Doug Ford is triggering a PC identity crisis

Will the real Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario please stand up?

Having, just barely, chosen Doug Ford to take them into the next provincial election, the PCs have for better and worse solved the leadership crisis that engulfed them when Patrick Brown resigned amidst allegations of sexual misconduct.

Today, however, they face something more daunting. An identity crisis.

And for a party that aspires to run Ontario less than three months from now, that’s a problem of existential proportions.

The sad truth is, no one has the faintest idea what it means to vote PC today.

The party, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside the enigma of a Toronto populist.

Less than two months ago, and with Brown’s hand on the helm, the party was intent on selling itself as a moderate, progressive alternative to the governing Liberals.

The PCs’ enticingly named “People’s Guarantee” was an unashamedly centre-right platform. At its heart was a new carbon tax that would not only fight climate change but pay for more child care and mental health services as well as an appetizing, 22-per-cent income-tax cut.

This was a carefully calibrated agenda advanced by a party that had blown three previous, entirely winnable elections with rash promises of publiclyfunded faith-based schools, chain gangs and 100,000

Is this a party previous PC premiers such as Bill Davis or even Mike Harris would recognize? Or is it simply the Doug Ford show?

public-service job cuts.

We’ll never know how Brown’s platform would have fared because Ford has blue-binned it.

It’s clear the carbon tax is out. But that’s an unforced error on two counts.

First, it deprives Ford of using new revenues for new goodies. Second, it puts him at odds with the federal government which has ordered the provinces to put a price on carbon and has the constitutional power to back up its demand.

To be fair to Ford, voters can’t expect to see his fully-developed platform just four days after he became leader.

But the planks he’s tossed out so far look too flimsy to support any serious government.

We know he’ll scrap the province’s sex education curriculum. Even if that’s a hot-button issue for a minority of parents, it’s hardly the most burning issue facing Ontario.

We also know Ford wants to cut four per cent out of the province’s $141-billion budget. But considering he rejects slashing civil service jobs, which account for more than 30 per cent of spending, where will he find the savings?

Today, a lot of voters are trying to get beyond the Donald Trump comparisons and understand what the previously brash and erratic Ford is all about.

At the same time, they’re trying to make sense of the reconstituted PC party.

Is this a party that still straddles the ideological centre? Or has it taken a giant leap to the right?

Is this a party previous PC premiers such as Bill Davis or even Mike Harris would recognize?

Or is it simply the Doug Ford show?

There’s time before voting day to sort this out.

But standing for election is not enough. A party must stand for something beyond winning power.