Right Turn: How the Tories Took Ontario

It wasn’t so much a big blue machine that chugged its way across Ontario’s political landscape in the spring of 1995 — it was more a big purple bulldozer driven by leader Mike Harris and a new breed of Tories. Gone were the pinstripes and the cigar-chomping backroom boys of the forty-two years of Tory rule. These Tories were young, hip, and they were riding the wave of their Common Sense Revolution, a platform launched a year earlier.

Still, there were only a few who thought the PCs stood ...