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The surest way to ensure your own defeat in Canadian politics is to hold fast to some bit of conventional wisdom and stubbornly refuse to let go of it despite the warning signs.

Stephen Harper was convinced that appearing Prime Ministerial and balancing the budget would be enough to hold off Justin Trudeau.  Thomas Mulcair thought tacking towards the centre would make the NDP a government in waiting.  When that didn't work he banked on the NDP grassroots holding to their pattern of keeping their leaders through multiple election losses.

Political pundits advanced the "balance theory", which held that Ontarians balance out a federal Liberal government with conservatives at Queen's Park and vice versa.  Pollsters argued for the emergence of a "big shift" in Canadian politics, with power moving westward and towards new Canadians with conservative values and voting patterns.

Newspaper columnists spun tangled webs about the unlikelihood of the NDP running Alberta, the inevitability of Christy Clark's defeat in BC, and the threat posed by Pierre Karl Peladeau to the Quebec Liberals' electoral fortunes.

These, and other brainwaves fueled by unchallenged conventional wisdom, have been flushed down the memory hole, never to be spoken of again.

Now to her credit there is absolutely nothing conventional about Kathleen Wynne.  Daily she invents new ways of confounding the expectations of her haters.  Her government is under investigation for 5 separate OPP investigations, they protest.  The deficit is out of control.  Taxes are laid upon taxes.  Hydro rates skyrocket.

Unashamed by any of it, Wynne allows the Liberal candidate for Scarborough Rouge River to call the by-election in that riding, bypassing the usual route of Elections Ontario and the lieutenant governor.  Cue howls of outrage and demands for investigations from the opposition.  This isn't the way things are supposed to be, they cry.

Bashing the government for slip-ups like this is all very well, but the Liberals are still leading even if the party is bleeding.  The other parties are following behind no matter how you look at it.

Doing something unconventional- something that would catch Wynne off guard- would really make voters notice.  At the moment, at this point in the summer when a crucial riding is up for grabs, one more scandal isn't going to look like much when piled next to all the others.

But then again, the PC Party of Ontario is in uncharted territory, as they have been for quite some time.  Opposition has always been a bad fit for the party, which spent most of the 20th century comfortably in power.

Good old conventional wisdom would suggest the time to return to what was once their natural home on the government benches is long overdue.  Those involved with the party who remember decades of uninterrupted control and who now exert the most control within the party- would most definitely agree.

They'll point to Manitoba, where a similarly embattled NDP government recently gave way to that province's PC without much of a fight.  They'll remind us of other byelection victories as proof that this time- and yes, they know it's been said before but this time the OLP is absolutely, definitely, unambiguously on its way out.

And if they manage to take Scarborough Rouge River from the Liberals, well, the critics will just have to be quiet, won't they?  Steady as she goes will be the order of the day until 2018.

Except Kathleen Wynne has been there before.  A string of byelection losses before the last general had her critics within the OLP muttering that Sandra Pupatello would have been a better and much more aggressive choice.  Andrea Horwath was being tapped as the next Premier by those who weren't willing to allow themselves to be excited by the prospect of Tim Hudak running the province.

Smelling blood, the PCPO went in for the kill, only to be undone by the ill-fated jobs announcement and some math errors that the Liberals weren't supposed to notice but did anyway.  In the end, the Tories found out that they were a lot farther away from power than they had first thought.  The NDP tried the same gambit for blue-collar voters that would undo Mulcair and lost their Toronto seats for their trouble.

It's OK if the spinners and so-called experts dont remember any of this.  They, and the opposition parties as well, have moved on.

After all, conventional wisdom holds that you should never dwell on the past…..

Written by Josh Lieblein

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.