The question that matters most about Patrick Brown is whether he's as smart as Mike Harris.
Eerie parallels link Mr. Brown's successful campaign for the leadership of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party to the campaign that Mr. Harris waged in 1990.
Back then, the Nipissing Member of Provincial Parliament, an insurgent right-winger, snatched the leadership of a defeated and dispirited Progressive Conservative Party from establishment candidate Dianne Cunningham.
Last weekend, the Barrie Member of Parliament, also an insurgent right-winger, snatched the leadership of today's defeated and dispirited Tories from establishment candidate Christine Elliott.
History also appears to be repeating itself in the broader context, with today's Ontario struggling to fight off debt and stagnation, as it did 20 years ago.
To repeat Mr. Harris's back-to-back majority government wins in the 1990s, Mr. Brown will need to repeat his predecessor's feat of winning over without surrendering to socially conservative voters in suburban ridings.
Whether he can achieve that could determine whether Mr. Brown becomes premier.
When Mr. Harris became Tory leader, the media universally dismissed him as an uneducated, dim-witted golf pro from North Bay who simply didn't understand the dynamic, complex, urban province he sought to lead.
But Mr. Harris was smarter, and craftier, than his critics suspected. He surrounded himself with a cadre of young and passionately true-blue advisors – Tom Long, Leslie Noble, Guy Giorno, Jaime Watt and others – who were determined to dismantle the legacy of high-taxing, high-spending Liberal and NDP governments.
When a severe recession in the early 1990s laid low the Bob Rae administration, everyone assumed that Lyn McLeod's centrist, cautious, already-measuring-the-curtains-for-the-premier's-office Liberals would return to power.
But voters were attracted to the short, powerful Conservative manifesto called the Common Sense Revolution that promised to cut taxes, slash spending, balance the budget, get tough on criminals and put people on welfare back to work, whether they wanted to work or not.
After sweeping the province in the 1995 election, the Harris government launched the most aggressive reform program of any government of any province in Canada's history.
Despite province-wide strikes by teachers and public servants, one-day shutdowns of entire cities in general strikes and endless demonstrations that sometimes turned violent, voters rewarded the Conservatives with another majority government in 1999.
That amiable golf pro understood that the burgeoning suburbs around Toronto, which had just received their own area code – 905 – could be decoupled from voters in downtown Toronto if Conservatives delivered on a message of smaller government and balanced books.
In their second term, the Conservatives couldn't settle on whether to become even more militant or to tack toward the centre. A judicial commission concluded that lax regulations resulting from all that cutting of red tape contributed to the deaths of seven people in Walkerton, Ont., from contaminated water. Mr. Harris resigned and the Liberals returned to power, for 12 years and counting.
But governments get tired. And Ontario's economy is struggling, taxes are high, the budget runs chronically in the red. It's 1995 again.
As in 1995, Mr. Brown has been dismissed as a backbench non-entity in Ottawa whose conservatism is too extreme for this dynamic, complex, urban province.
But Mr. Brown has successfully courted immigrant voters, especially those from South Asia, many of whom live in the 905.
If Mr. Brown can grow that base, he could bring the Conservatives back to power by once again detaching voters in the 905 from voters in the 416 with a message of lower taxes and balanced books.
But first he must absorb one crucial lesson into his bones. The Harris governments appealed to social conservatives by cutting back welfare benefits and cracking down on panhandlers and squeegee kids. But they went nowhere near so-con issues such as gay rights and abortion, knowing that they were too divisive.
Mr. Brown supported attempts to debate abortion rights in the Commons and supported a motion to re-open the debate on same-sex marriage.
But he also marched in a gay pride parade in his riding. And he insists he wants to focus on economic, not social issues.
He could win Ontario with a strong narrative of balanced books, tax cuts, spending cuts and tough-on-crime measures. But he must stay away from God, gays and guns issues, and those who preach them.
Stephen Harper has been prime minister for a decade because he watched, learned from and imitated Mike Harris.
If Mr. Brown wants to become premier of Canada's largest province, he will have to do the same.
John Ibbitson