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OTTAWA - Don't tell Scott Brison there's no can-do spirit in Atlantic Canada. He's a third-generation entrepreneur. Just like Dad and Gramps, he never got a grant from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency either. "I started my first business when I was 19, renting fridges to students. The idea of going to government never even occurred to me," he said over raw fish at lunch the other day. "They were bar fridges. I had two different sets of pamphlets printed up. The one for parents had pictures of the fridges filled with milk, orange juice and yogurt. The one for students had the fridges filled with Keith's, Moosehead and Labatt."

From there he went on to become a fancy Bay Street investment banker. But in his spare time Mr. Brison has a political career, and that's what we are gathered here to consider today.

Mr. Brison, the 35-year-old MP for the Nova Scotia riding of Kings-Hants, is running for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative party. He pleaded with Joe Clark to lead the party in 1998. He abandoned his seat briefly in 2000 so Mr. Clark could get into Parliament in a by-election. He remains fiercely loyal to the departing boss. Yet Mr. Brison's candidacy represents a break from the Clark style. Polite. Respectful. But complete. For almost five years, Mr. Clark has bet his party and his career that hammering the Liberals will be an adequate substitute for having any coherent and widely-known plan for governing Canada. The high point of this strategy was the Tories' 2000 advertising campaign, which consisted in its entirety of television ads calling Liberals liars. (Mr. Clark is the only federal leader whose party did not show his face in its 2000 party ads.) The result was the lowest support for the Tories, in terms of popular vote, in the history of Canada. Yes, lower than Kim Campbell in 1993.

Mr. Brison was an enthusiastic advocate of the strategy at the time, but he could not have changed his mind more completely. Pointing out Liberal flaws has a big advantage and a big disadvantage, he said. It's easy work. And it doesn't help. "There's nobody as good in the attack role... as Joe Clark. Nobody's better. And it hasn't translated in terms of the poll numbers." Mr. Brison rattled off some Liberal sins, just to show he can do it, too. Gun control overruns. Iraq fuzziness. Shawinigate. Sponsorgate. The amazing stealth campaign of Paul Martin, who is said to have released a new tape to al- Jazeera. "They're not doing very well," he said. "But they're at 50% and we're at 15%." So. Attack the Liberals some more? No.

Mr. Brison intends to present an alternative. "We don't win on the current ballot question" -- the question Canadians ask themselves when they begin to think about which party they support. The current ballot question, Mr. Brison says, is: Does Paul Martin deserve a shot at being prime minister? "And I can give you a litany of reasons about why Paul Martin doesn't deserve a chance.... but the fact of the matter is, that line of attack hasn't worked."

So Mr. Brison is setting out "policies and ideas that aren't pablum" -- that break cleanly, in fact, with Tory ideas of the last decade. So he wants to scrap the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency outright, along with a raft of other "corporate welfare" programs, and use the savings to bankroll big corporate tax cuts. He believes in letting the private sector deliver health care -- and when I pushed him on the subject, he pushed back. He wants to replace Employment Insurance with a system of personal notional job-insurance accounts, so if I don't draw benefits over a long time I can use the money instead to pay for mid-career job training. "An EI system that works for Canadians who work," he calls it.

So here we have an Atlantic politician who is quite cheerfully touching every high-voltage third rail he can find -- medicare, pogey, state handouts to business. Strong central government? Not on the provinces' dime, he said, endorsing the Quebec government's Seguin report, which asserts that the feds have too much of the money the provinces need. It is, taken all in all, a strikingly conservative prescription for a party whose current leader bragged, once upon a time, about luring an EI activist, New Brunswick MP Angela Vautour, from the NDP.

"I'd rather have some people disagree with us than have nobody know who we are," Mr. Brison said. Merge with the Canadian Alliance? He'd rather steal their votes out from under them. His campaign co-chairman is Ken Kalopsis, a former Canadian Alliance party president who fled the Stockwell Day unpleasantness.

He knows one sure way to trip up Paul Martin. But it's not to attack the Liberal dauphin -- it's to come up with your own idea and then make Mr. Martin respond. The must-please-everyone chip in Mr. Martin's brain would short out in two seconds. Especially with that feisty new Jack Layton fellow making similar trouble on the Liberals' left flank.

Mr. Brison must be counted a long shot. His parliamentary deskmate, Peter MacKay, has two-thirds of the Nova Scotia Tories' provincial MLA caucus on his side. But Mr. Brison is running a bold campaign of ideas, which has the virtue of novelty in the current political climate. One more thing. Mr. Brison is homosexual. He and I talked about that for a few minutes until the subject grew boring. His candidacy represents a kind of dare: If he can count on Tories to be progressive, they can count on him to be conservative.