Wynne truly the Liberals’ greatest asset
Party reeling, but hard to imagine her alternative
The question of Kathleen Wynne’s future as leader of the Ontario Liberal Party made its way to the public airwaves this week in the form a panel discussion on TVO’s The Agenda. Host Steve Paikin asked former Liberal MP Greg Sorbara what advice he would offer the premier, and his response caused a bit of a stir.
“It is extremely unlikely that you’ll win the next election. The facts are the facts,” he said he would tell her. “I have not seen a party in the last year of its mandate turn (poll) numbers around when they are as bad as (the Liberals’) are.” And he noted the numbers are “particularly bad” for Wynne personally.
The l atest Mainstreet Research/ Postmedia poll, released last week, had the Liberals at 22 per cent support, 10 points behind the Tories. Forum Research last measured Wynne’s approval rating at 11 per cent, and her disapproval rating at 77 per cent. Just nine per cent said she would make the best premier of the three party leaders.
In light of all this, Sorbara said, he would advise Wynne to consider “doing what Dalton McGuinty did” and resign now, sooner than lose her job in ignominy anyway in 2018. ( Presumably he would advise her to depart in less disgraceful fashion than McGuinty did.)
There’s no good news in the numbers. Mainstreet’s poll suggests the Liberals’ Hail Mary plan to cut 25 per cent off the average hydro bill might have had an effect — namely, knocking eight per cent more voters into the “undecided” column, to no party’s benefit. Not exactly salvation. It wouldn’t be shocking if Wynne herself decided she would rather do something else.
What amazes me is the notion, f our years after Wynne snatched a jaw-dropping majority from the jaws of well-deserved defeat, that Wynne is somehow the Liberals’ biggest problem. I just stare at the notion, blinking, wondering how lost in partisan desperation you have to be to believe that’s true.
If Liberals are worried “it’s all over,” as Sorbara put it, I would submit it’s in large part because, on election day 2018, they’ ll have been in power for 15 and a half not very impressive years. That’s the longest streak in Ontario in three decades. No party has managed it federally since St. Laurent took over from Mackenzie King. Stuff builds up. Stuff like, you know, Dalton McGuinty promising in writing not to raise taxes, then instituting a “health premium,” which he claimed wasn’t a tax, and then admitting under duress that it was a tax; like lottery retailers defrauding players to the tune of $ 100 million, and casinos managing to lose money; like allowing Ornge to spin out of control into corruption, mismanagement and overspending; like the electronic health records debacle; like turning a blind eye while native protesters illegally occupied Caledonia; like flushing a billion dollars or so down the john to cancel gas plants sooner than risk voters’ ire, then claiming there’s “no wrong time to make the right decision”; like various apparatchiks winding up arrested for little things like bribery and conspiring to delete government emails; like taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from companies that benefit from government largesse, shamelessly demanding cash for access to ministers, and only changing the rules when it finally became politically untenable; like a debt- to- GDP ratio that grew 40 per cent, from third-lowest among the provinces to fourth- highest; and like astronomical hydro bills born to a significant degree of bad political decisions.
No doubt I’ve left off a lot of stuff. But that’s the kind of stuff, I think, that mostly explains why the Liberals are quite rightly in terrible, terrible trouble. Just go away and let someone else try.
Might another fresh face i mprove t heir chances? Sure, it might. But Kathleen Wynnes don’t grow on trees. There are a lot of people who utterly loathe her, but I very much suspect they wouldn’t think of voting for her replacement. She is a terrific campaigner in large part because whatever uncommitted voters might think of her record or policies, many who are willing to listen to her will hear an intelligent, serious, disarming person who seems to give a damn. ( I say this as someone who found Dalton McGuinty utterly infuriating and insincere in every respect.)
Certainly Wynne projects far more gravitas on a podium than either of her opponents. The Progressive Conservatives definitely know they could manage to lose again to Wynne, if they drop the ball and she doesn’t.
And it seems doubtful Wynne would take advice from someone like Sorbara, who professed that Ontari ans are so “completely down” on the Liberals. (Seriously? See “stuff,” above, especially “astronomical hydro bills.”) Wynne likely knows she’s closer to the only thing her party has going for her than its biggest problem.