Stumping for a comeback
Wynne quietly honing her campaigning skills ahead of spring election
KINGSTON — With all eyes on a Tory civil war, Kathleen Wynne is largely out of sight and out of mind.
Just not out of action.
While the media pay her no heed, the premier is quietly making tracks, popping up at town halls and universities across the province. With a spring election looming, it’s like spring training camp — on campus, on stage, on the road.
Is this the calm before the comeback?
Wynne strides into Wallace Hall at Queen’s University, where nearly 200 students are poised to question her on the state of the province. Stern paintings of past university presidents hang on the wood-panelled walls as the premier returns to the campus where she once studied English and history as an undergraduate.
A soft winter sun streams through the high windows as ceiling fans rotate slowly above, returning heat onto the premier, who is perched on a stool. Global warming, sexual harassment and mental health are top of mind, with the economy a strong undercurrent.
The premier is ready with her answers and her offerings: free tuition for eligible students, free prescription medicines up to age 25, a $15 minimum wage.
She deflects their queries with a recurring rhetorical question of her own, turning the focus onto her political rivals: What’s their alternative?
When a student asks why she opposes the Progressive Conservatives’ proposed carbon tax, Wynne counters that, “actually, the Conservatives are against” their own election platform’s climate change measures.
“This is the No. 1 threat to humanity,” she intones, touting the Liberal government’s own cap and trade plan. “Don’t know what the Conservatives are going to do — they’re saying they’re going to do nothing.”
Watching Wynne over two days of meeting university and college students in Toronto and Kingston, the personal animus tends to diminish in person — even if it hasn’t dissolved in public opinion polls. On campus, the premier’s policies appear to be popular, but is her well-honed town hall skill set transferable to the general electorate?
To make the most of the ongoing Tory storm, Wynne must emerge from a maelstrom of her own making after five years in power. That means confronting the demons that have dragged her down.
Perhaps the demonization ebbs when voters notice that she has no horns on her head nor those hornrimmed glasses (recently replaced by contact lenses as she hones her public image). Yet no one knows more than Wynne how far she has fallen in public esteem, and how little time is left to recover.
At a lunch stop on her daylong tour, the premier tells me she considered quitting a year ago, when the chorus of naysayers was at its peak.
“I’m not going to pretend I didn’t think about it seriously — I did a lot of soul-searching about it.”
Still trailing in the polls, and personally unpopular, the dial has barely moved.
“I understand that, and I can’t explain it,” she muses, poking at her half-eaten salad.
But Wynne has her answer — the one she gave herself a year ago, and the one she gives today: “If we are going to go by the polls, people like the things that we’re doing — and at the end of the day that’s all I can do.”
She is relentlessly upbeat despite the political downturn, selling her policies during long days of campus tours and town halls in what looks like a dry run for the spring campaign. Undaunted by the risk of embarrassing questions.
“You don’t know what’s coming,” Wynne says. “That’s why I’m always nervous before I go into these things, there’s always the danger, the risk that you’re not going to be able to handle it.”
Is the premier winning converts among voters? Wynne is surely no Justin Trudeau on tour, lacking the love and buzz of the prime minister, not to mention the fealty of his followers.
Even when she connects with voters, she doesn’t always convert them. When she stops at Toni Parisi’s table at a Queen’s cafeteria, the philosophy student is beaming.
“To meet such a successful woman as yourself,” gushes Parisi, 20. “It was so great meeting you.”
As Wynne moves onto the next handshake, I drop back for a word with Parisi, who tells me she comes from a low-income family that benefits from better tuition and loan programs under the Liberals. All that said, and after all that effort by the premier, Parisi hedges — she still can’t decide who has her vote.
In our interview, Wynne concedes time is running out for a turnaround.
“Yep, I get that — we are very close to an election,” she says, lips pursed.
Despite the appetite for change after so many years of Liberal rule, and her own declining popularity, she is counting on voters like Parisi to look at policy over personality at a time of Tory disarray on key issues.
“I really think this election has to be about, ‘Will change to what?’ Right? We’re offering change, and the other two (PC and NDP) are going to have to say what they’d change to, and so far we haven’t seen that.”
Can she change the ballot question from a referendum on the Wynne Liberals to a three-way assessment of what all major parties are offering? Citing the latest Tory tumult, Wynne offers but one certainty:
“There’s a lot that can happen between now and June 7.”