Not Wynning friends or influencing people

Recent polls suggest Ontario residents either no longer believe anything Kathleen Wynne says, or have tuned her out. Despite a flurry of recent and costly pre-election spending promises designed to prop up her faltering, scandal-plagued government, a Mainstreet Research poll this week shows just 19 per cent approve of the job the premier is doing, and 70 per cent disapprove. An Angus Reid poll similarly pegged Wynne’s approval rating at 15 per cent, but noted that’s up from single digits earlier this year.

Her dismal numbers are noteworthy because they come on the heels of a series of popularity-boosting announcements.

They include a $45 billion to $93 billion “Fair Hydro Plan” to temporarily lower Ontario’s crushing hydro rates by 25 per cent; money for daycare; rent controls for tenants; a minimum wage hike and 7.5 per cent pay hike for civil servants and managers.

None seem to have rekindled much love for our premier.

Meanwhile, with the other hand, the Liberals quietly hiked driver testing fees this week, now up 133 per cent per cent since Wynne took office.

And it’s the conflict between these two behaviours — callous indifference to tax hikes and self-serving willingness to blow taxpayer cash promoting party ideology and survival — at the root of voter discontent with Wynne.

Despite her enormous strengths as a campaigner, Wynne leads an activist government. The Liberals are more interested in pursuing ideological and progressive agendas, such as green power, than providing dull but necessary public services to ordinary people, like efficient health care and education.

This explains why the premier and her government defend as “fair” a plan to saddle future generations with billions in debt to lower hydro rates — that outrageously are the highest in the country because of unrelenting Liberal mismanagement.

Promoting green power to protect the environment is a worthy goal. But blind pursuit because it’s the “right” thing to do, as the Liberals have with solar and wind contracts, and with little consideration for costs or actual environmental benefits isn’t good public policy — it’s religion.

In time, as has happened in Ontario, everyone realizes you don’t give a damn about their petty lives or troubles, and tune out the excuses for mistakes and bungles.

Such ideological corruption lies at the heart of Wynne’s popularity troubles.