Wynne’s rise and fall now just a historical footnote

On Friday, Doug Ford will be sworn in as our 26th premier.

Four years ago, Kathleen Wynne was sworn in (again) as Ontario’s 25th — succeeding her own minority government with a remarkable majority.

How did she fall so far, so fast? In her final days as premier, the rise and fall of her Liberals already feels like a footnote to history.

But it’s easy to forget that while Ford was always the odds-on favourite to win this election, Wynne’s come-from-behind win in the last vote beat all the odds.

So why was she beaten so badly this time?

Everyone has an easy explanation for the deluge: Liberal scandals. Wynne deceptions. Reckless spending. Misogyny. Homophobia. Hydrophobia.

But the simplest answer may be

Wynne’s resurgence in 2014. For before the fall was the rise, and staving off defeat stokes grievances over time.

Had the Liberals not risen from the grave in the three previous elections, there would have been far less accumulated animus. Had they lost in 2014, as everyone expected, they likely would have easily retained at least two or three dozen seats, not the historic low of 7 seats.

Over time, Wynne managed the remarkable feat of uniting a normally polarized province against her, plunging in the approval ratings to as low as 14 per cent. For all the theories of misogyny and homophobia to explain why Wynne wore out her welcome, her 2014 victory reminds us that she was welcomed at the outset regardless.

And while it’s hard to deny double standards, it’s harder to argue they played a decisive role: Horwath’s popularity vitiates the anti-woman argument, while the success of other openly-gay politicians dilutes the homophobia factor.

With her popularity in terminal decline, the Liberals focused on policy — promising a $15 minimum wage, Pharmacare for young and old adults, free tuition, and free child care for preschoolers. But voters were beyond buying what Wynne was selling.

Which prompted her to publicly concede in the campaign’s final days that she could not win the premier’s office again — freeing voters to choose their Liberal candidates without fear of being stuck with her again. The decision remains controversial among many of her candidates and partisans, who believe it created confusion among supporters — was voting Liberal a wasted vote?

One person who doesn’t see it that way is PC campaign chief Kory Teneycke. In a fascinating conversation hosted by his Liberal counterpart, David Herle, on his latest podcast (The Herle Burly), Teneycke suggests the Liberals would have been virtually wiped out if they hadn’t made that desperation move to shore up their vote.

“Clearly it worked, it absolutely worked,” Teneycke said, citing internal PC polling. “You went from having one to two seats to having seven ... it’s a heck of a lot better than two.”

In an interview, Herle said he is still licking his wounds, wondering what the campaign team could have done differently in an era of transactional politics — notwithstanding transformational initiatives on labour, free drugs, and education.

“In three years of thinking about that, no one ever thought about lowering the price of beer, it just wasn’t on our radar,” he mused — a reference to the popular buck-a-beer promise by Ford’s Tories.

Herle, the architect of Wynne’s winning 2014 campaign, argues that defeat was likely “but not inevitable,” and that the devastation of seven seats was avoidable. Perhaps it is in the nature of a campaign manager to believe that the Liberals’ defeat was not preordained this time.

But providence intervened for his party last time, and the times before that — in the form of faith-based funding, mass firings, and NDP confusion. Not this time.

Martin Regg Cohn is a columnist based in Toronto covering Ontario politics. Follow him on Twitter: @reggcohn