Now the hard part begins,
Wynne is facing debt, angry unions, joblessness, low polls
TORONTO • When Kathleen Wynne wakes up Monday, her first working day as Liberal leader and Ontario’s first female premier-designate, there won’t be much time to consider the historic significance of her achievement.
The enormity of the challenges ahead leaves her with little margin of error. It’s going to be a baptism of fire for the new premier, and she must hit the road running.
The new Liberal leader will inherit not just a scandal-scarred party that is low in confidence — its own and that of the public, languishing in third place in the polls behind the Conservatives and NDP.
Wynne must not only revive and renew the party but, in the aftermath of a close election, unify a divided party. She has already started that process.
More importantly, the problems that dogged Dalton McGuinty and hastened his departure — the Ornge air ambulance debacle, the controversy over the cancelled power plants, the revolt of the teachers’ unions and prorogation — will not disappear simply because McGuinty has left.
The opposition will keep those issues alive, and Wynne will have to find a way to deal with the fallout.
But that’s far from the end of her woes.
The province has a $14-billion deficit and Ontario’s total debt is projected to hit $278 billion in March, up more than $20 billion from a year ago.
More than that, the unemployment rate remains high at 7.9 per cent. True, Ontario is creating jobs faster than any other province, accounting for three-quarters of the 40,000 jobs created in Canada last month. Still, thousands cannot find a job and, as of December last year, 585,000 Ontarians were unemployed.
And with the economy sputtering and expected to grow by only 1.8 per cent, the future remains bleak. Worse still, teachers and other public unions are in revolt, and threatening mayhem.
Such is the size of the problems facing Ontario, Wynne may have chosen the wrong time to be premier. She now leads a province that is mired in debt and soaring deficit, with thousands of Ontarians unable to find work. Her challenge is to turn things around or face the consequences in an election most people expect this spring.
But with a minority government, the Liberals don’t control their own destiny, and in what would be a poisoned legislature, they would have little room to manoeuvre.
The Conservatives, in particular, have been slamming the Liberals for months, and together with the NDP, hold the cards. A number of Conservative MPPs are predicting a spring election, saying the party will not support a Liberal budget, although it would take the NDP’s opposition to topple the government.
Western University political scientist Cris de Clercy says the new Liberal leader has two major challenges to tackle immediately above everything else.
First, bring back the House, which Wynne has promised to do Feb. 19.
Second, they have to develop a solid platform. Unlike the Liberals, the Conservatives have been bombarding the province with policy papers that will be the basis of the platform. The NDP have also been quietly working on their platform.
But consumed by the leadership race, the Liberals haven’t had time to come up with anything coherent. Now, with little time on their hands, the Liberals must be strategic about when they reconvene the House. They have to leave enough time to prepare a budget and a throne speech which, in essence, will become their platform, perhaps heading into a spring election.
All things considered, it doesn’t bode well for the Liberals, although pollster John Wright says the situation is not as hopeless as it appears.
The Liberals may be behind, but he says there is nothing in the polls so far to show that the Conservatives or the NDP, for that matter, have captured the public’s imagination.
“There is a lot of baggage that the Liberal party is carrying but with McGuinty leaving, he is going to carry most of it away,” says Wright, vice-president of Ipsos Public Affairs. De Clercy agrees.
“There’s always excitement about a new leader and they may get a bump in the polls,” she says. “If you look at the opposition — Tim Hudak and Andrea Horwath — I have no sense that the majority of Ontarians have swung to them.”