Wynne: Premier-designate feels cities’ pains,
Toronto-based premier-in-waiting owes little to Eastern Ontario
Ontario’s cities need more help with transit and big public construction projects, says premier-designate Kathleen Wynne. But she’s not sure just how to give it.
It’s not the only local issue where the province’s premier-in-waiting has agreed there is a problem but has been vague on solutions. Controversial plans for new governmentsponsored casinos in cities across Ontario, including Ottawa, need “review,” Wynne said as she campaigned for the leadership. But she wouldn’t promise that she’ll insist on referendums before communities allow them to be built, or that she won’t.
An urbanite who represents a Toronto riding and who was drawn into public life by the fight against amalgamation there, Wynne spent her last year in Premier Dalton McGuinty’s cabinet as minister of municipal affairs. It was a pretty quiet year, one that gave little indication what she thinks about Ontario’s cities.
She brushed off a deputation of Toronto councillors looking to have their city exempted from the control of the Ontario Municipal Board, which can overrule elected councils’ urban-planning decisions.
McGuinty never thought much of proposals to abolish the OMB, either.
Wynne likewise had little to say about a report from the wardens of the counties outside Ottawa about the bleak economic future they expect in their rural districts, except that they’ve experienced much the same downturn everybody else has.
And that’s about all the news she made in the portfolio.
Nevertheless, Wynne says she learned a lot from that job and from her previous assignment as McGuinty’s transportation minister.
“Transportation really introduced me to the details of infrastructure and the relationship between the public and private sector on infrastructure projects,” she told the Citizen’s Joanne Chianello in an interview before the weekend Liberal convention that chose her as party leader. “And it also helped me to get a better grasp of the significance and fundamental importance of infrastructure to the economic well-being of municipalities, because there is no issue that bedevils municipalities more than infrastructure maintenance.”
Yet Wynne has been short on ideas for exorcising that devil, suggesting only that “new revenue streams” are needed and maybe the federal government should pay more.
On her brief watch as municipal affairs minister, the province reversed some of the “uploading” of social-service costs that began when Mayor Jim Watson had the job. It means millions of extra dollars for the budget in Ottawa alone every year, and he reminded Wynne of that in a statement just after she was chosen Saturday. Watson plans to “ensure the Province continues to keep its commitment to the Provincial-Municipal upload agreement that has been a great benefit to the City of Ottawa and its taxpayers,” he wrote.
(He pleaded a busy schedule in declining an interview Monday, but he tweeted from Toronto on the weekend that Wynne will be “a great partner with (the) municipal sector.”)
Wynne says maintaining the uploading is her plan, despite the cuts of hundreds of thousands of dollars from programs aimed at Ottawa’s poorest citizens in 2013.
Since the city is entirely at the province’s mercy on this, it’s not clear how Watson would hold Wynne to anything, or secure money from a Wynne government for transit and the city’s $350-million plan to stop sewage overflows into the Ottawa River, which are Ottawa’s other big demands of the province these days.
‘Transportation (portfolio) really introduced me to the details of infrastructure and the relationship between the public and private sector on infrastructure projects.’
KATHLEEN WYNNE
McGuinty is proud of the money he’s poured into Ottawa — $600 million for light rail, hundreds of millions more for highway expansions and schools and universities, a crane over every hospital — but with everyone at Queen’s Park preaching austerity, the torrent is down to a trickle.
Ottawa’s MPPs will be less help than they used to be in fighting for the drips.
When McGuinty squeaked out his winning run for the Liberal leadership in 1996, Ottawa West-Nepean MPP Bob Chiarelli was one of his few supporters in the party caucus (Watson, then a city councillor, publicly backed McGuinty, too). When Chiarelli was regional chair and mayor of Ottawa between his Queen’s Park stints, his righthand man was Brendan McGuinty, the premier’s brother.
This time, Chiarelli backed former MPP Sandra Pupatello, who lost. So did Ottawa’s other cabinet minister, Ottawa-Vanier MPP Madeleine Meilleur, Ottawa-Orléans backbencher Phil McNeely, and Glengarry-Prescott-Russell’s Grant Crack. That’s all of the local MPPs who took a side. Pledged local delegates to the Liberal convention backed Pupatello nearly threeto-one on the first ballot.
With their party in third place in recent polls, Wynne isn’t in a position to snub fellow Liberals for slighting her, but Ottawa’s politicians weren’t with Wynne before being with Wynne was cool. She doesn’t owe them anything.
(That likely makes Ottawa Centre’s Yasir Naqvi, the Liberal party president who stayed officially neutral because he was in charge of the leadership race, a lock for Wynne’s cabinet. Liberals have considered him a rising star since he was elected in 2007, and he’s been shuffled through increasingly senior assignments as an assistant to ministers without ever quite making the cabinet.)
By the time the legislature sits again, which she has promised will be Feb. 19, she’ll need to have at least preliminary answers to some of the questions she didn’t quite answer on the campaign trail. She has promised to make her views clearer upon taking over the premiership from McGuinty between now and then.
She’ll also name her cabinet; we’ll see how many Eastern Ontarians make it.