Ontario gets a new top civil servant

Steve Orsini, Ontario’s deputy minister of finance, will succeed Peter Wallace as the province’s secretary to cabinet and the head of its public service, Premier Kathleen Wynne announced Wednesday.

Wallace, also a former deputy minister of finance, has been in the job since December 2011. He’s leaving the Ontario public service after 30 years and will spend a year as a visiting fellow at the University of Toronto, the announcement said.

Orsini has spent most of his career in the Ontario public service, mainly in jobs in the finance and revenue ministries, but he also did a stint at the Ontario Hospital Association during a few years away from the bureaucracy. He takes over on July 9.

“I know Steve Orsini will serve Ontarians well and help our government lead from an activist centre — by creating jobs and growing the economy now and for the future,” Wynne said in a written statement, employing one of her new favourite expressions, the “activist centre.”

The clipped, straitlaced Wallace is best known to most Ontarians for his horrified reaction to the idea that an aide to then-premier Dalton McGuinty, whom he served, might have arranged for an outsider to access government computers to try to delete files related to an expensive decision to cancel two controversial gas-powered electricity plants near Toronto.

“It’s one of those things that, that you really don’t take that seriously because, it’s like, really?” police recorded Wallace telling investigators later. “Like, the tape doesn’t get my body language here, but really? Like, that’s just such a piece of s**t. Like, I’m not going to write you a memo saying don’t do that, because you already know: Don’t do that.”