DALTON McGUINTY’S LONG LIST OF REGRETS
Memoir is ‘shot through with self-congratulation,’ writes Chris Selley.
Dalton McGuinty has a “few regrets,” and begging his readers’ indulgence he’d like to unburden himself.
He regrets firing his first deputy party leader, Joe Cordiano, “under caucus pressure” — though he allows “others might say I had no choice.” He regrets calling Mike Harris a “thug” — which he says he was “goaded” into by a “wily and persistent” reporter.
He regrets suggesting Harris’s cuts to youth services might lead to more incidents like the 1999 school shooting in Taber, Alta. — which media then “gleefully” relayed to the victim’s nonplussed family, he alleges.
You may sense a pattern. He regrets the error. He takes accountability for it. But if you were inclined to absolve him, he might have a suggestion. There’s plenty more of that in McGuinty’s new memoir, Making a Difference.
McGuinty regrets his government “did not get on top” of the private-sector experts at eHealth — whom they engaged after the Tory government spent “a lot of money” on electronic health records “without much being accomplished.” He regrets that health minister David Caplan had to resign over the boondoggle — the premier having concluded “nothing else was going to satisfy either the media or the opposition.” He regrets that the out-of-control management at Ornge “had basically run away from us” — but also that braying opposition and media “had a devastating impact on (employee) morale.”
As a general policy, McGuinty regrets that the opposition and the media were so mean to him.
He regrets that political leaders have failed to tackle climate change in general, and in particular to implement carbon pricing, which he believes spelled trouble for his signature green energy plan.
And before you ask: “I knew if Ontario moved forward on its own this could unfairly penalize our industries,” he explains — i.e., it would inconvenience a major source of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. He considers allowing automobile manufacturing to decline, an utterly unthinkable prospect, incidentally: “Together with the federal government, we should fight for our fair share of global auto production.”
McGuinty regrets that the government “blindsided” parents with a new sex-ed curriculum that “came out of nowhere when it … hit the media in 2010.” (It had hit the media well before then.)
“I myself had no idea our government was even considering changes … until a reporter asked me about it,” he claims — no small briefing failure for a self-professed policy wonk on an obviously explosive issue. Ditching said curriculum certainly had nothing to do with the concerns of “Christian fundamentalists,” says McGuinty.
McGuinty regrets delegating the siting of Ontario’s new gas-fired power plants to independent experts, who “got (it) wrong ” by choosing two locations that were far too close to homes and schools, he says. “This is not an indictment of the experts,” he says, confusingly.
Kathleen Wynne has apologized for axing the Mississauga and Oakville plants, at astronomical cost, calling it a “political decision.”
No similar frankness or contrition is forthcoming from McGuinty. He regrets not “demanding to know with some precision what the costs of relocation would be,” but then suggests the costs were in fact unknowable.
“What mattered to me was that I made the correct call,” he says — at any cost whatsoever, we are left to believe.
And of the Mississauga plant, conveniently enough kiboshed during the 2011 election campaign?
Well it certainly wasn’t “designed to win seats,” McGuinty scoffs at his critics. “My gut was telling me this plant was to be located in the wrong place and, like before, I was going to have to make things right,” he says.
“I prefer policy to politics,” McGuinty claims. Yet Making a Difference is shot through with self-congratulation for various “gut-” and “heart”-based decisions.
He gave us Family Day not in hopes of winning the 2007 election — perish the thought! — but because he wished he had spent more time with his late father. When officials decided the collapsed Algo Centre Mall in Elliot Lake was too unstable for further rescue attempts, McGuinty boasts of convincing them to change their minds: “If that were my mother or my wife in there, I would want to do everything we could to try to save her.”
“(Politics has) been much more an affair of the heart than the head,” McGuinty muses.
Is that really something to boast about? What if rescuers had been killed?
The inoffensive, principled, feel-your-pain image McGuinty cultivated was enough for him to muddle and meddle through a decade in government. But it was a fraud, and this sentence in his memoir opens a window into it: “One first-term highlight was something we did not do: allow the introduction of Sharia law in Ontario.”
What a curious way to frame the events: Roman Catholics and Jews had access to religious arbitration for some matters; nobody cared. But when Muslims wanted it too, people freaked. So the Liberals nixed all religious arbitration and sold it to us (in McGuinty’s words) as part of “our wonderful adventure in pluralism.”
It’s precisely what the Liberals did to John Tory in the 2007 campaign, leveraging Islamophobia to great effect against the Progressive Conservatives’ unpopular but principled plan to extend funding to other religious schools.
If McGuinty regrets not redressing what he once admitted was the unfair privileging of Catholics, he isn’t saying.
“I have always been very idealistic and positive in my approach to politics,” McGuinty writes. “Some may find that hard to believe, given the expediency and self-interest cynics would have us believe characterize all politics today.” Not “all politics,” no. But Dalton McGuinty’s, certainly.
Readers will say, well, surely this is the sort of nonsense politicians always pack into their memoirs.
And they will be right. But it is remarkable to come face to face with someone so utterly convinced of his own idealism, or so cynical as to insist upon it, so soon after he irrefutably demonstrated his lack of it — by squandering billions of dollars for a few seats the Liberals would probably have won anyway, proroguing the legislature to derail inquiries into same, and summarily resigning to watch the various police investigations unfold from afar.