Why Wynne makes it difficult to see her lose
It’s as plain as the nose on your face.
It’s so obvious it hardly bears saying.
But it’s why the decision facing Ontario voters on June 7 is so freaking difficult — or rather, she’s why.
Kathleen Wynne is so clearly heads and tails smarter, better informed and more capable than Doug Ford that it borders on the ridiculous.
The leading candidate to take her job has his appeal — a certain rough-and-readiness — and he’s a better extemporaneous speaker than is usually credited and is adored by those weary of big government.
But in most of the ways that should count, he simply shouldn’t even dare to hope to line up to carry Wynne’s briefcase.
Andrea Horwath may be somewhat more in Wynne’s league (in fairness, I’ve not seen her up close) but she comes with the perennial baggage (knapsacks, surely) of the New Democratic Party.
There are Ontarians who can’t bring themselves to vote NDP or who did that once (for former premier turned-Liberal sage Bob Rae) and, as with liver, never quite managed to acquire the taste.
(Wynne told the National Post in an interview Wednesday, “the NDP hasn’t had to be accountable for anything they’ve said” since 1995, when Rae was premier.)
As a colleague noted, this after we’d listened to Wynne deliver a routinely great speech that showed her command of the aerospace file particularly and more generally the grownup file, if you were interviewing the three candidates for a job, any job, there’s not a person around who wouldn’t hire her.
If Dalton McGuinty were still leading the Liberals, there’d be no qualms about throwing the bums out after almost 15 years in power.
And yet, and yet, Wynne makes that option painful, because she’s frankly so good.
As Bruce Callan, the operations manager at MHI Canada Aerospace and a self-confessed Conservative, cheerfully acknowledged of Wynne in a quiet moment, “She’s done some good things. She’s been good.”
But he’ll vote for Ford because he’s a Tory and he thinks it’s time for a change.
Wynne expected, even three weeks ago, that hunger for change would be a defining theme of the campaign, as it was in the last federal election.
But, she said, she thinks there’s a growing consensus that Ford wouldn’t be good for the province, and as the polls reflect, that’s meant the New Democrats are getting greater consideration and thus greater scrutiny.
She doesn’t dispute the two parties share much common ground but says the difference between them is the “ideological rigidity” that has the NDP, for instance, promising not to fund for-profit child care.
That would see the end of “thousands of spaces,” Wynne said, “and why would we not fund that?” Her grandkids attended a small for-profit child care. The ideology that dictates a blackand-white view of things isn’t for her; “that’s why I’m a Liberal.”
She’s aware of some of the reviews of her — that she’s aloof, or that she’s changed since she first ran (and lost) as a Toronto District School Board trustee, and that in some quarters, this has translated to a lack of authenticity.
“I have always been taken aback when people say (that),” she said. “I don’t feel I’ve changed at all. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to talk to strangers, when I didn’t ask a lot of questions, when I wasn’t curious.”
The notion that she’s an insider, with powerful friends, also grates. “The party didn’t want me to run in the first place,” she said. “I had to fight for the nomination, because I wasn’t one of them…. I’ve always felt that I could connect with all sorts of people.
“And I don’t think being rude or being abrasive or being divisive or angry has anything to do with authenticity. It has nothing to do with decent interaction, and I’ve had decent interactions with people all my life.”
She was careful to add, “Not so much that there’s a leader in Ontario that has bought into that, but that somehow as a society we don’t seem to be able to cope with it.” It worries her.
And lest anyone forget, Wynne is so ferociously, naturally competitive that once, when she was skipping outside the family home with her sisters, the third one, the artist, perhaps a bit exasperated and weary, “just stopped and said, ‘Kathy, why do you always try so hard?’”
Years later, that sister, who draws comics, interviewed the others and made a little book called “Why We’re Not The Premier.”
There she was Wednesday, at the aerospace plant in Mississauga first thing, next at the main store of Paramount Fine Foods, the Middle Eastern restaurant chain started by the dimpled philanthropist Mohamad Fakih, baking pita and then tiny baklava pastries.
These were incredibly small and delicate, and had to be folded just so; one of them would be about the size of my thumbnail.
Wearing an apron, hands duly washed, Wynne was tentative at first, brow furrowed in concentration.
Within a few minutes, she had the folding thing mastered.
Next thing anyone knew, she was in charge, now showing a member of her entourage how to do it, then lining the little suckers in neat rows on a tray, ready to be drizzled with honey and popped in the oven.
She doesn’t like to lose, at anything. That’s authentic. She makes it hard to be a voter.