How Liberal leader’s devotion to family strengthened her resolve. As for gas plants, she vows her new regime will do better,
KATHLEEN WYNNE
“Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it,” says the reporter to Kathleen Wynne. It’s in reference to her quest for the Liberal leadership after Dalton McGuinty stepped down in October 2012.
Wynne, who began political life as a Toronto school board trustee before the rough-and-tumble of Queen’s Park, wanted to succeed McGuinty. She ran for the job and won, and on Feb. 11, 2013, Lt.-Gov. David Onley swore her in as 25th premier of Ontario.
Wynne barely reacts to my attempt at humour. She’s sitting on a couch in a Scarborough hotel, one leg casually slung over the other. This so-called break before a meeting with schoolchildren consists of a media interview and photo shoot. We’re already behind in allotted time because her staff sent photographer Lucas Oleniuk and me to Ajax by mistake.
Every campaign has these slip-ups and we’re rushed.
Wynne doesn’t smile but is that an eyeroll I detect?
From the other side of the room where a few staffers share a low-slung couch along the wall, there are a few spontaneous guffaws. At least somebody found the comment amusing, if darkly so.
I ask about her relationship with her predecessor and whether she and McGuinty are still on good terms. She confirms they are and says he recently sent her a “lovely text” to mark her 61st birthday on May 21.
What about the gas plants? Does she feel her former boss, benign Premier Dad, handed her a double-edged sword with the cancelled gas plants, notably the decision to move the two from Oakville and Mississauga, at an estimated cost to taxpayers of as much as $1.1billion? In asking the question, I clumsily, unsuccessfully search aloud for another word for cover
up. (Opposition parties allege that signed agreements for the plants were cancelled because they were so unpopular they risked losing the ridings for the Liberals.)
Wynne stresses, as she has on and off on the campaign trail, that she had limited access to the high-end decision-making process before she was premier and that afterwards she took charge and “brought in a new regime” with new rules.
“It’s my integrity and work I’ve done in this role that I’m taking to the people of the province,” Wynne says. She has apologized countless times for “mistakes that were made (and) decisions that shouldn’t have been taken,” and apologized again a few days later, during the provincewide debate, moderated by Steve Paikin at TV Ontario. She understands why people are angry and vows that nothing similar would happen on her watch.
Wynne is suing Conservative Leader Tim Hudak, Lisa MacLeod (who had been energy critic) and the PC Party of Ontario for $2 million for alleging that Wynne “oversaw and possibly ordered the criminal destruction of documents to cover up the gas plants scandal.” The premier is not suing NDP Leader Andrea Horwath because, as a source explains, her allegations are not directed at Wynne personally, nor do they attack her for specific actions.
With the clock ticking and children in Grades1and 2 waiting at Pickering’s École Ronald-Marion School for a special person to lead gym class today, Wynne has to leave. Seeing her in sweats and running sneakers evokes the many ads showing the premier jogging up and down the banks of highways without breaking a sweat. I’d like to join but am afraid young children will laugh at me.
Wynne and her team worked for a long time preparing the Liberal budget. For example, she says that the $150,000 mark was chosen as a new taxation threshold well before it was announced; it was merely kept secret. There’s a general sense that Wynne, who represents Don Valley West, and her advisers fought hard to keep Andrea Horwath and the New Democrats onside for the budget vote. Without Tim Hudak and the Conservatives, the Liberals needed the NDP to avoid a nonconfidence vote Asked about it at first, Wynne said: “We just didn’t know. There was a lot in that budget to recommend it to people who have a progressive view of government.” Later, however, the NDP leader said the Liberal team “wasn’t at all surprised by the NDP decision to reject the budget. What did surprise me, however, was that their plan wasn’t more coherent.” Asource fleshed it out a bit more, saying the Liberals “didn’t have much expectation that the NDP would go for it.” Nobody on the political inside appears to have been particularly surprised at how everything shook out.
It would be a hard search to find a family tighter than Wynne’s. Both her parents, John Wynne and Sandra O’Day Wynne, are elderly, active and still living in Richmond Hill. It’s been said nobody in this family is ordinary.
It’s a family of tradition — even when it’s unconventional — with medicine and the United Church playing important roles. John is a doctor, as was his father, Charles, a badly wounded veteran of the Great War. He was gassed at the Battle of the Somme without even having had a gas mask. Though he became a doctor after the war, he was so frail that it took enormous fortitude.
“I never, ever heard him talk about the war,” Wynne told me at the midtown home she shares with her partner, Jane Rounthwaite, at Christmas 2013. “He was fairly frail with a terrible cough and he was deaf.” Adds Wynne: “Father was very proud of his dad.” Her mother, Sandra, grew up in Nassau where she was orphaned. She was a musician with an exquisite singing voice and sang for Wallace Simpson and the Duke of Windsor before she married John. In Toronto, she sang on the CBC and for the revue Spring Thaw.
Wynne’s father’s mother, Eva, was also close to her granddaughter. Earlier in her life, she’d been involved with overseas aid and Norman Bethune’s work in China. Last Christmas, Wynne told me she thinks she looks a bit like Eva, with her kind face and curly hair. Eva, though, was five-foot-zero to Wynne’s five-foot-four — hardly a giant, but not a pixie like Eva.
Wynne’s great-uncle Arthur was head of biochemistry at the University of Toronto until the 1860s and his sister, her greataunt Margaret, taught at Davisville Elementary for 30 years.
But, again, Charles and Eva had the most influence.
“My mom tells this story with laughter in her voice,” says Wynne, of her grandfa-
“It’s my integrity and work I’ve done in this role that I’m taking to the people of the province.” KATHLEEN WYNNE
ther with her mother, recapturing a story from Christmas. “I was very little and she had me in this stroller, and I was trying to lift up the foot rest of the stroller and my grandfather (Charles) says, ‘Patsy, look at that! She’s very, very bright, very bright.”
The person Wynne credits with being the rock in her life is Jane Rounthwaite, 60, whom she met in 1973 when Rounthwaite interviewed Wynne for the job of floor proctor at Queen’s University. They later fell in love.
Wynne came out as a lesbian at 37 and her former husband, Phil Cowperthwaite, has since remarried. Wynne’s family, notably her grandparents, gave her a great sense of self-confidence.
It’s helped her as a politician in several senior portfolios, including education, and on the difficult road she chose with Jane. They both cook and at Christmas their kitchen was a treasure chest of com- peting Christmas delicacies.
Everybody appears to get along, with the Wynne-Cowperthwaite children visiting both parents and sharing their kids. Wynne and Rounthwaite have three children, Chris, 34, Jessie, 32 and Maggie, 30. Jessie has three children: Olivia, 5; Claire, 2; and Hugh, 8 months. “My best memory of my mom growing up is of her making these amazing cookies,” says Jessie. “She cares so much about her kids and grandkids; she is always ready to listen to us.
“My dad had a part in that, too. They were both great — and Jane.”
As everyone close to politicians in a campaign knows, it can be hard, says Jessie Cowperthwaite. She had a tough time watching the debate the other night. Cowperthwaite had to see her mother attacked over the gas plants by opponents on both sides. “It was really rough,” Cowperthwaite said, adding she felt it was unfair.
Wynne can be soft-spoken but she is tough and can have a temper. It was particularly difficult during the time she was coming out and people were disingenuous with her.
“I realized it was because I was changing my life and I remember feeling outraged,” she told the Star in December 2013. “I was (thinking) who are they to do this to me? I have had heterosexual privileges all these years, then realizing I’d stepped over a line. I was the same person, but I was treated differently.”
We’re back at the Scarborough hotel where Wynne has several events before she can call it after another gruelling day. At this point, we’re talking about style — particularly her style.
She’s disappointed because her favourite designer, David Findlay, from whom she gets most of her suits, is retiring. She says she doesn’t know what she’s going to do.
She doesn’t think she has a strong style and needs someone like Findlay.
For a politician who imagines she has no style, Wynne sure knows how to look cool, confident and breezy — effortlessly. Linda Diebel can be reached at ldiebel@thestar.ca