What goes on in the documentary that you aren’t supposed to see
Candid look at Wynne captures premier dealing with byelection scandal in Sudbury, her exasperation with media, and life at home with her spouse
The Toronto Star is lifting the veil on the political drama that no one is allowed to see.
It is a one-hour documentary entitled Premier: The Unscripted Kathleen Wynne that was supposed to air on TVOntario earlier this month — before it was yanked.
The fly-on-the-wall account depicts Wynne under siege during February’s Sudbury byelection scandal, lashing out at the press for being “out to get” her, and discussing the toll of being Canada’s second most powerful leader.
Wynne complains that the media “just seem obsessed” with the story.
“That’s what makes me so mad,” she fumes.
She also dispenses campaign advice to a wide-eyed federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and, with help from spouse Jane Rounthwaite, artfully smacks down a Progressive Conservative MPP for homophobic comments.
Indeed, some of the documentary’s most illuminating moments are of Wynne and Rounthwaite in their Toronto home.
Their marriage is one of loving, equal partners who share a puckish sense of humour, a passion for politics, and a quaint affinity for the 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy.
But the behind-the-scenes portrait — filmed as the Liberals crafted the budget while coping with a police investigation into allegations a former candidate was bribed not to run in the Sudbury byelection — may never be broadcast.
That’s because the premier and her officials won’t sign release forms, the director and editor quit the project in protest in May, and TVO is demanding a refund on its $114,075 investment from the executive producer.
The Star viewed a copy of the film complete with titles and moody background music.
Well shot, it shows Wynne as a thoughtful and conscientious boss who treats staffers well and enjoys friendly relations with her cabinet colleagues as they prepare the budget that began the sell-off of Hydro One and ushered in supermarket beer sales.
Rounthwaite comes across as a smart and savvy political operator fiercely loyal to her spouse, cannily weighing in on:
The Wynne “brand”: “Your honesty.”
Trudeau: “He should be taking advice in Ontario about how to get those seats back.”
Image-making: “Kath never wore make-up, it was a point of principle, but with all the exposure you have to look good every minute of the day.”
A pesky young reporter: “He’s a twerp.”
Tory MPP Monte McNaughton: “This guy is a Neanderthal.”
The McNaughton episode is especially instructive in displaying Rounthwaite’s shrewdness as a strategist. After McNaughton (Lambton-Kent-Middlesex) — then courting social conservatives in his failed bid for the PC leadership — alluded to Wynne being a lesbian, the Liberals pounced.
“He said: ‘It’s not the premier of Ontario’s job — especially Kathleen Wynne — to tell parents what’s ageappropriate for their children,’ ” the premier told the legislature on Feb. 24.
“Is it that I’m a woman? Is it that I’m a mother? Is that I have a masters of education? Is that I was a school council chair? Is it that I was the minister of education?”
Speaking to the documentary interviewer later, Wynne says she had “been awake in the middle of the night worrying about wanting to confront what this young man had said.”
“We worked it out in the morning. But Jane said: ‘Don’t give him the word. Make him say it,’ ” the premier recalls.
Adds Rounthwaite, seated beside her for the interview: “Let everyone fill in the word. Don’t give him the gift, he doesn’t deserve it. This guy is a Neanderthal and we just won’t help him.”
“Jane is an amazing manager,” Wynne marvels.
“If we’re at Point A and she knows we’ve got to get to Point B, she can always figure out how to get there,” she says glancing at Rounthwaite.
“Whether you’re helping me with a trustee campaign, or whether we’re on a canoe trip and we’re in some bloody beaver s--- dam place and we’ve got to get out of it and you have the map and you figure out how to get out of it and I’m just in the front of the canoe going in the direction that you tell me to go.”
Looming large in the film is the Feb. 5 Sudbury byelection won by Liberal Glenn Thibeault, a former NDP MP who had defected.
To pave the way for Thibeault, Wynne, her deputy chief of staff Pat Sorbara and local Liberal activist Gerry Lougheed urged former Grit candidate Andrew Olivier to step aside.
In conversations recorded by Olivier, a quadriplegic, and replayed in the documentary, Sorbara and Lougheed ask for his co-operation in exchange for a position in an MPP’s constituency office or on the Liberal party executive.
Spurning their overtures, he went public, triggering the current Ontario Provincial Police probe.
Olivier ended up running as an independent, finishing third in the byelection, and the film features poignant images of him plowing his motorized wheelchair through the snow to meet with voters.
“I had to have a very long discussion with my mother about Sudbury last night,” Wynne tells her principal secretary Andrew Bevan in the documentary.
“She was worried . . . because, of course, she just sees the news. I just had to go through it with her and explain that it was about trying to keep the guy involved.”
Media coverage of the byelection debacle clearly troubled Wynne. She even tells aides she is “never speak- ing” to one reporter again.
“He’s a twerp,” opines Rounthwaite on byelection night in Sudbury.
“You’re on mic,” shoots back Wynne.
“I know. I could have said something worse, but I said ‘twerp,’ ” deadpans Rounthwaite to howls of laughter from her spouse’s staff.
As a Star reporter pursues her for comment immediately after the Liberals won the byelection, Wynne, racing up a Sudbury hotel stairway, is heard muttering: “That’s why I can’t stay, right?”
“Is he still following us?” she whispers to an aide.
In an interview at home, Wynne shares her exasperation with the media over the Sudbury story.
“There are certain people in the press gallery who I just know are out to get me,” the premier says.
“I mean they just want to – not ‘they’ personally but their organization — just wants to bring me down. They can’t stand what I stand for and they are going to look for any way to make me look bad,” she says.
“And then there are others who are just more neutral, but there’s nobody who is standing in that press scrum who is there to make us look good or make us look like we’re doing the right thing.”
A private meeting in Ottawa with the federal Liberal leader is also revealing.
“Do I call him ‘Mr. Trudeau?’ ” she asks an aide, who assures her “Justin” is fine.
“I’m old enough to be his mother. I’m not quite old enough to be his grandmother. What is he, 40? I’m 61, boys, I’m old enough to be his mother,” the premier says with a wry laugh.
In the meeting, Trudeau, 43, is deferential and solicitous, eagerly seeking her advice.
“The conversation we’ll have to have to have when you’re prime minister is how do we have a rational infrastructure plan that’s going to allow us to do that long-term planning,” she tells him.
“So, you just went through the election. (What) would you be thinking if you were in my shoes right now?” he says.
A testy Wynne replies: “I think the people really want to know that there’s a plan. Show people what you think the future is going to look like and how we’re going to get there.”
Speaking to a documentary interviewer after, the premier says: “He’s got to do well in Ontario. I’m the premier of Ontario, who just won an election against all odds as a Liberal, so there are things we need to talk about.”
Sudbury was one of those top-ofmind subjects.
“There have been lots of complications around the byelection. It makes our lives interesting,” she confides to Trudeau. He grins, saying: “You know what, that’s why we chose this line of work.” To which Wynne sighs and says quietly: “Yeah, really, or it chose you — us.”
While the byelection weighs heavily on her, she demonstrates genuine personal concern for Sorbara, who could face still criminal charges.
After a staff meeting, Wynne says to her embattled deputy chief: “Pat, can I just see you for one sec?”
While their private meeting was not recorded, Sorbara is visibly touched when recounting it for the documentarians.
“I’ve worked for a lot of leaders over the years, but for her to say, ‘Can I see you for a minute’ and her only question is, ‘How are you doing?’ That just speaks to who she is, very much and where a lot of my devotion comes from to this particular leader, premier.”
Wynne admits to the stress of governing Canada’s largest province.
“It’s easy to get pulled into the negativity. You have to breathe. Sometime I just have to,” she says in her office.
“I have an eagle feather I was given by a group of First Nations women and sometimes, if it’s going to be a particularly trying day, I will just get some strength from the eagle feather. I just hold it and stop for a minute and breathe.”
“Jane (Rounthwaite) is an amazing manager. If we’re at Point A and she knows we’ve got to get to Point B, she can always figure out how to get there.” PREMIER KATHLEEN WYNNE