Wynne presses reset button
Love means never having to say you’re sorry.
That’s the storyline in the movies. But it’s a different kind of Love Story in politics:
Lack of love means always having to apologize, as Kathleen Wynne has discovered.
Plunging in the polls, the premier offered a weekend mea culpa for messing up since taking power. And choked up onstage at her party’s convention.
Will Wynne’s dramatic apologia provide the political reset she needs to recover? Are there second chances in politics?
It’s not the first time Wynne has appealed for forgiveness. She apologized before (and during) the 2014 election campaign for the costly cancellation of gas-fired power plants by her predecessor.
And it’s not the first time she has cried in front of Liberal loyalists. In a heart-to-heart confessional behind closed doors at a caucus retreat earlier this fall, Wynne teared up for letting down MPPs.
Then, as now, the premier appealed for help in reversing her record-low popularity in public opinion surveys — a data point that’s now a talking point.
“I want to acknowledge the polling numbers and the pundits,” she told the annual meeting of Liberals in Ottawa. “Many people in Ontario are not happy with me right now. I get that.”
It’s hard to get away from that. Wynne wins the contest for most unpopular premier in Canada, bottoming out at 14 per cent in the last Forum Research poll published in the Toronto Star. Languishing far behind the opposition Progressive Conservatives, her governing Liberals were effectively tied for second place with the NDP.
Wynne’s apology may be heartfelt, but it’s a hardheaded calculation by Liberal strategists. They see an undeniable disconnect as resentment rises against a premier who seems far removed from people’s problems.
And it’s getting personal. Internal party polling shows people believe Wynne can’t feel their pain, that she’s too competitive, too calculating, too political.
They didn’t always feel that way. It’s easy to forget that Wynne once seemed to voters like a different kind of politician when she took over from a discredited Dalton McGuinty in early 2013: Collaborative — and unafraid to show empathy, vulnerability, humility.
That’s not what the party’s research shows today, and it found an echo in Wynne’s prepared speech this weekend:
“I’ve spent some time reflecting on why people feel the way they do about me,” she mused.
People think, “She’s not who we thought she was; she’s become a typical politician, she’ll do anything to win.”
Going forward, “I have some work to do, to prove that I am who I have always been.”
Recapturing her honeymoon days with Ontario voters won’t be easy. As the face of change in 2013, Wynne could cast herself as an agent of change — and her popularity soared, leading her to win a triumphal majority government in the last election.
Today, leadership “means admitting when a mistake has been made — when I’ve made a mistake.” She promised to do better, without saying how.
Ontario’s economic statistics are strong. But Wynne’s personal numbers remain weak.
The conventional wisdom — possibly even at the Liberal convention — is that the Progressive Conservatives are destined to win the next Ontario election by default, benefiting from the same appetite for change that helped Donald Trump defeat another woman politician in the U.S. this month. In a hint of her future strategy, Wynne exhorted Liberals to embrace change, while opposing a change in government of the kind that Americans have just seen.
“There is no more important time, my friends, to be a Liberal than right now, in North America.”
If voters want change, the challenge for Wynne is to recast herself as an agent of change after so many years in power: By the 2018 election, she will have been premier for five years and the Liberals will have held power for 15 years.
As a self-styled progressive, Wynne embraces climate change and stresses transit spending. As a practical politician, she aims for a balanced budget and promises to curb hydro increases. It’s an ambitious agenda. But it’s hard to be both transformational and transactional at a time when voters lean toward lower taxes and lesser government.
That’s how Trump won the presidency and how the Mike Harris Tories won the province in 1995. They made no apologies.
“You’re just going to let me cry for a minute,” Wynne said this weekend, alternately crying, laughing and apologizing as more than 800 Liberal delegates cheered her on.
It’s a tough balancing act — leading and apologizing, being transformational and transactional. What’s the tipping point?
At some point in time, no matter how much Wynne loves to apologize, voters may simply want to say: Sorry, time’s up — isn’t there a better alternative? Martin Regg Cohn’s political column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. mcohn@thestar.ca, Twitter: @reggcohn