Kathleen Wynne\u2019s victory is historic, it is almost all hers, and its meaning is a little opaque, because there is a tension between her platform and her record that will be resolved only by her actions, now that she has the length of a majority mandate to show Ontarians what kind of premier she wants to be.<\/p>\n
Historic: She is Ontario\u2019s first elected woman premier. Almost all hers: People who make a living proclaiming their knowledge of strategy said she was crazy to put herself at the centre of her party\u2019s messaging and communication to the extent she did. She voiced her own attack ads. To voters upset about the mess McGuinty left behind, she offered her person as sufficient guarantee that the past would stay past. It\u2019s what Paul Martin attempted in 2002-2006, but Wynne offered none of Martin\u2019s creepy intramural fratricide and never benefited from the fast-burning personal popularity that seemed, at first, to be Martin\u2019s greatest asset until he ran out of it. The funny thing about a cult of personality is, sometimes it works better if you don\u2019t have quite as much personality. Rule One in Bill Davis\u2019s Ontario is, don\u2019t get on people\u2019s nerves.<\/p>\n
But there are a lot of Conservatives in Ontario who have forgotten the province was ever Bill Davis\u2019s. There are a lot of people who accreted around Mike Harris in 1990 like barnacles \u2014 the Little Shits, Frank<\/em> magazine used to call them \u2014 and they\u2019ve never really grown up. They were at Trinity College or Upper Canada College or Hillfield Strathallan or some other dreary Anglo-Saxon dumping ground in the early \u201980s when Ronald Reagan came on TV and fired the air traffic controllers, and they\u2019ve spent the rest of their lives looking for an excuse to play Ayn Rand Home Edition. It even worked in 1995, when Mike Harris came back from his 1990 drubbing and years of the worst recession, combined with the worst government, Ontario had seen in ages. Harris\u2019s \u201cCommon Sense Revolution\u201d worked because by 1995, thanks to Bob Rae, common sense seemed revolutionary.<\/p>\n[…]<\/p>\n
But back to Wynne. She ran on activist government, and celebrated victory by congratulating those who want to \u201cbuild up Ontario.\u201d But Ontario can\u2019t afford the Ontario it\u2019s got. Wynne\u2019s own platform quietly acknowledges this. Hard public-sector wage freezes and a new program-review exercise won\u2019t feel much like building up. If she abandons them for more spending, she simply postpones harder choices. She has proven herself a redoubtable politician; now she had better be a very good premier, because she\u2019s put herself in a fix to get the mandate she just won.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s a high-class problem, one she would not trade for the simpler life Hudak can now look forward to. (A word on the NDP\u2019s Andrea Horwath: she is in trouble with some New Democrats for forcing this election and losing the bargaining power she had in a minority-government legislature. But the balance of power is not a comfortable place to be after a while, and Horwath was well into the zone where, every time she propped Wynne up, voters would wonder why. The NDP should cut her some slack.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well, that happened. As Elizabeth said to me when I got up this morning, at least it means we see the back of Tim Hudak. Aside from that, not a lot of encouraging news from the polls. We have set our acceptable political standards to a much lower notch, and we clearly don’t think it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,53],"tags":[188,957,413,739,392],"class_list":["post-26301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-politics","tag-electionwatch","tag-kathleenwynne","tag-scandal","tag-timhudak","tag-unions"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6Qd","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26301"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26303,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26301\/revisions\/26303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}