A Note On Ontario’s Liberal Leadership Race – All I Am Saying Is Give Wynne A Chance

A Commentary by Doug Draper

Through the first 25 days of this New Year, I woke up each morning with one over-riding wish in mind for addressing what I felt had become the sad state of governance in Ontario.

Ontario’s next premier Kathleen Wynne.

My wish was for the opposition parties in Ontario – the Conservatives and NDP – to use the first days, if not hours, of the next session of the provincial legislature to pull the plug on whatever remains of outgoing premier Dalton McGuinty’s minority Liberal government. My wish was for them to do it as soon as possible so that we, the people, can decide in an election who we want to move the province forward.

Now, with an Ontario Liberal Party convention this January 26 in which Kathleen Wynne has emerged as the province’s next premier, I am thinking let’s not be so fast to pull the plug. Let’s give Wynne, who as much as she had to mouth a few obligatory niceties about the outgoing premier’s “legacy” and “building on the foundation” he is leaving behind, let’s give her a chance to fulfill the promise she has made to reach out to the opposition parties and to communities across Ontario to get us back on a healthy sustainable track again.

Let’s give Wynne at least a few months to show what she might do anyway, before triggering an election that sees both her and an NDP leader Andrea Horwath, who may not be so far away from her when it comes to host of issues that involve building healthier, more sustainable communities and improving the lot of the 99 % split the vote in a way that could see a Conservative Party that, in so much of its ‘Paths to Prosperity’ rhetoric echoes the Mitt Romney and Tea Party rhetoric in the United States, gallop up the middle and form the next Ontario government.

If that were to happen, I am willing to bet that within no time at all, many of the thousands of union members and other activists who were out protesting in front of the Toronto stadium where the Liberals held there leadership convention, would be wishing Wynne was still premier.

 I feel confident saying this, because I saw it happen before and played a role in covering it as a reporter for a daily newspaper in the province at the time. It was 1995, when then-NDP leader and Ontario premier Bob Rae suggested what became infamously known as “Rae Days” – asking teachers and other public service workers to forgo a modest number of working days without pay to help balance books that had been drowned in red due to recessionary times – that many teachers and other groups thought they would teach Rae’s NDP a lesson at voting time. It was a lesson that saw the rise of a Mike Harris Conservative government in Ontario that was so tough on everything from union groups to people trying to get by on welfare that the same people who hated Rae Days so much were marching in the streets.

By the second term of a Harris government that included Tim Hudak as a cabinet minister, by the way, and that was all but selling off our public services to Bay Street, if not Wall Street, there were not too many people I talked to in the community – whether they be teachers fortunate enough to earn some wages and benefits at the higher end of middle class, or cab drivers or parking attendants or Wal-Mart greeters or whoever  else was out there, trying their best to get by on an income hovering above or below the poverty line –who admitted voting for Harris/Hudak and company.

Sadly enough, those who were still earning enough money to pay income taxes were later willing to admit that those tax rebate cheques the Harris bunch sent back to some of us – some out there may remember those gimmicky rebate cheques sent out at a cost that was outrageous compared to simply cutting what we would pay in income tax – hardly made up for the loss of education, health and other services that were of need to them.

Is there still a chance for the Liberals’ new leader Kathleen Wynne to find some common ground with NDP leader Andrea Horwath and Conservative leader Tim Hudak?

So let’s not lead ourselves, as communities of people, in to the same self-defeating trap again.

Let’s at least give Wynne an opportunity to do a few things – to form a cabinet of her own which, word from insiders have it, is likely to include a number of newer and younger faces, and reach out to the NDP and Conservatives to see if there is some common ground on challenges the province faces that they can work on together.

Yet less than 24 hours after Wynne was chosen by her party as its new leader, we can already see the way things are shaking out.

NDP leader Andrea Horwath circulated a short and conciliatory note, congratulating Wynne on winding the Liberal leadership race and, at the same time, urging her to recall the provincial legislature “so that MPPs of all stripes can do the job Ontarians elected us to do.”

Conservative leader Tim Hudak sent a similar congratulatory note, but only hours later, as is the recent style of his party to follow up a ‘good cop’ note from him with a ‘bad cop’ note from one of his critics, another member of his caucus, Vic Fedeli, circulated a media release (that would never see the light of day without approval from Hudak’s office) slamming Wynne for sitting on McGuinty’s cabinet and therefore being his “right hand” while “half a million Ontarians struggle for work (and) her government raised spending to record levels.”

Have little doubt that the Hudak Conservatives are thinking that they may have been handed a greater opportunity to win a majority in a coming election than they would have had if the more Bay Street establishment, business-minded Sandra Pocatello – another words someone closer to singing their tune – was elected the Liberal’s leader, which she almost was.

Wynne has a record of being more left of centre when it comes to supporting public education, health care, public transit and other services. In one of my only interviews with her, while she was serving as transportation minister, she expressed her desire to invest more in public transit, and to place rail transport and other alternatives ahead of constructing another multi-billion-dollar highway (that some may know to be the “mid-peninsula highway”) south of the Niagara Escarpment, and through long stretches of agricultural and environmentally sensitive land.

During a recent editorial board meeting with The Globe and Mail – a paper that ended up supporting Pupatello for the leadership, by the way, due to her stronger business background – Wynne admitted that the Liberals, under McGuinty, has made some serious mistakes when it comes to a shift to greener energy in Ontario and, on transit, she was quoted saying the following; “We don’t have good incremental plans for building transit into the future – not in the way that we have incremental plans to build roads. It is really important to me that we develop that.”

It is important for all of us to develop that and more in the way of making our communities more healthy and environmentally and economically sustainable for the future. And I hope that despite the attack ads Hudak’s Conservatives are already throwing at Wynne before she even picks a new cabinet and outlines her agenda in more detail, I think that what makes sense at the moment  – to paraphrase an old John Lennon tune – is to give Wynne a chance.

As for a new cabinet, let us hope that she finds new blood to fill key portfolios like finance, health and education, just to name a few. Wynne might want to consider a maverick from Niagara Falls like Kim Craitor who, although he has dared to openly question some of his own Liberal government’s policies over the past nine years, she might still be courageous enough to embrace as someone with a mind of his own – one of those all-to-rare members of provincial or federal parliament with enough spunk to speak out for the concerns of his constituents, even if that means disagreeing, from time to time, with the party’s leadership.

And if, after giving Wynne a reasonable chance to chart a better course for all of the people of this province, including those struggling to pay their bills and find decent jobs, and young people looking for the same opportunities their parents and grandparents had for a prosperous future – if she is not doing her best to move us in that direction, then by all means pull the plug.

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