(Although listening to Andrea Horwath’s jousting with scandal-mongering media just before noon made us think there is still some room on the high ground for avoiding an election that most people of Ontario do not really need right now.)

We remain skeptical about both the public interest importance and practical political legs of the gas plant scandal, or whatever it more properly ought to be called.  The real question in Ontario politics today is which party leader is really the most principled and trustworthy? And the answer seems obvious enough.

Meawhile, both our Toronto focus group and Vaughn Palmer in the Vancouver Sun say that  Adrian Dix did best in last night’s BC election debate on TV.  (A Sun poll, on the other hand, currently has Christy Clark as the winner — by a substantial margin.  So … stay tuned.)

UPDATE MAY 3: Ms Wynne’s Liberals brought down their first Ontario budget yesterday. Whether Ms Horwath’s New Democrats will finally back the thing and avoid a fresh election remains unclear at the moment. But the government has certainly moved in their direction. And unless Ms Horwath finds some massive public outcry over the latest bumps in the so-called gas plant scandal, over the next short while, it would seem tricky at best for her party to fight an election on finance minister Charles Sousa’s budget. So “no Ontario election yet” also seems the direction in which the Queen’s Park commentariat is leaning at the moment. If this finally proves on the money, Canadian provincial election junkies will have to rest content with May 14 in beautiful BC, where the NDP seems on much more solid ground.

See, eg: “Ontario budget great politics. But does it make sense?: Walkom …  Ontario’s new budget may have squared enough political circles to keep Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government alive. But is it a credible economic blueprint for the province?”;”Ontario budget 2013: Liberals’ budget packed with NDP measures …  Premier Kathleen Wynne’s minority Liberals have delivered an Ontario budget full of NDP proposals, but it’s unclear whether the New Democrats will support it” ; “Ontario budget offers NDP an olive branch” ; “Ontario Budget Should be Approved, say CAW and CEP” ; “ONTARIO BUDGET: ‘I’m hard pressed to see why we’d have an election over this’, Craitor says of budget” ; and “NIMBYism at heart of Ontario’s gas plant scandal: Cohn … NIMBYism trumps cynicism as the most explosive and expensive political force of our time.”

(Meanwhile, back on the Wet Coast, according to the hard-working Andy Radia : “Are we seeing a Wildrose Party-type collapse in the B.C. election? …  According to a Forum Research poll, conducted after Monday night’s leaders debate, Christy Clark’s Liberal Party is now within four points of Adrian Dix’s NDP … Could the Liberals be in the midst of an epic comeback — just two weeks ago, polls suggested they were down by 18 points? …  Clark could make this a closer race, but are we really going to see a Wildrose type collapse by the NDP?… It’s possible but not likely.”)

In any case, we know for a fact that there will be a BC provincial election this coming Tuesday, May 14 — only some two weeks away. We also know for a fact that there will be a rather late Ontario budget this coming Thursday, May 2. And if Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats do not finally support this budget, there will be another Ontario election soon enough.

Ontario-BC linkages are  similarly reflected in the recent news that : “Veteran strategist Don Guy declines to run another Ontario Liberal campaign   …   Reached on Friday while in British Columbia, where he is working on Premier Christy Clark’s uphill re-election battle, Mr. Guy cited family needs for his decision, as well as the possibility of an Ontario campaign beginning before he returns to the province …  The [Ontario] Liberals are in the midst of trying to convince the provincial New Democrats to support next week’s budget, rather than join with the Progressive Conservatives in bringing down the government and forcing a spring election.” (And btw don’t worry about the latest rumblings close to someone’s lunatic fringe, such as: “Ontario Tories call for non-confidence vote on gas plant controversy unlikely to succeed.” They are all smoke and mirrors, etc, etc.)

Perusing recent news in the Vancouver Sun, you may run across as well : “Jonathan Manthorpe: South Korea’s powerhouse conglomerates face forced reform.” Ontario political history addicts will recall that in earlier incarnations, the Sun‘s current “International Affairs columnist and a foreign correspondent for nearly 25 years,” Jonathan Manthorpe, “grew up in Toronto,” once wrote on Ontario politics for the Toronto Star, and published the still memorable The Power and the Tories : Ontario Politics — 1943 to the Present in 1974.

* * * *

One thing many among we current Ontario residents are having some trouble understanding is why a provincial premier as cute as Christy Clark is having so much trouble holding onto her job as BC Liberal premier.  (An April 24–25 Angus Reid poll puts Adrian Dix’s BC NDP at 45%,Ms Clark’s BC Liberals at 31%, the [quite beleaguered] BC Conservatives at 11%, the BC Greens at 10%, and all “Others” [eg,  Libertarian, BC Excalibur Party, BC Vision, Communist Party of BC, British Columbia Party, BC Marijuana Party, and the Work Less Party] at 3%.)

If Charlie Smith at straight.com is right, the key problem is that : “Since becoming premier in 2011, BC Liberal Premier Christy Clark has introduced some progressive measures … But [in the current election campaign] rather than talk about these moves, Clark has chosen instead to market herself like a 21st-century Thatcher … The failure of Clark to recognize that neoliberalism is dead—as much as anything else—will explain why her party’s candidates are likely in for a rude awakening when BC voters go to the polls on May 14.”

Similarly (you might guess), if neoliberalism really is as dead in the Western World etc as Mr. Smith contends, in any near-future election Ontario Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne may surprise both Tim Hudak’s alleged Progressive Conservatives and Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats. (And note here that the Hudakians apparently had a slight lead over second-place Wynners, in an April 3-10 EKOS poll, an alleged big lead in an April 12 to 17 Ipsos Reid poll, and now no lead at all in the latest April 26 Forum Research poll ["Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals jump into first-place tie with Tories: poll"]. Meanwhile at least some Horwathians seem to be forgetting that Premier Kathleen Wynne has also introduced some progressive measures, and is definitely NOT choosing to “market herself like a 21st-century Thatcher.”)

Whatever the other current similarities between Ontario and BC (and I agree they are more substantial than some may want to believe), as matters stand the two provincial Liberal parties are quite different. (Ms Clark is certainly cuter as well as younger, but Ms Wynne is clearly more comfortably progressive, however you may want to define that term.)

Liberal-NDP co-operation, it seems right now at any rate, is just not going to happen in or after the May 14 BC election. And there are those in Ontario progressive circles who do want to follow the BC model. (See, eg, “Why Andrea Horwath should force an election.”)

I am still hoping myself that the rational case for even some very vague form of Liberal-NDP (or NDP-Liberal) co-operation in Ontario will ultimately prevail. I still think this kind of co-operation is the only dependable way forward for the progressive cause in Canada at large. Unfortunately, I am still not altogether convinced that it will actually happen even in Canada’s most populous province, over the next few weeks. Like everyone else who is remotely interested, I am waiting to see just how appalling the future that fate has in store for we anglophone central Canadians will finally prove to be!

The 1989 movie Scandal offered a compelling portrayal of the 1963 Profumo Affair in the United Kingdom, which finally brought the Conservatives out and the Labour Party in to the government at Westminster. What lessons does a new book on the same subject suggest for the current gas plant controversy in the old outpost of the British empire in Canada’s most populous province today?

A week or so ago Heather Mallick at the Toronto Star published a passionate defence of “British novelist Hilary Mantel’s elegant writing on Princess Kate” — which had been “viciously attacked” by various individuals and organizations in the United Kingdom. Ms Mantel’s writing had appeared, online and then in print, in the London Review of Books, which Ms Mallick calls “the best literary and political magazine in existence.”

Like Heather Mallick I subscribe to the London Review of Books. I received my latest number in the mail — the one that included Hilary Mantel’s essay on”Royal Bodies” — at about the same time as my local Ontariario media were touting such headlines as “Kathleen Wynne rejects Tory calls for inquiry into gas plant cancellations” ; “Ontario premier rejects public inquiry into cancelled gas plants” ; “No inquiry needed to probe gas plant boondoggle: Cohn” ; “Wynne won’t blame McGuinty for scrapped gas plants scandal” ; and “Wynne admits scrapping gas plants was ‘political decision’.”

Richard Davenport-Hines, author of new book on Profumo scandal.

(The Tim Hudak Conservatives in Ontario provincial politics, that is to say, seem to have decided that one of their better hopes of engineering a spring/summer election, which will return them to their rightful position as natural rulers of Canada’s most populous province, is to flail away at the so-called gas plant scandal. In which the governing “McGuinty-Wynne” Liberals — as the Tories are saying — cancelled two unpopular Greater Toronto Area gas plant projects, one in the midst of the last election campaign, at some still unclear expense to taxpayers!)

The 21 February 2013 London Review of Books has brought fresh food for my own thoughts about the so-called gas plant scandal, here in the old Ontario outpost of the old global empire on which the sun never dared to set. Right after Hilary Mantel’s elegant writing on Princess Kate, it includes an even more fascinating review of a new book about the so-called Profumo Affair of the 1960s in the UK. This is arguably the current textbook or model political scandal in the Westminster tradition of parliamentary democracy, to which Australia, Canada, India, Ontario, and quite a few other places still more or less subscribe.

David Runciman, reviewer of Davenport-Hines’s new book.

More exactly, the book under review is An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo by Richard Davenport-Hines — “a British historian and literary biographer, best known for his biography of the poet W. H. Auden.” Davenport-Hines has also “headed a research project on the globalisation of pharmaceutical companies,” and written such other books as The Pursuit of Oblivion: A global history of narcotics 1500-2000. The reviewer is David Runciman — “a British political scientist who teaches political theory at Cambridge University,” descends from the old aristocratic English ruling class, and is the great nephew of the historian Steven Runciman (a schoolboy friend of George Orwell’s at Eton College).

I think the Profumo Affair, which ran its effective course in 1963, is a useful lens through which to view the Ontario “gas plant boondoggle,” which the opposition parties and especially the Hudak Conservatives are apparently trying to turn into a major political scandal in the Great Lakes region of North America some 50 years later. It compares our current local peccadilloes with the (or at least a)  model Westminster-tradition scandal since the Second World War.

The real Christine Keeler, in an infamous 1963 photo by Lewis Morley.

(And note that an early 20th century Ontario Conservative government invented what still passes for the province’s official motto — “Ut incepit Fidelis sic permanet” or “Loyal she began, loyal she remains,” where the key object of loyalty today is presumably the British or Westminster political tradition.)

Even more importantly, the Profumo Affair had a lot to do with sex, and featured a scion of the celebrated Anglo-American Astor family, a Second World War hero, Russian spies, and at least two beautiful women, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. This side of things was compellingly brought out in an excellent 1989 movie, simply but aptly called Scandal. And, perhaps most important of all, comparing our allegedly scandalous local Ontario scene today with the Profumo scandal, in the Mother of Parliaments a half century ago, is the only way I can see of making the 2013  Ontario “gas plant boondoggle” more interesting than an afternoon nap.

Seven Steps to Heaven : David Runciman’s key quotations on the Profumo model

As I look again at David Runciman’s review of Richard Davenport-Hines’s new book on the Profumo Affair of 1963, I seem to have marked up seven key passages or quotations. It is not entirely unfair, I think, to suggest that, taken together, these quotations more or less summarize some kind of Profumo model of high-order political scandal in parliamentary democracies (and note that I have added italics in some places myself, to, as it were, further summarize the summary)  :

According to someone known as T. Stokes, Lord William, 3rd viscount Astor, held “sex and black magic parties at his grand house, where Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies seduced the rich and famous.”

(1) WITCH HUNTS.  “Witch hunts don’t make people behave better; on the whole, they make them behave worse. Davenport-Hines …  mocks the most celebrated moment of the whole saga, when Mandy Rice-Davies responded to being told that Bill Astor had denied having had sex with her with the line: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ Ever since, worldly commentators have taken this to be a glimmer of straight-talk amid the welter of lies. In a recent article in the Times, Daniel Finkelstein held it up as a watershed in modern political analysis, the moment when someone finally pointed out that public figures are as self-interested as the rest of us. The only trouble is that all the evidence suggests Astor was telling the truth, and Rice-Davies was lying …”

(2) NEVER REFORMED. “Neither does Davenport-Hines have much time for the other redemptive story that is often told about the affair: the penance done by Profumo himself. After his resignation, he withdrew from public life and devoted himself to charity. He went to offer his services to Toynbee Hall in the East End of London … His obituary in the Daily Telegraph in 2006 announced: ‘No one in public life ever did more to atone for his sins … Davenport-Hines accepts that Profumo deserved to be rehabilitated, as indeed he was: his return to favour was championed by the Queen Mother, who hosted dinners in his honour towards the end of his life. But … on one of these occasions, seated between his hostess and a 17-year-old Guinness heiress, ‘the old satyr whispered to the latter during the first course: “Ever been fucked by a seventy-year-old? No? You should try it.” Profumo may have been chastened by his experiences, but he was never reformed …’”

The real John Profumo, in later life: he died in 2006, at the age of 91.

(3) REAL QUESTION. “In conventional accounts of the Profumo affair the government’s fatal error occurred the night before Profumo made his denial to the Commons, when he was summoned from his bed by panicked ministers demanding that he set the record straight. One of them, Iain Macleod, put it bluntly. ‘Look, Jack,’ he said, ‘the basic question is: did you fuck her?’ Profumo said no, and his interrogators said they believed him. But that wasn’t really the question. The meeting had been called because the government was spooked by Labour suggestions that Profumo had committed some sort of security breach.” [P btw was at the time “secretary of state for war”.]

(4) COCK-UP NOT CONSPIRACY. “Why did Brooke unleash all this thuggery? The conspiracy theory says that he and others had decided the only way to hush up what threatened to become a national security scandal was to turn it into a sex scandal: they wanted the facts about Profumo’s little lie to come out, so as to throw the public off the scent of the much bigger lies … Nailing Ward as a pimp, and Profumo as an adulterer, was much better than allowing MI5’s dirty linen to be washed in public. The cock-up theory says that Brooke was fed up with all the nastiness swirling around the government and wanted to make an example of someone. He simply didn’t think about the consequences. When things go wrong in politics it’s usually cock-up, not conspiracy.”

“Stephen Ward, Christine Keeler and two unnamed women.”

(5) ROLE OF MASS MEDIA. “The press, once the lid was lifted, went after the story with everything at their disposal: editorial writers took the high ground, castigating Astor, Ward and Profumo for their depravity; feature writers recounted in as much detail as they could muster just what this depravity consisted in; reporters routinely broke the law to provide any shred of evidence that might back them up. Anyone who thinks the recent antics of the press are uniquely shocking should read this book. Ward’s cottage on the Astor estate was broken into. His friends were bribed to spill the beans … Profumo was pursued remorselessly, along with his wife and eight-year-old son. The police didn’t just turn a blind eye to all this; they connived in it.”

(6) CAREER ADVANCEMENT. “Two days before Macmillan resigned on 18 October 1963, another ageing political leader stepped down. Konrad Adenauer, the 87-year-old West German chancellor, finally called it a day, his authority having been undermined over the previous year by the effects of the Spiegel affair …   Adenauer’s defence minister, Franz Josef Strauss, had authorised a police raid on the offices of Der Spiegel … charging them with security breaches for publishing a highly critical article about his management of the West German military …  The press had a field day, and so did Adenauer’s political opponents.  Power-starved politicians and embittered journalists used the scandal to advance their own careers, The outs got in; the ins were temporarily put out. Davenport-Hines complains of the Profumo affair that its result was for ‘one network of egotists, with an intricate history of mutual obligations, murky pacts and tacit promises [to be] replaced by an opposing alliance, no more qualified or efficient, held together by similar bargains, ambition and vanity’. There is nothing distinctively English about this. It’s how democracy works.”

Bridget Fonda as Mandy Rice-Davies and Joanne Whalley as Christine Keeler in 1989 movie, Scandal.

(7) VEHICLE OF DEMOCRATIC CHANGE? “In many countries, the political class that produced the postwar settlement was still hanging on; old political soldiers were refusing to die. Governments that had been around too long were growing careless, and their publics were looking for something new. These are the circumstances in which scandal becomes a vehicle of democratic change. The result is usually disappointing: change is never commensurate with the scale of the outrage a scandal provokes. But it is effective: scandals are a good way of telling entrenched political elites when their time is up. The Profumo affair is simply an egregious example of a familiar tale. Democracies (especially parliamentary democracies) run on cycles of tolerance and intolerance for indiscretion at the top. New governments get away with a lot, but they are also more alert to what they can get away with. Then, when they become old, they become less alert and they get away with less. The ability of a scandal to destroy a government usually has very little to do with the merits of the case. It depends on timing. It is asking too much to expect democracies to acquire a sense of proportion about these things.”

How does the  Ontario “gas plant boondoggle” stack up against the Profumo model?

There are no doubt various ways in which one might use this seven-point Profumo model of political scandal to evaluate or otherwise assess the current Ontario “gas plant boondoggle.” A few hasty remarks under each of the seven points will probably do the trick well enough for any sensible purposes here:

Premier Dalton McGuinty, left, and Energy Minister Chris Bentley chat Oct. 2, 2012, moments before opposition MPPs voted to send Bentley before a legislative committee for contempt. (Jonathan Jenkins/Toronto Sun).

(1) WITCH HUNTS. The opposition parties’ passion to investigate the former McGuinty government’s cancellation of two unpopular gas plant projects in the Greater Toronto Area has involved at least one altogether overblown witch hunt.  See, eg: “Chris Bentley could face jail if found in contempt of parliament …  Energy Minister Chris Bentley faces a historic punishment —  or even jail time —  after opposition MPPs used their majority in the legislature to ram through a motion to probe the $230 million in cancelled power plants.” In a bow to the parallel notion that the people who are really lying are often the people who claim to be telling the truth the loudest, Chris Bentley was not even energy minister when the gas plants were cancelled. Moreover:”Bentley had widely been seen as Premier Dalton McGuinty’s heir apparent but … ten days after McGuinty announced his resignation, Bentley announced that … he too would be leaving politics. Bentley resigned his seat in the legislature effective February 14, 2013.” If there were an award for person most unjustly treated in this alleged Ontario political scandal so far, Chris Bentley would almost certainly be the leading candidate.

The real John Profumo, and his wife, former actress Valerie Hobson, who stayed with him despite his affair with Christine Keeler, back in the day.

(2) NEVER REFORMED. The Profumo model proposition that the prime mover in a political scandal may be “chastened” but is “never reformed” starts to test the Ontario gas plant boondoggle in very arduous ways. The key question here is who is/was Profumo in the current Ontario case? If Chris Bentley wasn’t the energy minister responsible at the time the deed was done, who was? The formal answer is one Brad Duguid (currently Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities in Premier Wynne’s new cabinet). But, as CBC News reported back on October 5, 2012 : “Last month, the government released 36,000 pages of documents on the cancelled plants to comply with a Speaker’s ruling, but there were no communications signed by Duguid…. That prompted the Progressive Conservatives to claim the energy minister had been cut out of the decision to cancel the Oakville plant by the premiers’ office, something Duguid flatly denied … The decision to cancel the Mississauga gas plant was made by the Liberal campaign team.” You could say that all this casts former Premier McGuinty himself in the Profumo part. And Premier McGuinty did announce his resignation on October 15, 2012 — in a context in which the gas plant controversy at least figured in a significant way. (And can anyone seriously imagine that Dalton McGuinty will ever eventually ask some 17-year-old heiress, at a lunch in Ottawa hosted by the Governor-General’s mother, “Ever been fucked by a seventy-year-old?”)

Christine Keeler, right, and Mandy Rice-Davies on the way to the trial of Dr Stephen Ward. Photo: AP.

(3) REAL QUESTION. The early 21st century gas plant controversy in Ontario suffers from a fundamental lack of clarity over just what the basic question actually is. It can’t be whether the Oakville and Mississauga gas plant projects should have been cancelled, since all three parties in the Legislative Assembly have agreed that they should have been. It is similarly jejune at best to object that the projects were cancelled for “political” reasons — “to save the seats of five Grit MPPs in Oakville and Mississauga” in the 2011 election.  As David Runciman puts this point in another of his seven steps, that is just “how democracy works.” Opposition parties and other critics flailing about for something more plausible have latched onto the question of the costs involved in cancelling the projects — variously estimated by various sources at anywhere from $230 million to $1.3 billion. Yet, even here, are either the Conservatives or the New Democrats prepared to say that if governments led by them had discovered the costs of cancelling the projects were too high, they would have let the projects go ahead? The most sensible basic questions have probably been suggested most recently by new Premier Wynne herself, as she struggles to deal with the legacies of the now resigned Premier McGuinty : why was the (wrong) decision to put the plants in Oakville and Mississauga made in the first place, and how can we ensure that such wrong decisions aren’t made again? Alas, this kind of question is not going to be very much fun for the opposition parties or almost anyone else.

The real Christine Keeler on the beach, back in the day.

(4) COCK-UP NOT CONSPIRACY. In another effort to isolate a sensible basic question opposition parties and other critics have sometimes urged that the real offence of the McGuinty Liberal government was not the decision to cancel the two gas plant projects, but what amounts to a conspiracy to cover up the essentially political or even corrupt process by which the decision was made. (Thus all the fuss about how many documents have been released when and so forth, the latest phase of which unfolded just last week : see “Liberals slip on Project Banana peel as more power plant documents surface.”) Yet this quickly bumps into the Runciman/Profumo model proposition that When things go wrong in politics it’s usually cock-up, not conspiracy. And Martin Regg Cohn at the Toronto Star recently focused on this side of the story: “Are we seeking evidence of a government coverup? The Ontario Power Authority released 30,000 pages last September and another 26,000 in October after expanding the search terms. When the OPA dumped 600 more pages of irrelevancies last week, MPPs screamed ‘coverup.’ Seems more like political death by 56,600 paper cuts thanks to incompetence, not conspiracies.”

“Welsh-born party girl Mandy Rice-Davies” in her early 1960s youth.

(5) ROLE OF MASS MEDIA. The current Ontario example of journalists like Cohn may seem to contradict the  the Runciman/Profumo model proposition alluded to in : Anyone who thinks the recent antics of the press are uniquely shocking should read this book. And it probably is true enough that another flaw in what Cohn has also more aptly christened  the current Ontario “gas plant boondoggle” is that the regional media have not more or less universally piled on to the opposition parties’ frequently overblown narrative. At the same time, another recent report in the Toronto Star suggests that the media does have its own self-interest in aiding and abetting a story line that attracts readers : “Wynne admits scrapping gas plants was ‘political decision’… Premier Kathleen Wynne promises more documents to come on decision to cancel gas plants in Oakville and Mississauga before the 2011 election …  ‘There is an admission there are more documents,’ added Progressive Conservative MPP Vic Fedeli (Nipissing), his party’s energy critic … With some critics claiming the cancellations cost taxpayers as much as $1.3 billion, Fedeli said more documents will help get ‘to the bottom of this cover-up and to the price’ … Conservative House Leader Jim Wilson said his party would “take seriously [Premier Wynne’s] offer.” …  “I just hope this isn’t the beginning of the cover-up of the cover-up of the cover-up.” (And yet, as noted above, as long ago as last October the press was reporting that the “decision to cancel the Mississauga gas plant was made by the Liberal campaign team” : so it has long enough been admitted by everyone involved that “scrapping gas plants was ‘political decision’.” And if you watched the actual Premier Wynne press conference on which this recent Toronto Star report was based yourself, you could easily enough see how the media is trying to spin its own provocative story, rather than report on what the premier has to say in some essentially neutral way.)

Joanne Whalley, as Christine Keeler in 1989 movie, Scandal.

(6) CAREER ADVANCEMENT. David Runciman urges that in both the 1963 Profumo Affair in the UK and Konrad Adenhauer’s 1963 resignation in West Germany, you can see how : ”Power-starved politicians and embittered journalists used the scandal to advance their own careers.” My own sense at least is that enough of this has also gone on in the current Ontario gas plant cancellation controversy to have a disproportionate influence on public opinion. Last week, eg, “a new Forum Research poll found 57 per cent of Ontarians want … a probe to get to the bottom of the gas plant closures … Only 22 per cent disagreed with the need for a judicial investigation and 20 per cent didn’t know.” Respondents to such polls, I think it is fair to say, react to the general tone of reports in the media — not to any careful assessment of the details of the case, which are confusing at best even to those few paying close attention. And there is of course enough justification for voters to entertain a healthy general scepticism about almost all comings and goings in the real world of politics — even or perhaps especially in real-world democracies.

John Hurt as Stephen Ward in the 1989 movie, Scandal.

(7) VEHICLE OF DEMOCRATIC CHANGE? So (as our new Premier Wynne herself might say) … does the current Ontario gas plant controversy finally qualify as what David Runciman’s Profumo model calls “a vehicle of democratic change”? And what about his concluding propositions : “The ability of a scandal to destroy a government usually has very little to do with the merits of the case. It depends on timing. It is asking too much to expect democracies to acquire a sense of proportion about these things.” The objective answer here is of course that only time can and will tell. My own subjective impulse at the moment is to side with Martin Regg Cohn’s scepticism about the ultimate sharpness of the current Ontario “gas plant boondoggle”’s cutting edge.  To me neither the Conservatives nor the New Democrats have (yet?) shown that they are in a better position to govern effectively than Premier Kathleen’s new Liberal government. (And personally I grew up in an Ontario in which a so-called Progressive Conservative party ruled without interruption from the time I was born to my 40th birthday: the thought that a Liberal or generally progressive party, or combination of co-operating parties, might now repeat this stunt in an opposite ideological direction, in some degree, does not really bother me.) I finally feel as well that David Runciman’s subjective conclusion about how it “is asking too much to expect democracies to acquire a sense of proportion about these things” probably has a little too much to do with his old world aristocratic ancestry. Those ardent democrats among us from humbler new world backgrounds (and I must confess that I qualify myself under this heading) have a right to expect a little more.

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne (left) and Finance Minister Charles Sousa applaud as Lieutenant Governor David Onley delivers the throne speech at the Ontario Legislature in Toronto on Tuesday. Chris Young / CP.

[UPDATED FEBRUARY 22]. (1) Here are some quick notes on the first (and some would say last?) throne speech of Kathleen Wynne’s new Liberal minority government in Ontario yesterday. They also serve as an update to “Ontario ‘three-party system in transition’ is back .. but can Premier Kathleen do it, at last?,” which appeared on this site the day before yesterday. If you want to read all 3800 words of the speech yourself see  THE WAY FORWARD.  My own first thought was “much motherhood, little meat.” But almost all throne speeches are like that (in Canada at any rate).

Conservative leader Tim Hudak will not back the throne speech, because ...

(2) The main reception narrative emerges in these eight key current headlines: “Tepid response to throne speech” (Windsor Star) ; “Prospect of spring election drawing closer after throne speech” (Waterloo Region Record) ; “Hudak won’t support throne speech” (Sun News) ; “Throne speech vague on details, but gains NDP support” (Northern Life) ; “Ontario’s Liberal government won’t fall on throne speech … But further New Democratic Party support will depend on budget” (CBC News) ; “Premier Kathleen Wynne’s throne speech sets stage for Liberal-NDP budget” (Toronto Star) : “Kathleen Wynne insists she will bring ‘balanced’ approach to budget … will not steer the minority Liberal government left just to appease NDP Leader Andrea Horwath” (Toronto Star) ; “Premier Kathleen Wynne’s throne speech tries to buy Liberals time: Cohn.” (Toronto Star).

(3) Anyone who looked in on this morning’s TV question period in the Ontario legislature in media res and had some trouble following things might find this Canadian Press report helpful: “Tories open new session of legislature with old contempt motion on gas plants.” The Hudak PCs almost seem to be thinking that they can just run the old Harper Conservatives’ playbook on the federal sponsorship scandal — and laugh all the way to the bank. Others may wonder. But it did work for Stephen Harper. And if you don’t have policy ideas that most people like  …

Eric Grenier’s latest Ontario poll averages and seat projections.

(4) Thomas Walkom has an interesting column in today’s Toronto Star, reminiscent of Pat Bauman’s rural life comments on this site the day before yesterday, on “Ontario ‘three-party system in transition’ is back.” See: “Windmills, horse-racing: How Kathleen Wynne can woo rural Ontario …  Liberals need countryside voters to win next election, so …  In Tuesday’s Throne Speech, the government made one brief reference to consulting citizens about wind turbines. If Wynne wants to reconnect with rural southern Ontario, she will have to go further.”

(5) So suppose a spring election does finally prove impossible to avoid? Eric Grenier’s “latest averaging of polls conducted mostly after the OLP leadership convention,” in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, suggests a political reality in the Legislative Assembly not all that different from what we have now. See : “Ontario Liberals up in polls since Wynne won, but election still a gamble.”  On Grenier’s seat projections here, the New Democrats would take some Liberal seats in an election right now, but the Liberals would still have the largest number of seats. And some form of Liberal-NDP co-operative venture / arrangement (with Ms Wynne as premier) would still be the only way ahead — as it is right now, without the expense of a fresh election.

Liberal minority Premier Wynne and New Democrat leader Andrea Horwath, whose party is up in recent polls, but still not enough to beat the Liberals ... yet. Can these two clever ladies figure out some way of governing Ontario sort-of together? For how long? Or not?

(6) I have a small but (maybe) a bit interesting technical quibble with an otherwise commendable phrase right at the beginning of Premier Kathleen Wynne’s inaugural throne speech yesterday. The second sentence of the speech has Lieutenant Governor David Onley “acknowledge that we are on the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the New Credit.” This strikes me as a nice touch. At the same time, in the interest of historical accuracy — and arguably even political realism in our own time — it should be noted that the Algonquian-speaking Mississagua did not occupy the territory where the Ontario Legislative Assembly is now housed when Europeans first made contact with the geography of modern Ontario in the early 17th century. At that point it was the territory of Iroquoian-speaking peoples whose descendants now live in other parts of Ontario, Canada, and North America writ large. The Mississauga did not establish a clear title to the territory by force of arms, so to speak, until the early18th century. Somewhere in this quibble, I think, is something of some relevance to our diverse lives in Ontario today. Yet whatever else, in this and many other of the speech’s fine motherhood declarations, it is to Kathleen Wynne’s credit that she prompts us to think about such things. [Click on “Read the rest of this page” and/or scroll down below for FEBRUARY 22 UPDATE on new Forum Research poll.]

FEBRUARY 22 UPDATE : Using interactive voice-response telephone calls, Forum Research polled 1,053 people across Ontario on Wednesday, February 20, 2013 — the day after the return of the Legislative Assembly and the new Wynne government throne speech. See “Poll suggests Hudak Tories could win minority, but Wynne has pulled Liberals out of tailspin.”

The past few days have also seen fresh developments of the great gas plant scandal that have hurt Premier Kathleen’s new momentum somewhat, but …  See, eg: “Liberals slip on Project Banana peel as more power plant documents surface” ; “Kathleen Wynne ‘has clearly not been truthful’ about cancelled gas plants: NDP” ; “NDP won’t trigger election over Liberal’s gas plant fiasco.”

Kathleen Wynne, Premier, Minister of Agriculture and Food, MPP Don Valley West.

In the early 1970s John Wilson and David Hoffman wrote : “The strength of the Conservative party in modern times makes it difficult to believe that Ontario was once ‘by large odds a Reform and not a Conservative Province.’ In fact, however, the Liberals were the leading political group in the province for the better part of the nineteenth century, and continuously from the introduction of responsible government in1848 to the collapse of the Ross government in 1905.”

Those of us who, like Wilson and Hoffman, first became acquainted with Ontario government and politics when the strength of the provincial Conservative party was still so overwhelming are bound to look on the swearing in of Kathleen Wynne’s new  “relentless progressive” Liberal government this past Monday, February 11, 2013 with some unique awe.

Deb Matthews, Minister of Health and Long-Term Care, MPP London North Centre.

The hours left before the Legislative Assembly of Ontario gets back to business, on Tuesday, February 19, invite some quick big-picture look at the changing regional political culture — and what it may or may not mean a little further down the road?

To start with, only a few years after it first appeared in 1972, Wilson and Hoffman’s “especially noteworthy” article on “Ontario,  A Three-Party System in Transition” seemed to have been eclipsed by events. A second edition of the Martin Robin reader on Canadian Provincial Politics, in which the piece first appeared, came out in 1978. One unusually wise and prescient reviewer moaned: “Astonishingly, the only essay dropped altogether is the one on ‘Ontario, A Three-Party System in Transition,’ by John Wilson and David Hoffman.”

Michael Coteau, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, MPP Don Valley East.

Some 35 years later, Wilson and Hoffman’s three-party system in transition theme seems to have acquired some provocative fresh relevance. It arguably ought to become a regional cult classic of some sort (if only there were enough people interested in the even only half-serious study of Ontario political history to make such things possible).

The last few sentences of the 1972 article similarly alluded to its nicely tabulated evidence “which suggests that before very long there must be an end to the pattern of competition which has persisted since the end of the Second World War … One thing, however, is certain. The character of Ontario politics will not be seriously changed until one of the opposition parties has taken power from the Conservatives and kept it for more than two terms. No one has managed that for nearly seventy years.”

Yasir Naqvi, Minister of Labour, MPP Ottawa Centre.

Some 40 years later, we can now see that the Dalton McGuinty Liberals did more or less manage this feat at last in the provincial election of October 6, 2011. At the same time, the rather fragile fact that it will not be former “Premier Dad” McGuinty but the new Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne who will meet the Legislative Assembly on February 19, 2013 reflects continuing ambiguities in just how the feat has finally been achieved.

(While the parallel facts that Ms Wynne is both Ontario’s first female premier, and the first openly gay first minister in Canada, also suggest that Canada’s most populous province just may be staging some kind of return to its more ancient 19th century status as “by large odds a Reform and not a Conservative Province.” Meanwhile, back on the banks of the Ottawa River, Prime Minister  Harper must be wondering as well : what does this mean for the present-day federal Conservatives, who relied so much on Ontario voters for the majority government they finally managed to bring off, also in the apparently poignant Canadian political year of 2011?)

1. Can Kathleen do it?

“Can Lloyd George Do It?” was a question famously raised by John Maynard Keynes and Sir Hubert Douglas Henderson about the last Liberal prime minister of the United Kingdom in 1929.

Jim Bradley, Minister of the Environment, MPP St. Catharines.

The analogy makes sense here partly because Ontario politics still leans strongly (if also increasingly covertly) on its British parliamentary precedents. (And note, eg, the Union Jack that remains in the left-hand corner of the official provincial flag, adopted as a kind of reactionary gesture when the independent maple leaf flag took effect Canada-wide in 1965.)

It also makes sense because the answer to “Can Lloyd George Do It?” for the old British Liberal party was essentially No. (And thus the Labour Party took over as the main voice of progress in UK politics — though that too may be changing somewhat again nowadays.)

If Kathleen Wynne can, on the other hand, get some form of Yes to a similar question north of the Great Lakes over the next few years, she will have taken quite a big further step away from the various legacies of the old colonial “British connexion,” which still has some special relationship with the Conservative political tradition in Canada’s most populous province.

At the same time, right now in the real world of politics the answer to “Can Kathleen do it?” is clearly far from clear. To take just a few immediate cases in point :

* There are the ongoing McGuinty scandals that no doubt won’t be going away after February 19. See, eg, “Kathleen Wynne should take lie-detector test, says Tory MPP Frank Klees …  The Conservatives say they don’t believe Premier Kathleen Wynne when she says she wasn’t involved in the decision to cancel a gas plant” [way over the top, of course, but ...] ; and “Kathleen Wynne wants auditor general to expand gas plant probe … [i]n a move reminiscent of former prime minister Paul Martin’s 2004 decision to strike the Gomery commission into the federal Liberals’ sponsorship scandal that happened on Jean Chrétien’s watch.”

John Gerretsen, Attorney General, MPP Kingston and The Islands.

* Even if the ongoing McGuinty scandals don’t lead quickly to something like a spring 2013 general election, Ms Wynne’s new minority government seems vulnerable to a few immediately damaging losses of precious seats, in by-elections within the next six months to replace a few resigning cabinet ministers.  See, eg, “Liberals in dogfight to hold Chris Bentley’s London seat” ; “Ontario NDP leader Horwath tours Windsor, attacks Liberals, talks by-election” ; and “NDP would win riding of Windsor-Tecumseh in by-election: Poll” (unless Sandra Pupatello runs in the by-election, which the latest intelligence seems to be saying she will not!).

* While the latest province-wide general election polls are not devastating, they do suggest that, as Premier Kathleen herself has acknowledged, her new government’s job is just beginning. See, eg : “Ontario voters split three ways, according to polls …  survey shows the PC’s with 33 per cent support followed by 31 per cent for the New Democrats and 30 per cent …  Liberals” ; “Wynne, Hudak and Horwath in dead heat: Poll …  If premier-designate Kathleen Wynne was hoping for a post-leadership convention hike in her polling numbers, a new Abacus Data survey shows that she will be sorely disappointed … most Ontarians don’t even know who Wynne is” ; and “Half of Ontarians believe province on wrong track: Poll.”

2. Prospects of Liberal-NDP co-operation?

Ted McMeekin, Minister of Community and Social Services, MPP Ancaster - Dundas - Flamborough - Westdale.

This past Thursday Martin Regg Cohn at the Toronto Star wisely observed : “Without NDP support, the minority Liberal government is doomed to defeat. The question is when.” (See “Labour leaders fear NDP-Liberal rivalry may spell Tory triumph: Cohn … New Democrats dream of disembowelling the Liberals to seize power. Unions fear that would let Tim Hudak’s Tories sweep up the middle.”)

Dalton McGuinty tried to revive the old Bill Davis strategy of using both opposition parties (sometimes one and sometimes the other) to prop up the “major minority” government he managed to hang on to a little too precariously in October 2011. But one of the various reasons Premier Dad finally resigned last fall was that this strategy failed to work at all as well for him in the early 2010s as it did for Premier Davis in the late 1970s.

The underlying logic here appears to remain in the current moon-of-wintertime air. See, eg : “Ontario’s opposition parties react to province’s new cabinet, in very different ways” ; “Tory Leader Tim Hudak trots out his shopping list for spring budget”; “Tim Hudak wants student loans tied to marks …  ‘We don’t want to reward mediocrity’” ; and “Kathleen Wynne and Andrea Horwath get down to the business of government: Cohn.”

At the same time again, exactly where Andrea Horwath’s collective NDP head is finally at on all this is not easy to figure out either (and perhaps even for her etc?). Personally, I like the concept explored on this site last fall: “Best outcome of next Ontario election — some kind of Liberal-NDP / NDP-Liberal co-operative government????.” And I’d be more than happy to see Ms Wynne and Ms Horwath experiment with this concept before the next election.

Laurel Broten, Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Minister Responsible for Women's Issues, MPP Etobicoke Lakeshore.

Yet as Martin Regg Cohn at the Toronto Star has also stressed, again, some “New Democrats dream of disembowelling the Liberals to seize power. Unions fear that would let Tim Hudak’s Tories sweep up the middle.”

You might think it is a bit rich for “Unions” to fret too much about how competition for the progressive vote can benefit the Hudak Tories, when at least some (public sector) unions have also been doing their best to foster virtually the same kind of dysfunctional progressive rivalry — with the same benefits for the Hudak Tories. Yet, whatever else, it does seem clear enough that the new Wynne Liberal government’s chances of succeeding in any immediate future have a lot to do with the willingness of Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats to support their progressive Liberal brethren in the immediate here and now. And the willingness of Ms Horwath and her party to provide such support for any significant length of time seems not all that clear at all.

3. Courting Alice Munro’s rural Ontario

Linda Jeffrey, Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, MPP Brampton–Springdale.

Anyone who remembers what the Ontario Liberals still were during the 30-year generation that followed the Second World War will find their current liabilities in so-called “rural Ontario” more than a little surprising. (Their late 1960s / early 1970s old agrarian democratic leader Robert Nixon, eg, once told a reporter who would later write an interesting book: “Sometimes I just want to go back to the farm and roll up the driveway behind me.”)

The current polls nonetheless show, in one degree or another, that : “Most of the support for the Ontario Liberals comes in urban Toronto with the Grits coming up short everywhere else in the province.” And Kathleen Wynne, the openly gay member of the legislature for the old Toronto suburban riding of Don Valley West, often seems especially vulnerable here. (See, eg, “Kathleen Wynne’s battle against the prejudice of Torontophobia: Cohn … Times have changed for bigotry and sexism. But trash-talking Toronto remains fair game.”)

As matters stand,.Premier Wynne has a two-forked strategy for at least trying to deal with all this. To start with, “Kathleen is focused on the priorities of farmers and Ontario’s $34-billion agri-food industry. To ensure those voices are heard, she is also the Minister of Agriculture.”

Jeff Leal ... Minister of Rural Affairs ... MPP Peterborough.

For added weight and heft on something broadly resembling a parallel theme, Premier Kathleen has appointed Jeff Leal, member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario for Peterborough since October 2003, to a new cabinet position known as “Minister of Rural Affairs.” As Mr. Leal has explained to his local media, the “creation of the rural affairs ministry ‘reinforces our commitment that we want to make to rural Ontario’.” He “also identified infrastructure as a major issue for his newly created ministry, which was split off from the former portfolio of agriculture, food and rural affairs.”

Premier Kathleen herself has said a number of things about her new Rural Affairs ministry, which almost make you think she (or someone on her staff?)  may have been reading a provocative new book of essays by several hands, edited by Gordon Nelson “distinguished professor emeritus, Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo,” and published in 2012 by McGill-Queen’s University Press, under the provocative title, Beyond the Global City : Understanding and Planning for the Diversity of Ontario.

According to some inevitably hyperbolic promotional material, Beyond the Global City is “[l]ooking beyond the smoke screen of Toronto’s rapid and costly growth to re-envision sustainable planning in Ontario’s neglected regions. Policies promoting Toronto as a global city and provincial economic engine have been seen as beneficial to the development of all of Ontario, yet much of the province has borne significant environmental, social, economic, and political costs as a result of one city’s growth. Contributors to this volume call for a radical re-imagining of public policy at local, provincial, and federal levels, that accounts for Ontario’s overlooked regions.”

Michael Gravelle, Minister of Northern Development and Mines, MPP Thunder Bay - Superior North.

For further and somewhat more objective enthusiasm about Gordon Nelson’s provocative new volume, see here, here, here, here, here, and here. And anyone who thinks the revived agrarian democratic quest of the first Lesbian Ontario premier from the Sodom and Gomorrah of Toronto is hopeless from the start should also consult “Is salvation for Ontario Liberals somewhere out there in Alice Munro’s rural Ontario?” (which appeared on this website just this past December), and “Ontario’s new premier could prove to be a Wynne-win situation”

In the first case here, remember that the mother of the youthful heroine of Ms Munro’s still impressive Lives of Girls and Women, in the fictional rural Ontario small urban centre of Jubilee (aka Wingham, Ontario), carefully cultivates her mind, intermittently sells encyclopaedias to raise ready cash, and listens to the Metropolitan Opera on CBC radio on Saturday afternoons. Premier Kathleen herself, who grew up in Richmond Hill, Ontario, when it wasn’t exactly part of the Greater Toronto Area as it is today, and who had a conventional marriage with three children before she came out in her present long-term relationship with another woman, could arguably qualify as a complex character in an Alice Munro story.

Teresa Piruzza, Minister of Children and Youth Services, MPP Windsor West.

It may be even a little more robustly interesting that the author of “Ontario’s new premier could prove to be a Wynne-win situation,” published on Valentine’s Day 2013, was no less than Bryan Tuckey, “president and CEO of the Building Industry and Land Development Association” in Canada’s most populous province,.

As Mr.Tuckey has urged, “Kathleen Wynne is not only the first female to be Premier of Ontario, she is also the first premier to have been a Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing.” You learn things about the “diversity of Ontario” in this job. The majority of the  people of the province who still live beyond any reasonable definition of the Greater Toronto Area still need to get to know Premier Kathleen quite a lot better than they do now. But if and when they do (assuming she can conspire to keep her first government alive for a while, before having to face another general election), they just might find her surprisingly attractive — like a very bright, energetic, and community minded school marm in an old one-room rural Ontario schoolhouse, where the concession road meets the main township highway.

4. Continuing financial challenge : “If it was easy, it would have been done already”

Charles Sousa, Minister of Finance, MPP Mississauga South.

For a host of excellent reasons, the last three parts of this extended six-part commentary must be much, much, much, much shorter than the first three. (To start with in this case, it is starting to get quite late at night — and/or early in the morning, and in my advancing age I tire much, much, much more quickly than I used to. Much more importantly, many or even any surviving readers at this point will also be wishing that I gave up altogether at least a thousand or so words ago!)

Under the “financial challenge” heading, in any event,  it is enough to say that Dalton McGuinty’s problems with his October 2011 major minority government had a lot to do with the very thorny politics of navigating Ontario’s current financial challenges without terminally alienating the less economically sensitive (some would say literate) branches of the progressive base. These challenges remain. And it is a sign of their continuing thorns that Mr. McGuinty’s last finance minister, Dwight Duncan, has decided to return to the many comforts of private life in Southwestern Ontario.

On the plus side of the current ledger, it is probably a good sign that Kathleen Wynne’s transition team has included “Don Drummond …  Chair of the Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services (2011-2012) …  Retired Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at TD Financial Group …  former Associate Deputy Minister, Finance Canada.”

Meanwhile, Ms Wynne’s replacement for the retiring Dwight Duncan is Charles Sousa, who finally helped her out politically so much at the Liberal leadership convention that made her Ontario’s new premier, for the time being at any rate.

It is inevitably unclear at this point just how well the new minister of finance will do. But a recent report in the Globe and Mail has some optimistic edges: “Born in Toronto’s Kensington Market, where his father ran a wholesale food business after emigrating from Portugal, Mr. Sousa’s family relocated to Mississauga when he was a child. After university, he started his own company providing financial services to small business. Later, he went to work for RBC [Royal Bank of Canada], first as a commercial account manager, then as a senior marketing manger at the firm’s investment bank. In his last role, he oversaw relations with policy makers in Ottawa …  ‘I  recognize that it’s not going to be easy,’ he said Monday [February 11]. ‘If it was easy, it would have been done already.’” That could qualify as at least the beginning of some kind of useful wisdom.

Liz Sandals, Minister of Education, MPP Guelph.

(And then there are the outright political struggles with the less economically sensitive branches of the progressive base — some of whom claim that economics is not the issue, even when it almost certainly is?  On this and related fronts see, eg: “Premier Kathleen Wynne taps long-time education advocate Liz Sandals as minister to tackle teacher turmoil” ; “Liz Sandals believes teachers keen to resume extracurricular activities” ; “Kathleen Wynne ‘optimistic’ about talks with teachers’ unions” ; and — a sign of just how challenging the other side of the financial equations can equally be — “California finances praised but not upgraded by Moody’s.”)

5. “Lots of rookie ministers in Wynne’s expanded cabinet”

The cabinet with which Premier Kathleen will be greeting the returning Legislative Assembly of Ontario on Tuesday, February 19 has “expanded to 27 from McGuinty’s 23.” The new premier has explained: “My cabinet is slightly larger than the last because of the serious work that must be done.”

Knee-jerk small-government ideologues in what still calls itself the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario have complained that the four more cabinet ministers just show how little Premier Wynne appreciates what the province’s real problems are.

David Orazietti, Minister of Natural Resources, MPP Sault Ste. Marie.

You probably have to be a similarly inclined ideologue yourself to find this kind of critique altogether compelling. But a more serious problem may lurk between the lines of such headlines as “Lots of rookie ministers in Wynne’s expanded cabinet … At least nine of the new members Wynne has picked don’t have prior cabinet experience ….”

There is of course nothing to say definitively that a rookie cabinet minister can’t do a good job. But there are certainly tricks to the vocation that it often takes a bit of time to master. Lack of mastery can sometimes embarrass governments — especially in a political culture where at least the illusion of so-called managerial competence counts for as much as it often said to count for in Canada’s most populous province.

One big risk for Premier Kathleen, that is to say, may be that her government finally comes off as a bit too “flaky” for the hard-working, sober mind of Ontario. And a cabinet made up of one-third rookies may heighten this risk.

The other side of this kind of argument is that a cabinet with one-third rookies may also bring much-needed fresh breezes and constructive new energy to an older team in some trouble — while still being lucky enough to avoid any altogether damaging political or public relations disaster. Whatever else, Premier Kathleen has already shown some impressive boldness in her initial approach to her new job. On the most optimistic assumptions, that could finally prove both quite refreshing — and at least popular enough for political survival in the cold, cruel world of anglophone “Central Canada.”

6. Key questions still how soon will next Ontario election be … and just what might all this mere provincial political history finally mean for Stephen Harper in Ottawa ?

Madeleine Meilleur, Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services, Minister Responsible for Francophone Affairs, MPP Ottawa - Vanier.

If Ms Wynne’s first government is still here a year from now (and even if it is finally expecting a spring election, but in the spring of 2014), it will probably be safe to say that she has at least set the stage for the finally new Ontario that Wilson and Hoffman saw in the wings, as long ago as the early 1970s, to emerge at the vital centre of things at last.

A lot of questions about the ultimate shape of this new Ontario will remain — including the question of just how much its natural governing party must involve some kind of ongoing Liberal-NDP (or NDP-Liberal) co-operation! But the new “relentless progressive” Ontario regional political culture of the early 21st century will be at least somewhat more secure than it is right now, with a slightly more assured long-term future.

The simplest answer to the further question of just what this might mean for Canadian federal politics is that strong partisans of Stephen Harper’s new Conservative Party of Canada probably ought to be happy (maybe). There is certainly a considerable wealth of historical evidence to suggest that Ontario voters like to put one party in power provincially, and another federally.

Michael Chan, Minister of Tourism, Culture and Sport, Minister Responsible for the 2015 Pan/Parapan American Games, MPP Markham - Unionville.

So the federal Liberals at least did very well in Ontario during the long reign of the provincial Progressive Conservative dynasty of 1943–1985. And, back in more ancient times, John A. Macdonald’s Conservatives did very well federally during the long reign of Oliver Mowat’s Ontario Great Reform Liberals, from 1872 to 1896.

On the other hand, it may also be that these patterns too are part of a regional past that is ending forever at last. It may even be that the finally new Ontario which Wilson and Hoffman saw in the wings as long ago as the early 1970s is going to prove something completely different than anything which went before. (Such as, eg, a growing new tradition of multi-party progressive co-operation in all parts of Canada, at both provincial and federal levels of government????)

Whatever else, and for the moment at any rate, it suddenly seems very interesting to wait and see.

PS: For the complete new Kathleen Wynne Cabinet see Office of the Premier : MEET THE TEAM — CABINET.

Oliver Mowat, Premier of Ontario, 1872–1896 — and the man who consolidated the Liberal Great Reform dynasty of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (and did so much else to lay the groundwork for modern Ontario's free and democratic political culture).

TORONTO. COLLEGE PARK FOOD COURT. SATURDAY, JANUARY 26, 2013. 9:00 PM ET.  So it is now official — and the “pleasant surprise” vainly hoped for on this site just two days ago has come to pass. Kathleen Wynne is the new leader of the Ontario Liberal Party. Very soon she will also officially become not just the first woman premier of Canada’s most populous province — but the first openly gay first minister/chief executive of any provincial or federal government in Canada.

The first sign that something of this sort might be in the wind at this Ontario Liberal leadership convention in the old Maple Leaf Gardens was Ms Wynne’s first-ballot finish just two votes behind the still front-running (and quite lovely) Sandra Pupatello. Then, thanks in no small part to Harinder Takhar, Ms. Pupatello finished 67 votes ahead of Ms Wynne on the second ballot, and the momentum seemed to have shifted away from any big surprise. But then Charles Sousa and Gerard Kennedy suddenly moved (literally) to Ms Wynne’s camp. The third ballot confirmed that the great mass of the Sousa and Kennedy delegates moved with them, and “Wynne won 1,150 votes to Pupatello’s 866” — quite enough to take the day, in a final effective electorate of 2,016 delegates (with a democratic majority of 1,009 needed to win).

We only have two quick thoughts at this point ourselves. First, many are saying that Kathleen Wynne’s speech earlier in the day was a big factor in her win. We’re not close enough to the front lines to judge this ourselves. But we (well, most of us it seems) did see her speech on TV. And it seemed a knockout to us. At the end we suddenly felt that Kathleen Wynne actually would make an excellent premier of Ontario.  Now we’ll get to see if this is true!

October 2011 : “Dalton McGuinty becomes the first Liberal premier since Oliver Mowat, 128 years ago, to win three consecutive elections.”

Second, many outside the Ontario Liberal Party will point to the thousands of demonstrators on the streets (and in the parks) outside the old Maple Leaf Gardens today and tonight, and rightly enough urge that both the party and the Queen’s Park minority government that Kathleen Wynne will soon inherit are still in a lot of trouble. Ms Wynne herself acknowledged as much in her nicely plotted victory remarks, when she said that the work has just begun. It is also all too true that even democratic politics in Ontario is a blood sport which is very hard to succeed at for very long, especially in the early 21st century. Yet as one of our number noted about half an hour ago, just at the end of the remarkably collegial victory remarks (from both Kathleen Wynne and Sandra Pupatello), maybe Dalton McGuinty has actually done the right thing!  Ontario politics has a long history of long-lived dynasties — from the old Liberal Great Reform dynasty of 1871–1905 to the 1943–1985 Big Blue Machine of the Progressive Conservatives. It may well be that in the 21st century the odds are against any  repetition of this formula by any party or combination of etc, etc, etc. There have nonetheless been moments at this remarkably energetic Ontario Liberal leadership convention when some kind of new “relentless progressive” political dynasty almost did seem to be lurking in the shadows. Who knows? Stranger things have happened. (And we know that, because one of them has just happened right now.)

PS: Congrats to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford on winning his court appeal to remain in office. And, even more importantly for us, congratulations to W.S. Noel on this site — who had at least the main outlines of the plot figured out, as long ago as last September! For more details see our “Streetcar Named Rob Ford … Friday 25 January 2013 : Mayor Ford still mayor …  wins appeal of Justice Hackland’s decision …  but… ????.”

Joyce Murray.

Without actually wanting to add to my colleague Frank Bunting’s recent over-effusive references to the work of Thomas Walkom at the Toronto Star, I have been drawn in spite of myself to yesterday’s further ruminations by the same authority,”Do Canada’s, or Ontario’s, Liberals matter any more: Thomas Walkom.”

At least on the surface of things, Mr. Walkom concludes: “The new [federal] NDP, while more slippery than it once was, still takes positions on fundamental issues like taxes and climate change …  But the Liberals? Who knows? …  Who are they? If they suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth, would anyone notice?”

“Premier MILF” Christy Clark may not survive as BC first minister all that much longer, but she certainly qualifies as cutest Liberal leader in Canada today — even if Justin Trudeau does win the federal leadership race on April 14.

Personally, I am somewhat less unimpressed by the current activities of Canada’s former alleged natural governing party. To start with, I think it is important to remember that the big arena for pondering Thomas Walkom’s question includes more than just “Canada” and “Ontario.” The other two or even three largest provinces of the 1867 confederation are also involved : as in, eg: “Hébert: The real Liberal race is in Quebec” ; “BC Liberals pick up support as Conservatives falter” ; and even “Albertans hold fundraiser for BC Liberals.”

Still more strikingly, I agree that Barbara Yaffe at the Vancouver Sun was onto something in her account of the federal party’s first nine-candidate leadership debate in Vancouver this past Sunday. (“Liberal lesser-knowns fail to distinguish themselves … The 41-year old son of the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau, even at this early point in the race, has a significant lead.”) But I think Susan Delacourt at the Toronto Star was still a bit prescient, when she earlier opined : “Liberal leadership debate in Vancouver will give candidate Joyce Murray time to shine … In a field crowded with candidates making appeals to the centre-right of the political spectrum, Murray is one of the rare few contenders saying that the Liberals’ future lies in the progressive left …”

Similarly, as Ms Yaffe herself has conceded, in Vancouver this past Sunday the “debate issue that inspired the strongest opinions was the idea of electoral cooperation with the New Democratic Party to defeat the Harper Conservatives …  All candidates except Vancouver Quadra MP Joyce Murray firmly rejected the proposal …  Another topic prompting disagreement, particularly between Murray and former Willowdale MP Martha Hall Findlay, related to an oil pipeline across northern BC for oil exports to Asia … Murray spoke on behalf of environmental sustainability and the need to ‘protect a pristine part of our coast.’”

“The last thing that Liberal MP Joyce Murray wants to see off the coast of British Columbia is an oil tanker. Murray, who represents the riding of Vancouver Quadra, is ... pursuing legislation that would prohibit just that.” Joyce introduced Bill C-606 as a private member’s bill in the 40th Parliament, which ended in March 2011. Her current variation on the same theme is known as Bill C-437.

I feel compelled to confess as well that the talking points Ms. Murray’s campaign have been putting out for some kind of hopeful mass consumption lately have at least impressed me : “Joyce has said to Canadians from coast to coast that the Liberal Party needs to stand for a truly Sustainable Society … She has offered her ideas —  things like the full legalization and taxation of cannabis, democratic reform and political cooperation, green energy and digital economy, and a national food policy — as examples of what that leadership would look like …”

Justin Trudeau almost certainly will win, but (like Nathan Cullen in Mulcair’s new NDP?) Joyce Murray is carrying the torch for progressive co-operation and the “new Obama liberalism” in Canada?

Federal Liberal Leadership candidate Justin Trudeau, left, shares a laugh with fellow candidate Joyce Murray during the federal Liberal debate in Vancouver Sunday. Photograph by: Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press, Postmedia News.

Some say Justin Trudeau’s current celebrity has been largely manufactured by sympathetic branches of the mass media. Yet the key data-based argument is that, according to recent opinion polls, he alone, among all nine current contenders, has the capacity to make the Liberal Party of Canada seriously competitive again.

At the same time, it is also part of the data-based argument that the young M. Trudeau’s polling numbers have been faltering at least somewhat in the most recent past. See, eg:  OCT 30, 2012 — “‘Trudeau Effect’: With Justin as leader Liberals would win majority government, poll finds” ;  NOV 21, 2012 — “Justin Trudeau-led Liberals would win … a strong minority government” ;
DEC 8, 2012 — “Poll: Justin Trudeau’s Liberals would tie Conservatives” ; DEC 11, 2012 — “Justin Trudeau Poll Suggests Liberal Leadership Front-Runner May Be Faltering.”

The nine contenders for the federal Liberal leadership race were far more collegial than adversarial when they met in Vancouver on Sunday for the campaign's first debate. From left to right: Justin Trudeau, Martin Cauchon, Karen McCrimmon, Joyce Murray, Martha Hall Findlay, George Takach, Deborah Coyne, David Bertschi and Marc Garneau. Jan. 20, 2013. JONATHAN HAYWARD/THE CANADIAN PRESS.

At the same time again, even a somewhat faltering Justin Trudeau is still doing much better in the polls than anyone else. Both the smart money and the popular majority still see him as the almost certain winner on April 14. (At the moment anyway. See, eg : JAN 3, 2013 — “Most Canadians expect Justin Trudeau to win Liberal leadership race, poll finds” ; and JAN 21, 2013 — “Liberal Party Leadership: Intrade Shares Show Trudeau With 75% Chance Of Winning.”)

Joyce Murray, on the other hand, is not very well known beyond her BC home province. Even setting Justin Trudeau aside, she still places behind former astronaut Marc Garneau in polls among the cross-Canada electorate — and sometimes even behind Martha Hall Findlay. There is still quite a lot of time between now and the April 14 federal Liberal leadership decision deadline — you could argue at any rate. But, as things look right now, I’d agree that it’s not too likely Joyce Murray can move ahead of the young and charismatic M. Trudeau (or even M. Garneau?).

On the other hand again, in many ways, Joyce Murray is speaking up for the big and bold progressive side of the historic Liberal Party of Canada for which I still have some admiration myself. As in this burst from her current talking points: “It’s not the first time we’ve seen bold ideas from leaders of our Party … Lester Pearson knew that national health care was not just the right thing to do but also a competitive advantage; Pierre Trudeau enshrined the Charter of Rights and Freedoms at the centre of Canada’s Constitution; Jean Chretien put Canada in Kyoto and kept us out of a senseless war in Iraq; and Paul Martin gave us the Kelowna Accord — and boy have we seen the need for Kelowna over the past few weeks.”

I give Ms Murray a lot of credit too for her aggressive support of ”democratic reform and political cooperation.” If Justin Trudeau really could win a majority again for his father’s old party, not worrying about co-operation with the New Democrats (and perhaps even the Greens) would make some sense. (Though even in this case it’s worth noting that even on the most optimistic majority scenario of the earlier polls, the Trudeau Liberals wouldn’t be taking any more of the cross-Canada popular vote than the Harper Conservatives did in May 2011. The democratic majority of Canadians would still have voted for someone else!)

Yet, in fact, the broad sweep of all the opinion polls of the past several months still strongly suggests that even a federal Liberal Party led by Justin Trudeau is not going to be able to govern Canada without help from the Mulcair New Democrats (and/or vice-versa).  And so in this past Sunday’s debate in Vancouver: “According to Trudeau, Murray’s electoral cooperation plan would blur the lines between the values extolled by Liberals and the NDP. The Quebec MP added he wasn’t ready to give up his Liberal values. Murray fired back saying, ‘if you want to replace Stephen Harper, where’s your plan?’” (And wasn’t one of the key values of Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal party that you always campaign from the left anyway?)

Just two more quick and dirty items:

(1) The more you get to know about Joyce Murray, the more interesting she becomes. Born in South Africa in 1954, she came to Canada with her parents at the tender age of 7. She later graduated from Vancouver’s Lord Byng Secondary School and Simon Fraser University.

Husband Dirk Brinkman and wife Joyce Murray own a reforestation company that has planted more than a billion trees across Canada. Photo : CHARLIE SMITH.

A “small tree-planting proprietorship” Joyce started with her future husband  Dirk Brinkman blossomed into  Brinkman & Associates Reforestation Ltd. She “found myself running the back office of a growing company with more than 500 employees, and juggling the responsibilities of work and raising three young children.”

Brinkman & Associates Reforestation continued (and continues) to grow. In 1989 Joyce returned to SFU for a mature-student MBA, to broaden her business outlook (and write a 1992 thesis on “the challenge of climate change”). About a decade later, she had became a BC provincial cabinet minister, serving as  Minister of Water, Land and Air Protection (Environment and Parks), 2001-2004 and Minister of Management Services 2004-2005.

In 2006 “my attention shifted to federal politics. After successfully contesting a nomination race in Vancouver Quadra, I was elected to the Canadian Parliament in a federal by-election. Since then I have been re-elected in 2008 and 2011 …  I have worked as a vigorous advocate for a stronger and greener economy, and to ensure that the federal government pursues intelligent, informed, and forward-looking policies.”

(2) This past Tuesday, January 22, the day after President Barack Obama’s second inauguration in Washington, Joyce Murray tweeted “Joyce Murray @joycemurray … Obama: ‘We will respond 2 the threat of climate change, knowing that failure 2 do so wd betray our children and future generations’ #lpcldr”. Ms Murray is, as best as I can make out at any rate, the candidate in the current Liberal Party of Canada leadership race who is standing up the strongest for the progressive new liberal vision articulated so powerfully and impressively by President Obama, in his second inaugural address this past Monday, January 21, 2013.

Meanwhile, back in Canada’s most populous province this coming weekend …

The top three contenders for the Ontario Liberal Party leadership. From left: Gerard Kennedy, Sandra Pupatello, and Kathleen Wynne — although fourth-place Harinder Takhar is surprisingly close to third-place Kennedy, in terms of initial elected delegate support. Ms Pupatello is in first place and Ms Wynne is a pretty close second. But all this could change quite a lot after the first ballot on Saturday! Postmedia News / The Windsor Star.

As I write (on the sunny but still very cold afternoon of January 24, 2013) the second part of ”Do Canada’s, or Ontario’s, Liberals matter any more: Thomas Walkom” is already descending upon the Toronto streets surrounding the old Maple Leaf Gardens  — where the grand finale of the current Ontario Liberal leadership race gets under way tomorrow. (With the start of the actual voting on Saturday, January 26 — and the definitive end perhaps arriving sometime early on the morning of Sunday, January 27?)

The assumption that Sandra Pupatello will prove the ultimate winner is so strong in so many places that it would be a pleasant surprise if she lost, from some  points of view in any case. My own guess is that both Gerard Kennedy and (especially) Kathleen Wynne still have a sporting chance. And still other surprises should not be discounted altogether, no doubt. As others have already said on this site, however (or was that actually me — I confess I forget), if I had to put down serious Canadian money right now, I too would bet on Ms Pupatello.

In any event, for those who really are interested in just who the next Ontario Liberal leader and (for at least a short while) the next Ontario premier will prove to be this coming weekend, I can only advise regular and careful watching of cp24 TV in the Toronto area (if you can get this on your system) — or another visit to this counterweights site itself, sometime on the evening of Sunday, January 27 or the early morning of Monday, January 28.

Dalton McGuinty’s last Christmas card as Ontario premier.

For the time being, here are some news articles from this week that may or may not prove relevant, when all the votes are counted at the old Maple Leaf  Gardens, in the city with the heart of a loan shark, home of the Ontario provincial legislature at Queen’s Park, etc, etc, etc:

JAN 21 — Sandra Pupatello is Ontario Liberals’ best bet as leader: Editorial … [Toronto Star editorial]

JAN 22  — Empty legislatures a disturbing trend for Canadian democracy: Tim Harper … [Which alludes to the fact that the Ontario legislature sat longer than any other provincial legislature in Canada last year — as documented in  SITTING DAYS OF THE PROVINCIAL AND TERRITORIAL LEGISLATURES BY CALENDAR YEAR 1987 to Date : see “Sandra Pupatello criticized” below.]

JAN 22 — Jarvis: Ten Tough Questions for Sandra … [Ms Pupatello is questioned by her hometown Windsor Star.]

JAN 23 — Siddiqui: Nightmare scenario for Sandra Pupatello … [A plea for Kathleen Wynne from the Toronto Star’s Haroon Siddiqui, who does not agree with his paper’s editorial board.]

JAN 24 — Sandra Pupatello criticized over plan to keep legislature closed until she’s elected … [But see ”Empty legislatures” etc above.]

JAN 24 — Cohn: The political powers of Sandra Pupatello: premier or opposition leader?

JAN 24 — Kennedy knows front-runner status does not ensure victor … [And maybe there still is some kind of chance for him — or Kathleen Wynne!]

JAN 24 — Chris Selley on the McGuinty years: How does a Premier like this stay in office? …[And in my view, if you really don’t know the answer to this question, you really don’t know much about Ontario ; but don’t worry too much : Northrop Frye called it “surely one of the most inarticulate communities in human culture.”]

Former Windsor-West MPP Sandra Pupatello. Photograph by: James Park, Ottawa Citizen.

It is now less than  10 days until the Ontario Liberal leadership convention opens at the old/new Maple Leaf Gardens in the provincial capital city. According to one observer : “Unfortunately, the race has been incredibly dull in terms of candidates and substance, and the party is unlikely to see any spike in the polls once a new leader is in place.”

The other side of this argument is that no one expects to be entertained by Ontario politics. And polls on any branch of the subject are usually somewhat suspect, until a few weeks before a given general election. (For one thing, there is a congenital confusion between federal and provincial politics in the minds of many “Canada First” Ontario voters.)

However you look at it, Sandra Pupatello and Kathleen Wynne are the current front runners. There seems a very strong chance that, for at least a short time, the next Ontario Liberal leader will also qualify as the province’s first female premier.

Kathleen Wynne is cheered by supporters after announcing her intention to run for the leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party at a rally in Toronto on Monday November 5, 2012. Frank Gunn / CP.

Moreover: “A female premier in Ontario would join five other women at the helm of their provinces or territories: Kathy Dunderdale in Newfoundland, Pauline Marois in Quebec, Alison Redford in Alberta, Christy Clark in British Columbia and Eva Aariak in Nunavut.” If this does happen, “87 per cent of Canadians” will be “represented by a woman at the provincial level.”

More technically, the results of this past weekend’s elected delegate selection for the January 25–27 convention are : Sandra Pupatello, 504 ;  Kathleen Wynne, 463 ; Gerard Kennedy, 257 ; Harinder Takhar, 244 ; Charles Sousa, 198 ;  Eric Hoskins, 104 ; Unpledged delegates, 67.

“Most” of the unpledged delegates “had been committed to Toronto Centre MPP Glen Murray, who dropped out Thursday [January 10] to endorse Wynne.” If these unpledged delegates “follow Murray to Wynne the two front-runners are in a dead heat.” A further wrinkle is that 16 delegates are as yet unallocated. (“A tiebreaker will be held later this week in the riding of Durham to determine where that riding’s delegates go.”)

Gerard Kennedy. Dave Thomas, Toronto Sun/QMI Agency.

More importantly, the 1,853 elected convention delegates chosen this past weekend will be joined at the January 25–27 convention by an additional  “419 ex-officios — MPPs and party brass” (Toronto Star) or “about 600 former MPPs, MPs, party executives and other ‘ex-officio’ Liberals” (Canadian Press), to finally choose the new party leader and (again for a short while at least) the next Ontario premier.

The current best guess would seem to be that either Ms Pupatello or Ms Wynne will finally emerge as the next Ontario Liberal party leader and first female Ontario premier over the January 25–27 weekend. For reasons that everyone knows but no one wants to talk too much about, if you had to bet money right now Sandra Pupatello would probably be your best bet. At the same time, it is certainly far too early to write off Kathleen Wynne. And there would even seem a vague chance that Gerard Kennedy (who did quite well in two late 2012 Forum Research polls, among”all Ontarians” and “Liberal supporters”) might ultimately triumph — reversing the scenario under which he lost to Dalton McGuinty in 1996.

1. Harinder Takhar’s big surprise

“Harinder Takhar has cast himself as a self-made man who arrived in Canada nearly four decades ago, writes Martin Regg Cohn.” DAVE CHIDLEY/TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO.

The election of Ontario Liberal leadership delegates over this past weekend did have one big surprise. And that was the strong fourth-place finish of the somewhat tarnished McGuinty cabinet minister Harinder Takhar.

Just before the delegate selection last week,  the always interesting Hershell Ezrin, like virtually all other Liberal insiders, was thinking out loud (on Ontario News Watch) that Mr. Takhar would likely finish last. In fact he finished a strong fourth, with 244 delegates, just behind Gerard Kennedy’s 257.

Mr. Takhar’s surprising strength reflects the growing muscle of Ontario’s growing South Asian community — in the provincial Liberal Party and beyond. And who can deny that this is good news for both the Ontario Liberals and the province at large?

There are those, however, who view Mr. Takhar as “arguably the least-qualified candidate … the veteran politician who was demoted to a junior cabinet post in 2006 for violating the Members’ Integrity Act (flouting conflict of interest rules over a blind trust for his personal assets). “

Pooja Handa, the real queen of cp24 TV in 2013, would make a much more attractive Ontario Liberal leader than Harinder Takhar, but alas she is not running.

Martin Regg Cohn at the Toronto Star had already raised doubts about Harinder Takhar on this kind of ground. On January 15  he added some fuel to the fire in “Harinder Takhar as deputy premier is a scary thought.”

Cohn concludes with : “The Takhar campaign is run by smart, talented people — gifted organizers who tapped into Sikh temples, networks of truck drivers, sports clubs and seniors’ associations to sign up new party members … They just deserve a better candidate.”

Mr. Cohn does have a few new disturbing things to report. But, say what you like, Harinder Takhar is the candidate these particular smart, talented people have in 2013. (Too bad it wasn’t Pooja Handa from cp 24!) And even democratic politics in Ontario is a cynical blood sport, as has long been recognized by all concerned, etc, etc, etc, etc …..

2. The Oscar Wilde Coalition?

Glen Murray and Kathleen Wynne.

One reason for guessing that Sandra Pupatello will finally win out over Kathleen Wynne is that “Wynne is … closely associated with the government, but is also very well liked, a rare principled politician … Unfortunately, the Liberals and even the media are afraid of having an honest conversation about her sexuality …  Wynne is openly gay and while some voters … may not have an issue with that …  others will … are Ontarians ready for a gay premier? … Wynne supporters have pointed out the positive results of her campaign in the rural parts of the province [at this past weekend’s delegate selection] … but these aren’t average voters, they’re card carrying Liberals.”

The Toronto Centre MPP (and former Winnipeg mayor) Glen Murray, who dropped out Thursday [January 10] to endorse Kathleen Wynne, is openly gay too. It may be that he has in some (perhaps quite slight?) degree turned her camp into a kind of gay coalition, that might quickly find it has reached its maximum level of support when the convention voting begins on January 26?

On the other hand, the antidote to all this may be that Ms Wynne “ is also very well liked” and “a rare principled politician.” (On the other hand again, there is as well the unfortunate precedent of the 2010 Toronto municipal election, where the openly gay former Ontario Liberal cabinet minister George Smitherman was soundly defeated by the aggressively right-wing loose canon Rob Ford, beyond the narrow boundaries of the inner city core.)

George Smitherman and Rob Ford at a debate in Toronto mayoralty race, October 2010.

For another more positive take on what may or may not be the 2013 Ontario Liberals’ Oscar Wilde Coalition, see Aidan Johnson in the January 15 Hamilton Spectator : “We’ve come a long way, Ontario … In 1994, the provincial Liberals killed a gay-rights bill. Today …”

Whatever else, Mr. Johnson notes: “One sign of progress is that all of the Liberal candidates for premier appear to be gay-positive. Further, an out [and out?] gay person has already served as leader of a party in Canada: André Boisclair (Parti Québécois). He was Quebec’s Leader of the Opposition … And in November, past Ontario’s southern border, Wisconsin elected Tammy Baldwin as the first openly gay Senator in the United States.”

3. Does it help if Dwight Duncan gives up his seat for Sandra Pupatello?

Former Windsor West MPP Sandra Pupatello (L) and Windsor-Tecumseh MPP Dwight Duncan (R) pose for a photo at a press conference in Windsor, Ont. in August 2011. Tyler Brownbridge / The Windsor Star.

Sandra Pupatello arguably has two further advantages over Kathleen Wynne. First, she “did not run in the 2011 provincial election and took a position as director of business and global markets at Price Waterhouse Coopers” instead — which means she can at least rhetorically get out from under the most recent alleged sins of Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal minority government, elected on October 6, 2011.

Second, unlike Ms. Wynne (and all four other four candidates still in the race, for that matter) Ms. Pupatello, originally from and representing the auto city of Windsor, Ontario — just south of Detroit, Michigan — can reasonably claim to be NOT from the Greater Toronto Area.

The first of Sandra Pupatello’s advantages here is shared by Gerard Kennedy, who left the McGuinty cabinet as long ago as 2006, for a subsequent somewhat chequered career in federal politics. Both Kennedy and Pupatello, however, also share the comparative disadvantage of not at the moment having a seat in the Ontario Legislative Assembly (as do all four of their opponents). And this could be seen as a significant disadvantage in the present Ontario minority parliament, hungry to get back to business after Dalton McGuinty’s much criticized prorogation this past fall.

Finance minister Dwight Duncan has apparently indicated that he would quickly resign his Windsor area seat, to make room for his friend and neighbour Sandra Pupatello in a by-election, if she does finally win the leadership. Does this give her some advantage over Gerard Kennedy? Maybe, but maybe not? According to recent press reports on Kennedy:”Two Liberal MPPs have offered to resign to free up a seat for him if he becomes premier at the Jan. 26 convention.”

4. Why is Andrea Horwath suddenly talking about Liberal-NDP co-operation?

Andrea Horwath — sometimes a tricky lady?

On January 15 a few intriguing press reports suggested “Ontario Liberal leadership: Kathleen Wynne and Andrea Horwath leave door open to Liberal-NDP cooperation” and “Horwath open to working with Liberals, not ruling out coalition.”

It seems that New Democrats would be happier thinking this way if Kathleen Wynne becomes the new Liberal leader, since she is seen as more ideologically progressive, in some sense New Democrats find congenial.

Yet according to the Toronto Star:”While Hudak sounds eager to head to the polls, Horwath said another $300 million vote would not go over well with the public … ‘My preference is to sit down with whoever is elected (Liberal leader) and to get some things done for Ontarians,’ she said, noting the NDP extracted concessions from McGuinty in last spring’s budget to ensure the minority government didn’t fall … ‘I’m not overly interested in the details of what that looks like in terms of structure,’ said Horwath when asked repeatedly about a coalition government … ‘I don’t think you necessarily have to have a structure to do that … you just need goodwill.’”

Similarly : Kathleen “Wynne …said she would co-operate with Horwath or Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak … ‘I’ve never talked about a formal coalition, but what I have said is that I would be reaching out to both Tim and Andrea,’ the Don Valley West MPP told the Star editorial board …”.

Tim Hudak — what if he won a quick election?

At the same time, Sandtra Pupatello “said Tuesday she would only go so far to appease the opposition … ‘Of course I am ready to sit down with Andrea and Tim in order to see what common ground there is on achieving what I, and the Liberal party, believe we need — a determined focus on jobs and the economy,’ she said … ‘But I am not interested in a coalition nor is any Liberal I have talked to across the province. Liberals believe in a number of different things than the NDP, including the need for sound fiscal management, innovation and productivity.’”

The most interesting bit of political intelligence here may be that Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats are starting to become concerned that a fresh Ontario election too soon after the Liberals choose their new leader might just be too much of a good chance for the increasingly wildly right-wing Hudak Conservatives (especially with the Ontario teacher issue making Hudak’s false siren songs increasingly attractive to growing numbers of voters who have forgotten Mike Harris ????). Personally, I’d be happy to see more Liberal-NDP co-operation, for whatever reasons. And I think this would be in the broader public interest of the people of Ontario too.

5. Ontario teacher issue sidebars

All this is going on far too long (again!!).

Here are just two quick further references to the Ontario teacher issue, and its implications for the Ontario Liberal present and future:

* WARREN KINSELLA … “Ontario Grit leadership candidates play a dangerous game” (and note that Mr.Kinsella is a supporter of Sandra Pupatello)  ;

* “Dalton McGuinty’s education legacy will outlive Bill 115 travails” … (by Charles Pascal, who served as Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Education and Training under Bob Rae’s Ontario NDP government in the first half of the 1990s).

6. The great media confusion about ex-officio delegates

Former cabinet minister Charles Sousa kisses his wife, Zenaida, as he launches his campaign for Ontario's Liberal leadership in Mississauga back in November 2012. RENE JOHNSTON/TORONTO STAR.

Finally, there seems some considerable media confusion over just how many Liberal party “ex-officios” will be joining the 1,853 elected delegates, to chose the new party leader on Saturday, January 26. I am in no position to resolve this confusion myself. But I can quickly document it:

* According to the CBC : “About 400 ex-officio delegates — made up of party bigwigs current and former MPPs — will form the rest.”

* According to the Toronto Star (and the Waterlo Region Record) : “ Those elected delegates plus 419 ex officios — including MPPs, defeated candidates, Ontario Liberal MPs, and party bigwigs — will directly cast ballots for the leadership hopeful to replace McGuinty.”

Dr. Eric Hoskins now lives and represents a riding in Toronto. But he grew up in the much more rural centre of Simcoe, Ontario. His “Respect for Rural Ontario”plan “features 25 initiatives to support rural Ontario, including a review of the horse racing industry.”

* According to the Sun News Network: “Another 500 ex-officio delegates drawn from MPPs, defeated candidates and other Liberal insiders will make up the rest of the 2,300 who will choose a replacement for Premier Dalton McGuinty.”.

* According to the Canadian Press (in sources as far away from Ontario as the Victoria Times-Colonist!) :”The delegates will be joined by about 600 former MPPs, MPs, party executives and other ‘ex-officio’ Liberals eligible to vote for the new leader, who will automatically become Ontario’s next premier.”

* According to NOW magazine in Toronto: “On top of the delegates who took part in the voting this weekend there are another 400 to 800 ex-officio delegates (depending on whose numbers you believe), whose votes are also up for grabs. Those didn’t have to declare which of the candidates they’re voting for.”

Ontario Liberal party leadership candidate Sandra Pupatello (left) listens as Kathleen Wynne speaks during a forum in Toronto on January 10. Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press.

We should know the correct answer by the weekend of January 25–27.

Meanwhile I can report that “419 ex officio delegates (current and forner Liberal MPPs, recent defeated candidates, party officials, and federal Liberal MPs for Ontario)” is also the number given by “Ontario Liberal Party leadership election, 2013 … From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”— along with the Toronto Star and the Waterloo Region Record.  If someone put a gun to my head and said I had to guess the correct number myself, at this exact moment I think I would probably choose 419 too.

As early as January 13, 2012 we posted “Obama may yet prove smarter than all his critics — right AND left!.”  Then on June 28 we had “SCOTUS upholds Obamacare .. and cunningly evades single payer .. or blesses Trojan Horse for Canadianizing US health system?” This was closely followed by “Fourth of July 2012 way up north .. forget Romney : Obama is twice as popular in Canada as PM Harper!”

As election day drew nearer, on September 9 we featured “Why I think President Barack Obama is the biggest thing that’s happened in American history in my lifetime.” And then when he won at last, we made a buoyant bow to Jack Kerouac (the latest movie of whose On the Road classic premiered at both the Cannes and Toronto film festivals this year), with “Nov 6, 2012 : ‘Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?’”

We agree with Time magazine’s selection of President Obama as person of the year. (“‘We are in the midst of historic cultural and demographic changes, and Obama is both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America,’ Time Editor Rick Stengel told NBC’s ‘Today’ show.” We would just say Amen to all that.)

In the end Danielle Smith’s Wildrose Party did not win the 2012 Alberta provincial election, despite many predictions that it would. (And we were fooled too.)

Strictly within the boundaries of Canada itself, 2012 does not seem to us to have been either a very good or a very bad year. We do not agree with everything in the always interesting Chantal Hébert’s December 19, 2012 column in the Toronto Star (“Federal political landscape virtually unchanged in 2012”).  But her general argument that the “year 2012 is poised to go down as the quietest in [Canadian] federal politics in a decade” makes a lot of sense to us.

The corollary to this argument is that the interesting part of Canadian politics this year was at the provincial (and even the municipal) level. This had started to become clear by the end of April. We at least tried to signal our recognition of the trend with “Big surprise in Alberta .. Danielle Smith not necessary …  Alison Redford wins” (April 23),  and “Does Andrea NDP cute trick on Ontario Budget 2012 matter .. it did pass and there’s still no election?” (April 24).

1. Another year of vain hopes …

On other and related fronts, a lot of things we’d hoped for in 2012 have not come to pass (as usual).  Very early on in 2012 we were asking “Will showing the left how to co-operate be Ontario’s new role in confederation?”

We’re probably still crazy enough after all these years to hold out longer-term hope on this issue. But we do try to pay some attention to the real world. And with the year almost over, not much has happened on Green-Liberal-New Democrat co-operation yet (to say the very least),on any level of government in any part of Canada!

Very early on in 2012 as well, we signalled another of our favourite vain Canadian federal political hopes with “If step-by-step reform is good for the Senate, why not the monarchy too?” Again, we still think this makes a lot of sense in theory. But in practice anyone remotely realistic will point out that, with the year almost over again, virtually no practical progress has yet been made on step-by-step reform for the Senate, let alone the old colonial British monarchy.

(See, to take just one further case in point, our mid-summer rumination on “PM Harper : Senate reform ‘much slower than I’d hoped, but … we’ll continue to push it forward.’” And note that as of late December 2012 further evidence of pushing forward has been extremely hard — no, make that impossible — to see.)

2.  But we did see a little traction for new Canadian future …

NDP MP and leadership candidate Nathan Cullen wanted the party to join forces with Liberals and Greens in some ridings. He also argued for fresh debate on the role of the British monarchy in Canada today!

Who knows what keeps any of us going in the world we live in today? (Apart from our sheer love of breathing and getting up to an intermittent brilliant sunrise?)

But we have been slightly encouraged that some of the 2012 posts on this site — on one or more of our particular favourite themes — actually attracted more readers than we thought they might, according to the WordPress internal statistics. Take, eg, these half dozen cases in point:

* Is Nathan Cullen the conscience of New Democrat race in Canada? …  January 30

* Constitution Act, 1982 “severed Canadians from ancestral monarchical foundations” (no wonder PM Harper doesn’t like it!) …  April 17

* Who pays for the Canadian Forces nowadays — the offshore monarchy or the people of Canada (and Quebec)? …  August 20

* Iran parliamentarians think it is the British queen who has closed Canada’s embassy in Tehran! … September  12

* Who really believes PM Harper’s new panel to ensure ‘non-partisan’ vice regal appointments will fix the problem? …  November 5

* 175th anniversary of 1837 rebellions more important for Canadian democracy today than War of 1812 …   December  4

3. Bad news — Ontario and Quebec not dead yet

Dalton McGuinty and Jean Charest both left office as premiers of Ontario and Quebec in 2012, in one sense or another. But that doesn’t mean that Ontario and Quebec themselves have vanished, of course.

The new Canada of the future is certainly going to mean a lot more than Ontario and Quebec. And the Laurentian thesis (whatever that is or was) is definitely on its way out, or has long since left the building, etc, etc, etc.

At the same time, another theme of the Canadian federal-provincial scene in 2012 was that Ontario and Quebec are not dead yet.  (Which is hardly surprising, since together they still account for more than 60% of the Canada-wide population.) Here are a half dozen cases in point from this site:

* What will feuding politicians finally do with “the Don of a new era in Ontario”?…  February 16

* Iggy returns .. laughing to keep from crying on Canada and Quebec…  April 27

* Is Liberal Conservative détente next big thing in Ontariario .. and will it work? …  May 7

* Maybe Pauline Marois is telling the rest of us that we cannot do nothing about Canada’s constitutional future forever! … August 27

* Is yet another Ontario election blowing in the autumn leaves of 2012? …  October 2

* Dalton McGuinty’s big surprise .. will he finally be founder of new “relentless progressive” dynasty in Ontario? …  October 15

4. Mayor Rob Ford of Toronto : Call Me Crazy Maybe????

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, 2012.

We started our “Streetcar Named Rob Ford” page on the last day of October 2010. And we’ve updated it more than a dozen times in 2012.

In many ways we’d agree that the less said the better about the man who just may qualify as Toronto’s craziest mayor (although the historical competition is pretty stiff, on some readings: to cite just a few cases, eg, Mel Lastman, Allan Lamport, Sam McBride, and Tommy Church … etc, etc).

But Mayor Ford does attract attention (even across the country some say). And he also appeared on our front page a number of times in 2012.

(Oh and btw, to us in December 2012 it’s clear enough that, whatever else, he’s far from a spent force, whatever that may mean!)  :

*  If Rob Ford really is a “spent force” in Toronto, does that mean at least something for Stephen Harper too? …  February  2

* Game change : Sarah Palin movie, Rob Ford nation, and the new leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada …  March 11

* Is Rob Ford on the ropes? Let’s hope so .. What might help him most now? A loss, not a victory, in Court …  September 17

* Rob Ford and Mark Carney .. one Canadian gravy train off the rails .. another bound for Bank of England …  November 27

5. Canadian foreign policy

We missed Keith Olbermann in 2012. He ought to be back on US TV, bigtime, somewhere, in 2013 or certainly in time for the mid-term elections in 2014.

The welcome re-election of Barack Obama notwithstanding, 2012 has in many ways been a year of turning inward. Our home base is Canada’s current largest metropolis, and our turning inward has kept us closer to home than we ought or want to be.

We have still indulged in recurrent outward glances in the interests of better informed foreign policy (especially if you adopt the not entirely accurate view that the United States qualifies as a foreign country in Canada, and vice-versa):

* It’s not Keith Olbermann’s fault that democracy in America today can’t seem to find a place for him ..  March 31

* Clyde Prestowitz’s neo-mercantilism could be telling us something about the revival of manufacturing in Canada too …  April 14

* Where will the new German hegemony in Europe lead this time? …  June 4

* Manic depressive markets … another reason for stopping the market economy from turning us into a market society? …  June 12

* Discovering Canadian girl Alison Pill .. and probing women’s constitutional right to go topless in public …  September 21

* Do Susan Rice’s Canadian connections disqualify her as US secretary of state? …  December 1

6. True north strong and free — real Canadiana 2012

We’re finally starting to agree that Paulina Gretzky doesn’t really deserve the attention she’s been getting, especially in Canada, in 2012. Or at least we were, until we stumbled across this photo.

We’ve come to the end of our year-end review, and we’re just too tired  from wrapping gifts to say anything much more.

Except here are eight final postings on this site from this fast-fading year that we somehow think are memorable, for reasons we almost seem to have forgotten already, except that they all involve people who have somehow said or done something about what Canada means or ought to mean this year — or at least that’s our story, etc … :

* Happy 60th anniversary Mr. Massey .. and why aren’t more Canadian leaders like Leo Gerard in Canada today? …  February 28

* What if Conrad Black divorced Barbara Amiel and married Paulina Gretzky .. where would that leave Canadian citizenship? …  May 2

* Canada Day 2012 : Duff Conacher, Helen Forsey, Michaëlle Jean, Percy Robinson (again), and maple leaf flag tattoos… June 30

* Now that loonie’s 25 let’s put David Thompson and wife on the heads-up side .. to celebrate real history of Canada …  July 6

* PM Harper’s spin-doctor boasts about Canadian economy are wearing thin ..  July 12

* The unbearable lightness of being Justin Trudeau .. just what Canada after Stephen Harper wants? …  September 28

One of the saddest events in our experience of 2012 was the death of the Canadian civil rights lawyer and political activist, Charles Roach, on October 2.

* RIP Charles Roach : “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery ; none but ourselves can free our minds” …  October 4

* RIP Raymond Souster : “Toronto’s foremost bard of bop .. and the small city moment, closely observed” …  October 23

And a very happy new year 2013 to all our highly valued discerning readers, who sometimes almost seem to be telling all our equally valued contributors that another year of contributing to counterweights.ca has been at least no crazier than the present mayor of Toronto, Canada, on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario, in what the late George Grant called “the Great Lakes region of North America.”

Meanwhile, remember what Marie de l’Incarnation said about the country of Canada a very long time ago: “Un français devenait sauvage avant qu’un sauvage ne devienne français.”

Ontario Liberal Leadership Candidate Kathleen Wynne also announced on Saturday, December 1 that provincial Health Minister Deb Matthews has jumped on board as the co-chair of her campaign.

According to a Toronto Star report this past Friday: “Premier Dalton McGuinty’s resignation has given the Ontario Liberals a significant bounce … the governing Grits have vaulted to second place, ahead of the New Democrats, and closed the gap with the Progressive Conservatives, says the latest Forum Research survey.”

The report goes on: “The Conservatives are at 35 per cent, the Liberals at 29 per cent, the NDP at 27 per cent and the Greens at 8 per cent. That’s a seven-point gain for the Liberals from a Forum Research survey last month; the New Democrats have lost five points, the Tories two and the Greens one over the same period.”

Sandra Pupatello —not exactly rural Ontario, but at least she’s not from Toronto either!

The governing Grits, however, have still not managed to move the mind of the mass media that watches over Ontario politics. The seven candidates in the race to succeed Premier McGuinty held their first public debate in Ingersoll this past Saturday. And according to Anthony Furey at the Ottawa Sun : “Ontario Liberal debate avoids issues.”

Martin Regg Cohn at the Toronto Star was no more enthusiastic in “Weak economy constrains Liberals’ bid to renew …  Saturday’s encounter served as a dry run (watching paint dry, in fact) for a road show of debates that culminates with the convention next month in Toronto. The first Liberal debate was timid, tame and platitudinous.”

Is the salvation of today’s Ontario Liberals somewhere out there in what the Atlantic magazine calls “Alice Munro's rural Ontario (Robert Estall/Corbis).”

Meanwhile, on a more general plane of being, just before the Saturday Liberal leadership debate, Adam Radwanski at the Globe and Mail was proclaiming that “Ontario is witnessing the emergence of an invigorated Hudak …Little more than a year ago, Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak was written off as a glib opportunist with nothing significant to say. Now, in the run-up to a likely 2013 election, it’s the NDP’s Andrea Horwath who seems to be flirting with that designation, while Mr. Hudak all but saturates the controversial-ideas market.”

In fact, there did seem to be at least one consistent theme at the Saturday debate in Ingersoll. The Ontario Liberals have got the message — rightly or wrongly — that their big electoral weakness at the moment is a lack of support in rural Ontario. And so CTV News reported that “Ont. Liberal leadership candidates pledge more support for rural areas.”

* * * *

Kathleen Wynne — premier and minister of agriculture?

The Global TV website has similarly noted, in a Canadian Press posting, that “Kathleen Wynne surprised the [Ingersoll] audience by promising to appoint herself as agriculture minister … ‘This is such an important issue for us as a province, not just as a party, not just as a government, that I think the premier needs to take this on.’”

(Well, for a while anyway. As the Toronto Star noted, in an report headlined “Ontario Liberal leadership: Pupatello warns ‘love-in’ debate won’t prepare Grits for political battles ahead … One-time municipal affairs minister and Don Valley West MPP Kathleen Wynne, 59, said the Liberals need to get back in tune with voters outside big cities — which she would do by serving as agriculture and rural affairs minister ‘for at least a year’ in addition to being premier.”)

Robert Nixon (l) and Bob Rae,in days gone by.

Reconnecting with rural Ontario will no doubt not be easy, for a Liberal leadership race with four candidates from ridings in the current City of Toronto proper, two from Mississauga, due west of Toronto, and one from Windsor — the Ontario auto city across the river from Detroit.

All this will nonetheless seem especially intriguing to those of us who started our careers as Ontario politics spectators back in the days when the provincial Liberals were still a kind of rural rump party, with a geographic base in the old progressive southwestern rural Ontario of Farquhar Oliver and Robert Nixon (son of Harry Nixon).

There are those who will tell you that there are still vague threads of the old progressive rural Ontario out there — the constituency that made the late 19th century Great Reform Grits of Oliver Mowat the provincial governing party, and that had its last big fling under Mitch Hepburn (“Canada’s Huey Long”) in the 1930s.

Gertha Reany, Farquhar Oliver, and Lilly Bailey unveiling historical plaque to Agnes Macphail, in Hopeville, Grey County, Ontario, 1960.

In some ways you might even say that Kathleen Wynne is a kind of spiritual descendant of Farquhar Oliver’s great friend Agnes Macphail — who started her political career in the far northern rural southwest of Grey County, and ended it in the Toronto suburb of East York. (Oh and btw, see as well Alice Munro’s quite beautiful Lives of Girls and Women.) But Ms Macphail also started her path-breaking feminist career with the United Farmers of Ontario, and ended it with the old Ontario CCF ancestor of today’s New Democrats. Which can all make you think that maybe the current mass media scepticism about the Ontario Liberals in 2012–2013 is not entirely misplaced. (So far at least — though there is that latest poll, which still shows that “the governing Grits have vaulted to second place, ahead of the New Democrats, and closed the gap with the Progressive Conservatives.” And how many even rural voters were actually paying attention to what went on in Ingersoll this past Saturday anyway?)