There's not a chance he'd remember this, but 22 years ago, I sat down to lunch with the only new Liberal MPP elected in the 1990 election.
It was an otherwise awful time for Ontario Liberals. They'd just been crushed at the polls by Bob Rae's New Democrats. The party was adrift, having lost an election they should have easily won, and their leader, David Peterson, lost his seat.
So you can imagine my surprise when that one new Liberal MPP told me he was interested in being the leader of his party some day.
I thought to myself, is this guy kidding? He barely knows where the bathrooms are in the legislature, and already he's talking about the leadership?
Count me among the many who at one time or another underestimated Dalton McGuinty over the years.
Six years after that lunch, McGuinty did in fact become Ontario Liberal leader. He was in fourth place on the first ballot. He was in a worse fourth place on the second ballot. And yet, somehow, at the end of it all, which was around 4:30 a.m. the next day, McGuinty found himself on top of the leader board on the fifth ballot, having defeated Gerard Kennedy.
McGuinty's first election as leader in 1999 wasn't memorable. He wasn't particularly good. Province-wide campaigns are hard for first-time leaders, and it showed. Mike Harris won a second consecutive majority.
But McGuinty showed enough to capture 40 per cent of the total votes cast, and managed to keep his job, despite a strong "Dump Dalton" movement.
Four years later, McGuinty was a better leader, going up against a rookie leader in Ernie Eves. This time, victory was his.
One of the first things he did was significantly raise taxes to pay for the service improvements he promised during the 2003 campaign -- that despite signing a pledge that he wouldn't raise taxes. And yet, four years later, McGuinty won again, this time over PC leader John Tory. He told his caucus after the election, "See! You can raise taxes and still win an election." It was another lesson in the perils of underestimating this guy. (True, the PCs helped mightily by promising full public funding for religious schools. But McGuinty capitalized on his opponents' mistakes and campaigned well.)
But those who underestimated McGuinty weren't done underestimating him. A few months before the 2011 election, I found myself chatting with a group of Conservatives who assured me that Tim Hudak was about to become the next premier. No premier had ever come back from such appallingly low approval ratings, they said, and McGuinty wouldn't be the first. Furthermore, no government had ever survived after implementing the kind of massive tax reform the Liberals had brought in (remember the HST?). Remember what happened to the federal Tories after they brought in the GST? Well, that fate was waiting for the Grits as well. McGuinty was done. Toast. History. They assured me.
Except he wasn't. His experience as a terrific campaigner came to the fore yet again. And, again, a rookie leader wasn't ready. McGuinty erased a 15-point deficit, and captured a minority government, just one seat shy of a majority.
So the electoral record is clear: McGuinty led the Liberals to three successive election victories, a feat not accomplished by another Liberal premier since Oliver Mowat did it 128 years earlier.
McGuinty pledged to repair Ontario's public services, which he believed were degraded after eight years of Conservative rule. And by all objective criteria in both health care and education, he's done that. He's had a big vision of a province with a healthy, well-educated populace, leading the way on clean, green energy. Whether you agree with his vision, he did succeed in moving Ontario closer to it.
Now, for the other side.
No one elected McGuinty's government in 2011 because of his pledges of austerity. And yet, after 2011, that's precisely the agenda he's tried to pursue. Relations with his closest allies -- the public sector unions -- have gone into the toilet. He commissioned Don Drummond to offer a pathway back from the deficit cliff, then proceeded to ignore several of Drummond's key recommendations, which would have helped get us to a balanced budget.
Ontario's financial statement was released yesterday (lost amidst all the news of the premier's resignation). The numbers show a province still operating with massive deficits. In fact, the forecasts for next year suggest Ontario will run a higher deficit than Canada. That's just shocking.
It's also true that the longer you stay in power, the more the barnacles you accumulate. Ornge. E-health. The power plant cancellations in Oakville and Mississauga. The refusal to provide documents about those cancellations to the legislature. A motion of contempt against the energy minister percolating its way through the legislative process. None of that looks good on McGuinty. So you will also hear metaphors about the captain abandoning a sinking ship.
So the decision to prorogue the house, in an attempt to avoid the hangman's noose on contempt, will also be part of the McGuinty legacy. On the one hand, it speaks well of McGuinty that he'd go to such extraordinary lengths to protect his energy minister, an essentially decent guy who's had to carry the can on an embarrassing volte face by the government. On the other hand, proroguing is a blunt tool that Liberals screamed bloody murder about when Stephen Harper tried it (twice) to avoid the hangman's noose.
So that's the record. If you liked McGuinty, you're impressed with his consistent ability to overcome those who underestimated him and make progress. If you can't stand him, you're glad he's gone and you shudder to think of how we'll ever pay off all the debt we've accumulated during his nine years in power.
And one last thing. Although he probably won't admit it, Tim Hudak is probably the happiest guy in Ontario today. Given what we know about how hard it is to win a first election as a rookie leader, Hudak will go into the next campaign as the leader with experience. It'll be the Liberal leader who's the rookie. And we've seen over the past 41 years how hard it is for rookies to win their first time out.