Ten years ago today, Liberals and New Democrats at Queen’s Park were engaged in a game of chicken for the right to determine who would get to run Ontario.
Kathleen Wynne, who’d been premier for almost 16 months, had introduced a budget featuring a decade-long “Jobs and Investment Plan.” The official opposition Progressive Conservatives, led by Tim Hudak, had announced their intention to vote down the plan.
That put all eyes on Andrea Horwath and her New Democratic Party. A year earlier, Horwath had her troops abstain on budget day, allowing the Liberals to survive another year. Remember, Wynne had inherited a minority government from her predecessor, Dalton McGuinty, so she depended on NDP votes to keep her government afloat.
But on May 2, 2014, Horwath revealed she would not sit on the sidelines for this one and that her party would defeat the budget, leaving the Liberals in a tough spot.
I spoke to Wynne earlier this week about that moment.
“Was she expecting me to continue in the house for the next two weeks and be hammered on our budget when we knew that the inevitable outcome was that there was going to be an election?” Wynne asked me rhetorically. “Why would we prolong the agony? It seemed like a waste of time to me. So we were ready to go.”
Wynne marched to Lieutenant-Governor David Onley’s office and asked him to draw up the writs for a general election to be held on June 12, 2014.
Initially, the Liberals’ bravado looked misplaced. The polls were anything but clear: some showed Wynne with a slight lead; one indicated the Tories had more than a 10-point advantage.
“It’s not that we were gleeful going into the campaign,” Wynne stresses. “We knew we were a longshot to win. I knew the odds were against us. We knew we were an old government. I knew Tim Hudak was a good campaigner and that he might very well have been able to beat us.”
The Liberals as a party had been in power since 2003. Wynne replaced McGuinty at a leadership convention in January 2013.
Your Vote 2014: Andrea Horwath
Wynne essentially campaigned on the items she’d introduced in the budget — primarily, a $29 billion infrastructure plan for items such as new light-rail trains in the Toronto and Ottawa regions. And despite the iffiness of the polls, she now recalls feeling good on the hustings.
“I love a campaign. It always pumps me up,” she says. “I was excited about the prospect of going around the province. That’s what buoyed me in those first couple of weeks.”
But sometimes in politics, it’s not what you do that makes the difference; sometimes it’s what your opponent does. And in the 2014 election, Wynne and the Liberals caught a break.
Hudak believed government had become too big under more than a decade of Liberal rule. So, at a now-infamous campaign stop in Barrie about one week into the campaign, Hudak proposed to eliminate 100,000 positions in the broader public service. Note: Hudak said positions, not people. In other words, he hoped much of the downsizing would happen by attrition — retirements or people leaving for other jobs — rather than immediate firings.
But the Liberals skillfully turned Hudak’s words back on him. They dressed up a campaign staffer as the Muppet Count von Count, from Sesame Street — the idea being to “count” all the jobs Hudak was going to slash.
Your Vote 2014: Tim Hudak
“I instantly understood that he had made a huge mistake,” Wynne says of the PC announcement. “That was not something he could campaign on. I knew in that moment that our team would be able to build on that.”
In one of her most effective campaign events, Wynne stood in front of a backdrop featuring a host of people holding up signs describing the public-service jobs they performed: nurse, police officer, firefighter, paramedic, teacher. It conveyed the impression that Hudak was about to take an axe to public services.
And Wynne wasn’t the only one who thought the Tories had dealt themselves a fatal blow. The current mayor of Brampton, Patrick Brown, then the Conservative MP for Barrie, was in the audience that day. “I knew as soon as that policy was announced that we’d lose the election,” he says. “Everybody in the province thought they were about to be fired.”
Ten years after the fact, Wynne gives Hudak some credit for that announcement, even if she virulently disagreed with it.
“He was trying to find a way to be honest with people, and he just didn’t have the right language around it,” she says.
But that wasn’t the Tories’ only problem. Economists put the PCs’ “Million Jobs Plan” through the fact-checking grinder and discovered it just didn’t add up. The math was so off, analysts figured 50,000 new jobs might be created. It certainly didn’t help the Tories’ credibility.
Your Vote 2014: Kathleen Wynne
“The mood of the [Liberal campaign] team shifted,” Wynne says. “There was a lot more laughter. I remember on my morning runs on the last couple of weeks really clearly visualizing myself continuing to govern.”
Still, on election day, the polls were anything but definitive. But as Liberals gathered at the Sheraton Centre in downtown Toronto, and as the returns came in, Wynne’s campaign chief displayed his signature brand of profane prognosticating.
“You’re going to win a f**king majority!” David Herle told her.
Wynne made history, becoming the first female Ontario party leader to win an election. As Herle predicted, her Liberals won a majority government with just 38.7 per cent of the total votes cast, good enough for 58 out of 107 seats — an increase of 10 seats from the 2011 election. The Tories, who were so optimistic going in because this would be Hudak’s second campaign as leader, managed only 31 per cent and 28 seats. And the NDP, which had provoked the election in the first place, captured the same 21-seat count it had before the campaign began — except this time, it did not hold the balance of power.
When the legislature reconvened, Finance Minister Charles Sousa reintroduced the same budget that had originally set events in motion. He caused much applause from the Liberal backbenches by starting his speech with: “As I was saying…”
Hudak announced his intention to resign as PC leader on election night. He now heads the Ontario Real Estate Association. Horwath led the NDP into two more general elections, both of which saw the NDP emerge as the official Opposition. After losing once again to Doug Ford in 2022, she left Queen’s Park and a few months later, successfully ran for mayor of Hamilton. Horwath declined to comment on the events of 10 years ago. A spokesperson said that “she is focused on the issues facing our municipality – a different time and place than these past events.”
Your Vote 2014: Election Night
For her part, Wynne served as Ontario’s 21st premier until 2018, by which time the public well and truly wanted a new party in power. After 15 years in government, the Liberals were relegated to third place and failed to achieve official-party status (12 seats). But the people who knew Wynne the best — the electors in her riding of Don Valley West — sent her back to the legislature, where she served the full four-year term as an opposition backbencher. She has since moved to Alliston to be closer to her grandchildren.
How does she recall the events of 10 years ago?
“What stays with me is the emotion of it,” she says. “The connection to the people I was working with and the time on the bus and arriving in communities and being excited.”
And then, for the one and only time during our 45-minute conversation, Wynne chokes up.
“I’d never had that experience of going from community to community,” she says. “Sometimes it was almost emotionally overwhelming to be at the centre of that. I can feel emotional [right now] about it. There was an optimism for me that even though we were an old government, we’d have a fresh start. I can remember that feeling.
“The positive energy of a winning campaign is a wonderful experience,” adds Wynne, whose place in Ontario’s history will always be assured. “And it was made all the more exciting because we hadn’t expected that we were necessarily going to get there.”
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