Reevely: Wynne embraces McGuinty's ghost

Dalton McGuinty haunts the Ontario Liberals. He was premier for nearly a decade and his successes are the Liberal party’s successes as they campaign to stay in power. But his failures — especially the stinking mess of the billion-dollar gas-plant cancellations before the 2011 election — are the party’s failures, too.

They ultimately chased him from power and they’re the handiest clubs for the other parties to use against his successor as premier, Kathleen Wynne.

She hasn’t quite seemed to know what to do. She’s proud of the Liberal record, she says — at the same time as she’s pronounced herself as keen as anyone to find out just who did what, and who knew what when, when the two unpopular generating stations were cancelled and a possible coverup was engineered from within the premier’s office.

For a while, to the point where it got downright weird, Wynne and her ministers treated McGuinty as someone whose works they could talk about but whose name would not pass their lips. In question period the opposition turned it into a game, trying to formulate queries that would force Liberal MPPs to say “Dalton McGuinty.”

They’re professionals. They avoided saying what they didn’t want to say.

But now, it seems Wynne has made up her mind.

She made her first eastern swing of the new 2014 campaign Wednesday and landed in Ottawa South, ceremonially opening the campaign office of McGuinty’s longtime aide and successor as MPP, John Fraser.

You can go to the legislature and not talk about Dalton McGuinty. You cannot do that in Ottawa South. Hot under the lights, in an overcrowded storefront next to a karate school by the Canadian Tire, Wynne embraced the absent McGuinty rhetorically.

Behind her on the podium stood Ottawa Liberal candidates and volunteers, including Bob Chiarelli and Madeleine Meilleur, ministers McGuinty made senior and Wynne made more so. Chiarelli was one of McGuinty’s earliest supporters when he was a long-shot candidate for the Liberal leadership in the 1990s. He’s not the type to backstab when his own job is on the line, but he’s a reminder that there’s still such a thing as McGuinty country and you have to reckon with it when you leave Toronto.

Ottawa South, Wynne said, “is a riding with a rich history of representatives we can all be proud of, especially Dalton McGuinty.” Wynne is proud to have been an MPP in his caucus, a minister in his cabinet, she declared. They invested in hospitals, in rail, in education, together, she said. We did that, she said — the Liberals under Dalton McGuinty. It’s a record she’s happy to run on. Dalton McGuinty’s.

Extended campaigns take stamina and discipline. Winning one takes a team that believes enough in what it’s doing to stick together even when it has a bad day, so one bad day doesn’t turn into two, three and four. It doesn’t help to have old loyalties and new ones under the surface. Ask the teams who’ve led the federal Liberals to ever-worse performances for nearly 15 years, who break into civil war over how nasty Jean Chrétien was to John Turner as soon as a cloud passes before the sun.

(Wynne’s brain trust includes a noticeable number of people who used to work for Paul Martin, who know a bit about how this kind of thing turns out.)

Wynne used the same speech to try to poke a wedge between provincial and federal Conservatives. She’ll stand up for Ontario against federal perfidy, she said, over cuts to programs Ontarians need and Ontario’s government depends on.

“Will Tim Hudak go toe-to-toe with Stephen Harper?” she asked. “I will.”

It’s a note she’ll likely hit again, and harder, in a $50-a-ticket speech Thursday morning to a breakfast organized by Canada 2020, a left-leaning think tank with a federal focus, so its people care more about the details of such things. But even so, the crowd of about 100 Liberals spilling out of the overcrowded campaign office toward Bank Street gave that the biggest cry of approval they’d roared since Wynne had walked in.

Wynne is a methodical speaker, more lawyer than orator, who builds a case rather than inspiring her followers to charge the enemy. She knew exactly what she was doing. She and her fellow Liberals are all in the same tribe and they’ll stand or fall together.

dreevely@ottawacitizen.com

twitter.com/davidreevely