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Kathleen Wynne has achieved what even many of her fellow Liberals doubted was possible.
A year-and-a-half after inheriting from Dalton McGuinty what seemed to be the flaming wreckage of a decade-old government, Ms. Wynne’s party entered this campaign just hoping to cling to power. Instead, their rookie leader won them back a majority.
Now, having proved herself a remarkably successful campaigner, Ms. Wynne will have to demonstrate what kind of premier she really is. And the big catch is that the way she won back office, by rallying the centre-left (and a whole lot of unions) behind her in opposition to Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives, has set up expectations she is going to have a hard time meeting as she returns to the cold realities of a government deep in deficit.
It may take a little while, for both her and her supporters, for those realities to sink in. Ms. Wynne has vowed to reintroduce promptly the budget the Tories and NDP rejected to kick-start the election, which means she will get to make good on her promises to launch a new provincial pension plan, increase spending on social programs, invest in infrastructure, and try to stimulate economic growth through direct business investment.
The problem for the Liberals is what that budget suggests will need to be done in future ones.
To project eliminating the province’s $11.3-billion deficit by 2017-18, despite actually increasing it in the current fiscal year because of those new expenditures, the Liberals back-loaded austerity both ambitious and ambiguous into the years to follow.
It is extremely improbable that, as some suggested during the campaign, Ms. Wynne will do the same things Mr. Hudak would have done if his party had won. A former social activist fond of pointing out that she got into politics to try to stop the government-slashing agenda of former premier Mike Harris, she is not about to cut 100,000 jobs (or anywhere close to that) from the broader public sector.
But for all her left-leaning inclinations, Ms. Wynne is not known to be dismissive of the dire warnings from Finance officials and others about the state of the province’s books. It is possible, although she has resisted it so far, that she will push back the balanced-budget target slightly. But she does not appear inclined to challenge the notion that it needs to be achieved, and neither is she likely to try to get it done primarily by raising taxes.
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