Scott Stinson: Kathleen Wynne endorses Lee Fairclough for Ontario Liberal leader. Will it be a blessing or a curse?

The sleepy Ontario Liberal leadership race received its first real jolt on Tuesday when former premier Kathleen Wynne threw her support behind rookie MPP Lee Fairclough.

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Wynne, who won the leadership in 2013 after the retirement of Dalton McGuinty and led the Liberals to a surprising victory the following year, has remained neutral in the past two provincial Liberal contests.

The Wynne seal of approval, though, could be a blessing or a curse. While there would plainly be many Ontario Liberals for whom Wynne represents a pleasant throwback to the halcyon days when the party wasn’t perpetually stuck in third place at Queen’s Park, she’s also a reminder of when the party lost its way.

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In a video posted on social media, Wynne, speaking in what appears to be her home, said Fairclough “has what it takes in terms of leadership and (the) capacity to lead us through these next number of years at such a time of uncertainty.”

Fairclough thanked Wynne and posted that, “Your belief that I am the right person to lead our party and province means so much to me.”

Wynne, who was swept out of office by Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives in 2018, cited Fairclough’s experience as a hospital executive and rugby captain as evidence of the qualities needed in the next leader, to be chosen in November.

Whether party members will be inclined to listen to Wynne is an open question. She won a close-fought leadership race that included several MPPs, at a time when the McGuinty government was sagging in popularity. The provincial Liberals had been in power for a decade and a series of decisions — a green-energy plan, an austerity push, a gas-plant spending scandal — made it seem like the new premier wouldn’t be long for the job.

But Wynne turned things around, at least in part due to a PC party that miscalculated the degree to which Ontario voters were concerned about government overspending, and she won a majority government the following year.

About that turnaround, though: the Wynne Liberals accomplished it in part by reversing course on McGuinty-era promises, and reneging on some of her own. A plan to balance the provincial budget became well-nigh impossible once she bailed on the hard line that McGuinty had taken with public-sector unions in the waning days of his government, and so she ended up selling off majority ownership of the provincial hydro utility for a one-time infusion of cash that made the books look better. (Auditors would later say that the sale cost taxpayers billions in the long run.)

On traffic and transit, Wynne abandoned her support for the road tolls or congestion charges that she had once said were necessary to fight urban gridlock and fund important investments, even after two — two! — expert panels she appointed said that, yes, such things were necessary. Even a request from then-Toronto Mayor John Tory, no one’s idea of an anti-car leftist, to toll highways into the city was rejected.

Perhaps most egregiously, amid a 2013 debate over how to best improve public transit in Scarborough, Wynne ditched plans for a light-rail, above-ground solution in favour of a much shorter subway that would serve fewer people for an exponentially higher cost. The main reason for that reversal: a byelection in Scarborough that was key to keeping her minority government afloat. It also aligned her at the time with the area’s great champion of subways, who mostly liked that they wouldn’t bother cars: then-mayor Rob Ford and his brother Doug, a council member.

Reading coverage of that event now is almost quaint, as subway opponents worry about costs that could go as “high as $2 billion” and a project that “might not be completed until 2026.” The costs have most recently been estimated to be more like $10 billion and completion is still years away.

These are all things that Kathleen Wynne decided to do to keep the Liberals in power, even if she probably knew they were terrible ideas. She always seemed like a politician who got into the game for the right reasons, and she inherited the top job at a difficult time, but by the end all of those policy flip-flops didn’t exactly leave her Liberals in a position of strength.

Once Doug Ford moved into the provincial realm and took over the PCs, her party dropped from 55 seats in the legislature to seven in 2018, and it has taken two more elections for the Liberals to just regain official party status at Queen’s Park.

Wynne also remains a pariah to some on the left for her late-campaign admission in 2018 that she had no chance to win, while still urging voters to support Liberal candidates to prevent a PC or NDP majority. That set the stage for what has since been eight years and counting of Doug Ford majority governments.

One imagines that Lee Fairclough will do her best to avoid mentioning any of that when she touts Wynne’s endorsement on the leadership campaign trail.

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