Do Ontario's former premiers still stand by the policies they became known for?

The Premier Files explores all of that and much more.

I, Dalton McGuinty, swear that I will duly and faithfully and to the best of my skill and knowledge execute the powers and trust reposed in me as premier and president of the executive council and minister of intergovernmental relations of the province of Ontario.

So help me God.

Dalton McGuinty brought the Liberals back to power in 2003, becoming Ontario's 24th premier.

He won three straight elections, making him the most successful Liberal premier in more than a century.

His approach-- never too high, never too low, just relentless.

We spoke here at Queen's Park.

Premier McGuinty, I'm curious as to what it was like walking back into this building today after so many years.

(Laughing) Well, I was met by capable, friendly, accommodating security personnel who wouldn't know me from any other passerby.

You really think they didn't you know you?

They did not know me. No. No.

But time marches on, right?

It's been 12 years since you were premier.

It's been 12 years, and--

But I have all kinds of warm memories from this building.

Well, let's go back, because we're going to go-- We'll eventually get to this building, but I do want to start at the beginning.

And I want to start with the home you grew up in--

Yeah.

--with two parents and 10 kids.

Was that the mayhem it sounds like?

I think it was kind of organized mayhem.

My parents, I think, allowed for a comfortable accommodation so that we could be kids and crazy, but there were also some rules that we had to stick by.

You know, one of my dad's routines, if you want to--

He was a university professor.

It's hard to feed 10 kids on an academic's salary, so he was very entrepreneurial, and he did all kinds of things.

But one of the things he did was, he taught summer courses and he taught evening school.

So, he'd come home to be with us during dinner, and then he'd stretch out immediately after dinner on a La-Z-Boy chair and just cover himself with the newspaper.

We would run around like idiots, high on ice cream we bought by the two-gallon barrels,

and if we got too loud, he'd let out a howl or a shriek.

That would scare the you-know-what out of us, and we knew we had to kind of temper our fun.

So, we had a lot of fun, but there was also a lot of discipline and a lot of expectation.

Were you expected, though, as one of the older kids, to be a kind of a co-parent to the younger ones?

Yeah. There was a heavy expectation.

It's not something that I felt at the time, though, Steve, that was heavy.

It was just how I was growing up.

I was the oldest of six boys, and so my job was, my mother and father expected me to set a good example.

A lot of multitasking here.

A lot of multitasking, yeah, and the other thing, of course, you learn in this large, big family environment is how to manage different personalities.

Does that come in helpful when you've got a caucus of--

Absolutely.

--70-plus people?

Absolutely.

It does?

Absolutely. I like to say a caucus is a football team consisting entirely of quarterbacks.

They all want to call the play, and they are all leaders in their own right.

They are leaders and have been seen as such in their communities.

So, you know, I'm sure we might find some time to come back to these kinds of things, but one of the things I've learned about leadership-- there's kind of a simple formula.

Get the best people.

Get the best out of them.

Not much more complicated than that.

Provincial politics is so much about health care and education, and your mom was a nurse.

Your dad was in the postsecondary world.

I mean, there it is right there.

Mm-hmm.

Do I assume that a large part of the reason why you went into public life is because of the example they set?

You know, I've never really thought of it that way, in fact, ever, but I think there was just an expectation, mostly unwritten.

It's never going to be good enough to grow up, get a job, and pay taxes.

Everybody does that.

That's kind of the minimum expectation.

They also would have conveyed that the quality of life that we enjoyed is nothing short of extraordinary and it didn't just happen,

but previous generations did something.

And I'm going to use a word we rarely use today.

They sacrificed, right, for the younger generations and handed down to us on a silver platter wonderful things like great schools and great health care and safe and strong communities and a safe and clean environment.

All those kinds of things didn't just happen.

So there was an expectation we would find a way, each in our own way, to make a contribution.

When did you first get the notion that maybe going into politics at some point in your life was a consideration?

Well, I kind of approached it, then pulled away from it, and then came back to it.

So, I approached it at the outset when we were younger.

You know, my dad was John Turner's riding association president, and we worked on campaigns even before then.

We'd show up with a modest crew of five or six kids.

We would stuff envelopes, make some calls when we got a little bit older, knock on doors, and came to see campaigning as a lot of fun.

And then later on, my dad got into politics.

I could see that he found it very challenging.

He wanted to be in cabinet.

He never got into cabinet.

I could see the long hours, the time away from family.

You're called upon to reconcile the irreconcilable.

It's so difficult at time to make progress.

There are frustrations, and there's cynicism.

It can be a toxic environment at time, so that kind of repelled me from it,

and then he passed away.

And I thought, you know, "Hey, time to step up."

I want to go back to one of the worst nights of your life, the 16th of March, 1990, and your father is shoveling the snow on the driveway.

What do you remember about that evening?

I got a call from my mother.

And my mom's a very calm and collected-- was a calm and collected person.

So, she said, "Mick, you better get over here."

So, I thought, "Okay. Alright. I'll take some time and, you know, pull some things together, make sure the kids are good and all that."

And then a few minutes later, my brother Michael phones, and he says, "Jamie, get the hell over here."

So I knew something was up, so I get in the car.

My mom and dad's place was only, like, five or six minutes away.

Drove as quickly as I could.

I get there and found my mom giving my dad mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. So--

Outdoors?

Outdoors, yeah.

On the ground in the winter.

On the ground.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, I took over.

She proceeded-- she was a nurse-- to give him chest compressions, but it was too late.

It was too late, so we waited for the ambulance to come.

They took him to the hospital.

We followed immediately behind, but it was too late. Yeah.

Sixty-three.

Sixty-three years of age.

Let me circle back to something you said a moment ago, which is, your mother called you Mac.

Mick.

Mick?

Yeah.

And you had a brother call you Jamie?

Yeah.

Your name's Dalton James Patrick McGuinty Jr.

Yeah.

You have the same name as your dad.

Yeah.

What's with all the different names that everybody calls you?

(Laughing) So, well, it's a little bit complicated.

First of all, yeah.

So, I was known as Jamie growing up, and my family still calls me Jamie.

Dalton was my father, right?

And then later on, my parents christened me Mick.

It became my nickname.

Got you.

His death, besides being a personal tragedy for your family-- I mean, I guess the reality is, he's an elected member at the time, and his death means there's going to be a byelection to replace him in the legislature.

Right.

How long did it take before your family kind of sat down and started to think about whether one of the kids would run in his stead?

So, David Peterson delivered the eulogy at my dad's funeral, and then we hosted a gathering at my mom's house afterwards.

And I remember David saying to me and my brothers, "Which one of you is gonna run?"

He put it like that?

Yeah.

So the expectation was, it was going to be somebody from the family.

Yeah. There was kind of an expectation there, and I think even had he not said that, I think we'd all seriously considered it.

And I felt a yearning, something to get at this now, and the joke I used to make was, "Well, look. My name's already on the signs, so we've got a financial argument in favour of my candidacy."

Anyway, two weeks after the funeral, I said to Terri, "I think I... I think I got to run."

She says, "We have four kids under eight. You're not running."

Yes.

I said, "That is so sensible."

But for me, as for everything that I've ever pursued in politics, it was always much more, Steve, an affair of the heart than the head.

It's been said that the heart has its reasons reason alone will never know, and I felt a calling.

I felt a responsibility to pick up where my dad had left off, and that's the long and the short of it, how I got in.

The 1990 election comes, and you are the one Liberal who's new at Queen's Park.

I am the class of 1990.

You are the Liberal class of 1990.

Fifty-nine Liberal MPPs lost their seats in that election.

This was the election Bob Rae won--

Right.

--in a shocking upset.

How do you think you managed to withstand the tide that was slaying Liberals all over the province?

The sheer quality of my candidacy. (Laughing)

But seriously, folks...

I think that my dad had an excellent reputation.

I think there's no doubt about that.

I think that there was some... "Let's give this kid a shot," right?

"His dad was in office.

He was an upstanding contributor to our community life.

Let's give the kid a shot."

So, I think there was undoubtedly some sympathy there associated with that, and the other thing I like to think was, we ran a good campaign and we ran an honest campaign.

I mean, you know, one of the things I did-- I think I even put this in my book.

You know, like, three days after I'd been knocking on doors, I discovered the bloom had really come off the Liberal rose.

Mm.

So I came back to campaign headquarters.

I said, "We have to remove all posters of my leader. I have to take them out of my pamphlets."

You know, some people might consider this heretical, but I figured the single most important obligation I owed to my leader was, win my seat.

Win my seat.

So that's what I did and worked very hard and was able to win, and I know that our party took a kicking.

And I recall our first meeting in this building, Steve.

I was the only newly elected MPP, and at the time, it was a gathering of all the MPPs who had run in that election.

And lost.

And lost, so I felt like I was sitting in on a wake.

I thought, "What the hell? I just won this thing. This is-- I'm riding the wave here."

I was excited to be here and grateful for the opportunity, but of course, I had to, you know, bite my tongue and feel the reality, what was being experienced by my colleagues.

There's no way you will remember this, but I have never forgotten it.

You and I had a lunch not too long after you won your seat, because I thought, "I got to meet this one new Liberal MPP and find out what he's all about."

So we had lunch in the basement of this building, and somehow, during the course of that lunch, you mentioned to me, when I asked you, you know, "What are your plans for around here?", you said, "Well, I think I'd like to lead this party someday."

You said that having probably no idea where the bathrooms in this building even were yet.

Did you really... What gave you the chutzpah to start thinking you could be the leader of this party, given the bloodbath your party had just been through and you're a brand-new person here?

Yeah. I was probably just full of blarney at the time, Steve.

I love that you're not denying the story.

Yeah. (Laughing)

Probably just full of blarney, but I think that I didn't give it really serious consideration until much later when I thought, you know, "Maybe I can bring something to the table here that'll be different from what others might be offering."

The crazy thing about the conversation you and I had over lunch is that six years later you ran for the leadership and won.

Yeah.

What made you think at the age of 41 years old in 1996 that you were ready, actually, to be the leader of the party?

Right. Well, I felt we needed to kickstart our party, right?

It was languishing, and we had won one in 50 years, I guess it was.

And I thought I could bring forward some new ways, some new ideas, some new methods, and I thought, "What the heck? Give it a shot."

And you know-- (Laughing) --there was no province-wide "Draft Dalton" movement, I can assure you, and again, there was a struggle on the home front.

When you told your wife you wanted to run for the leadership.

Yeah.

How'd that go?

Well, about as well as it did when I told her I wanted to get into politics in the first instance.

But she didn't veto.

She did not veto, but she raised all the usual legitimate concerns.

What did you consider your chances for victory to be during the course of the campaign, running for leader?

I felt the longer I was out there, the more optimistic I was, the more I was growing, the more I was connecting, the more I was learning.

So I felt optimistic.

We are almost 30 years since you ran in that leadership convention as we sit here today in June of 2025,

and you gathered at Maple Leaf Gardens, all the troops.

The results of the first ballot come in, and you are in fourth place.

Yeah.

What'd you think of your chances at that point?

(Laughing) I thought-- I thought-- You know what?

I wasn't put out by that, because... my ambition was to be everybody's favourite second choice.

I knew that in this-- I think-- Were was six of us or seven of us?

I can't recall.

A fair number of leadership candidates.

Seven, I think.

Seven all told, yeah?

So I had made an effort to-- It was an old-fashioned delegated convention.

The best kind. Yes, sir.

The best kind.

You got that right, and so, you get to know who the delegates are.

So, I made a point of phoning every single one before that convention personally.

Five thousand delegates?

Phoned them all, and the purpose of the call was simply to say, "I see you're supporting so-and-so. Fabulous. So-and-so's an excellent candidate. However, should he or she drop off the ballot, I'd be honoured to have your support."

Just a soft sell like that, right?

So, that was my objective, to be everybody's favourite second choice.

Except when the results of the second ballot came in, you were still in fourth and a worse fourth.

Yeah.

So, what did you think at that point?

Yeah.

The conventional wisdom says, when you come a worse fourth on the second ballot, you drop out.

Yeah.

You go endorse another candidate.

Right. Right.

Did you consider that?

No. No. I think there were still people behind me at that time.

There were, yeah.

Yeah. So, no.

As long as there were people behind you, you live to hopefully secure that support when they fall off the ballot.

Well, that was the crazy thing.

The people behind you who dropped off didn't go to one of the top three candidates.

They went to you.

Yeah.

How did that happen?

Favourite second choice.

Favourite second choice.

You know--

Did you know that was going to happen?

No, no, but that was my objective at the outset.

You know, I wasn't trying to be, like, a superstar candidate.

I hoped that people would say, "You know, we could live with that McGuinty guy. We could do worse than that McGuinty guy."

Compromise candidate.

Compromise candidate, right?

I'm okay with that.

You got to get the job, right?

So... And that's how it kind of unfolded.

This was an extraordinary convention, because, of course, it started-- It not only started on one day and ended on another day.

It started in one month and ended in another month, right?

It was November 30 over December 1st.

Yeah.

And fifth ballot, 4:30 in the morning, and Joe Cordiano was the kingmaker.

Yeah.

Did you talk to Joe personally in between the fourth and fifth ballots in order to try to secure his delegates?

No. No.

Did you know he was going to come to you?

No. I hoped that he would.

The good news, I felt, going into the campaign-- I was free and easy and I had no obligations.

The bad news-- no alliances.

Mm.

So I was really on my own.

Anyway, I was delighted when Joe came over, and then I can recall, Steve, what they did, the organizers of the convention.

They sent around some people to quietly whisper into our ears what the results were.

So, it was me and Gerard Kennedy on the last vote.

Yeah.

So, I turn to Terri and say-- (Whispering) --"Honey, we won."

You knew before they made the announcement.

(Aloud) We knew before they made the announcement.

She whispered back-- (Whispering) --"You said you weren't going to win."

(Laughing) So, anyway, and then the adventure began.

Indeed.

You then become the leader of the official opposition at Queen's Park.

Yeah.

Well, let me just tell you one story.

Sure.

So, it took me a while to kind of grow into the job.

So, I had to, at 4:30 in the morning when nobody wanted to hear anything, go make my way to the podium, leave my set of seats, whatever, up and walk down, and make my way to the stage.

And there's people everywhere, you know, and lots of media and all that stuff.

And at some point, somebody says, "Stand back and make room for the leader."

So, I stood back.

I had yet to grow accustomed to the notion that, somehow, I was the leader.

So, I went up there, gave some modest remarks, and then I think, crazily, there was a breakfast the next morning, and I had to give a speech at breakfast.

And then, the party was over, and everybody went home, and Terri and the kids got on a plane and went back home.

And then, I recall, I was exhausted, walking up Yonge Street on my own, thinking... "What the hell have I gotten myself into?

And I was feeling the weight of, not of office, of expectation.

"How am I going to live up to my party's expectations?

"How am I going to pull them together?

"How am I going to form a decent opposition?

"How am I going to inspire the confidence of Ontarians?

"How am I going to keep my family tight "and safe throughout all of this?"

So, that's-- (Chuckling) That's what I was feeling, honestly, at that time.

That's a lot.

Yeah.

How did you not, sort of sink, under the burden of all of that?

Day at a time.

Just a day at a time.

And I recall-- I recall, when I first got into this building and I had-- I got an office, it had a security button on it, and, um... I pressed it.

Nothing happened.

And I thought to myself, "Welcome to the powerlessness of leader of the opposition."

And-- but I just took it-- just took it one day at a time.

Just take it one day at a time.

And you know, my personal mantra has always been "never too high, never too low, just relentless."

You've got to-- there are gonna be smarter people, they are gonna be people who are-- have more capability in different ways, but I always told myself, "Nobody will outwork me. "I will keep doing what I need to do to grow and to learn, "to understand, and to become stronger "and more capable of meeting the needs of Ontarians."

They say being the leader of the opposition is the worst job in public life.

It is. It is.

Well, on the other hand, Mike Harris was the Premier.

So, you had a guy to oppose who was an incredibly polarizing figure in Ontario political history.

Did that make the job more invigorating for you?

Um... In some ways.

He was a formidable foe. Right?

He had, um... tapped into a vein in Ontario post the Bob Rae years.

And people were-- certainly at the outset, were more of the view that maybe the best government is the least government.

Maybe if you just allow us to keep more of our tax money and make our own way in life, that's what we're looking for right now.

I had a different philosophy, ideology, and based on the notion that we're at our best when we do things together.

He said something to you during one particularly tough exchange during question period.

I have to say this, I think your father would be embarrassed to see you stand here day after day after day in the gutter, ruining-- ruining the reputation of your father.

Order.

(Scattered applauding)

How did you take that?

Not well.

Did you ever talk to him about it afterwards?

No, I never did.

I just let it-- I let it pass by.

Julius Caesar, 2,000 years ago, once said, "Nobody has ever successfully consulted "their reason and their passion at the same time."

Hmm.

Or as my mother would say, "You can't be smart and angry, Mick. "Which one do you want to be?"

(Chuckling) Okay.

Okay?

So, I tried to be smart, right?

And tried not to get lured into these personal combats.

It wasn't always successful.

And probably, over time, I may have even launched a few of my own, which I would have subsequently regretted.

I think we are at less than our best when we stoop to those kinds of things.

Your first election as leader is 1999, and as I think about it, it was a lot like the last federal election we just had in this country.

You got 40% of the vote, which on most days of the week, is enough to win a majority government.

They ran ads against you saying, "e's not up to the job."

Yep.

Were they right?

I was certainly much better prepared for my second provincial election as leader,

I was learning on the fly.

Some days, I felt like I was just hanging on.

But you know where I kind of felt I turned the corner?

After the debate, which I felt I did not do particularly well in, but I felt, Steve, oddly, liberated.

I thought, "I have nothing to lose now."

And then, my big learning from that loss was that, in an election, as in public life generally, conviction counts.

Stop trying to tell people what you think they want to hear.

Act as a leader and tell them what you think they need to hear.

They may like it, and they may not like it.

What's important is that you are honest with them.

I like to say you got to worry about what people think about you, but you got to worry even more about what you think about you.

Did you and Premier Harris have a kind of a private call after the election was over?

We did. We did.

Do you remember anything that was said in that call?

Yeah. He was kind.

What did he say?

He said, if I can recall, "Hang in there; I've been there."

I remember you telling me this many years ago, which is why I asked the question, because my recollection was, he said to you, "You're going to be a much better candidate next time out."

Yeah.

"Yeah, so hang in there."

Right. Right.

I mean, that's not the kind of call I would have expected Mike Harris to make to a guy he'd just defeated.

Yeah. With glee.

But he did.

Yeah, he did. He did.

2002, he steps down.

Ernie Eaves takes over, calls an election for October 2nd, 2003.

You have been an MPP at this point for 13 years.

You have been the leader of your party for seven.

How are you feeling going into that campaign?

Feeling good.

Feeling good not only in terms of how I felt I was going to be stronger as a campaigner, Steve, I felt I had amassed an arsenal of really good ideas.

And I had spent-- you know, the, um... Being leader of the opposition is a terrible job, as you mentioned, but it also affords you the luxury of taking time.

I had travelled to Ireland to look at the Celtic Tiger, the Irish economic turnaround miracle.

What the hell was that all about?

What do they do and how do they do it?

And then, I went to the UK and looked at Tony Blair and what they were doing and why that was working so well.

And then, I looked at-- you know, the internet was finally kicking around, looked at other-- other experiences across the world.

So, I felt I was coming to the table with, um... some great plans and a strong vision for what Ontario could be.

There was a moment in the campaign when the PC party put out a press release calling you "an evil reptilian "kitten-eater from another planet".

You're laughing now, but your campaign reacted with fury when that came out.

How did you react to it?

I thought it was... I thought it was-- I thought it was funny.

I thought it was funny.

And you know what I did?

I did an event... at a farm... shortly after this happened, I was in a barn, there was a stray kitten making its way across, I thought, "Do I pick this thing up? "What if it scratches my face?"

Right?

There's a bit of a risk here.

I picked the thing up.

It was extremely cuddly.

And I gave 'em a picture, which was well shared in Ontario by Ontarians.

So, yeah, you know, these things happen.

It was silly.

I saw it as more of a... They kind of gave me a bit of an opportunity, right?

It was so silly a criticism.

And then, that kitten presented itself.

So, I was able to kind of tie a bow.

And for the record, you did not eat the cat.

I did not eat the cat, petted it, and then put it down.

Just checking.

Yeah.

Okay.

What do you remember from election night, when you won 46% of the total vote, 72 seats, and the first Liberal majority government since 1987?

Well, just feeling really good, very proud.

I felt very grateful.

But, you know, because it's kind of the McGinty way, this is the way my dad used to react to these kinds of things, I also began thinking immediately, "Now we've got to deliver."

So, I immediately began to turn my mind to what kind of a construct we needed to put in place in order to ensure that I got the best out of my people, whoever those might be.

The first really tough moment in your premiership came when you realized that, if you were going to keep all the promises you made about healthcare and education and reinvesting in the system, you were going to have to break your pledge not to raise taxes, which you had famously looked into the camera and said.

I'm telling Ontario families that their taxes will not go up tomorrow or any day under Liberal government.

Give us some sense about how you and your team weighed those options about whether to break the health and education promises, about reinvesting in the system, or do I break my promise not to raise taxes?

Right, yeah.

Okay, let's just back up for a moment.

So, the Ontario Taxpayers Federation, I think it was, wanted me to sign a pledge.

And you did.

And I did.

In a flourish.

It was a big pledge on TV.

Now, before I did that, of course, I said to my team, "Are we sure that we can-- "we're going to have the economic wherewithal "to make the kinds of investments that we want to make "to restore health and vitality to our public services, "i.e. healthcare and education?"

They said, "No worries, we're all over this. "We've had independent economists take a look at this. "It's all good."

I said, "Okay, great."

So, I get in the government.

A couple of days later, the senior bureaucrats say, "Premier, "we need to let you in on something."

I said, "Yeah, what is that?"

"Well, you're running close to a $6 billion deficit."

So, I kind of went into a shock.

Can I push back on that right now?

Yeah. Yeah.

Because you had a very smart finance critic named Jerry Phillips, who used to write his own newsletter about the state of the province's finances, and in that newsletter, he forecast a $5.5 to $6 billion deficit.

So, you tell me you were in shock.

Yeah.

He wasn't.

Okay.

Why were you?

Well, I don't recall Jerry's prediction, but I do recall independent economists telling us we were going to be okay.

So, um... I... So, I kind of-- I had to grapple with this-- you know, this, um... huge challenge, and it taught me a few things;

one is if you have to swallow a toad, don't stare at it for too long.

All right?

Just do it and do it all at once.

You're gonna have to-- yeah.

The other expression in politics is, "If you know you're gonna go there, go there."

Don't get dragged there kicking and screaming.

Do what you have to do in a way that is assertive of what you believe we need to do under the circumstances.

So, my choices were to renege on my promise to invest in healthcare and education or renege on my promise not to raise taxes.

I decided to go with raising taxes, which I did.

We called it a 'health premium'.

It was a tax hike.

And we dedicated all that money to healthcare, in fairness.

And we made massive investments in healthcare and education over the next four years.

Now, I might as well have given my opposition and the media a two-by-four so that they could hit me about the head and shoulders for the next four years, which they happily did.

They did.

Right?

And then, I got another majority.

If you're doing something for the right reason, that you honestly believe is the right reason, right, and it's not easy, and it's not convenient, and it may not even be popular, if you take the time to explain that - and we did that over the ensuing, you know, three or four years - then you will discover that people are more understanding than you might otherwise have thought.

Just for fun, I'm going to push back a little bit on this because I recall, June 9, 2007, you and your future opponent, John Tory, who was leading the PC party at the time, were dead even in the polls.

And then, he came out with the faith-based funding promise to give public money to all faiths, not just the Catholic faith, for their education systems, and that's when the polls went like that, and you pulled ahead.

So, yes, you stuck with your conviction, you were blunt with people, you were honest about the way you felt you needed to go back on the tax hike promise; you got really lucky, too.

Somebody made an ill-advised promise, and you got lucky.

Is that fair to say?

Yeah.

I think there's-- sure, there's some truth to that, Steve.

But I also think that I wasn't, in the eyes of Ontarians, in the eyes of the electorate, fatally flawed for having broken that promise.

Your government created the Greenbelt, so I want to ask a couple of questions about that.

This is the swath of land all the way from the Oak Ridges Moraine, just north of Toronto, around the Golden Horseshoe, all the way to Niagara Falls.

It was an historic decision of the time.

Why do it, knowing that you were going to get into a whole heap of trouble with a lot of developers and potential homebuyers who wanted to build and buy homes on that land?

Right.

If you visit places like London, and Paris, and Madrid, and New York, nobody there is complaining that previous generations set aside too much green space.

So, I think I felt a certain accountability to generations yet to come.

And I thought we need to be bold, we need to be ambitious on behalf of future generations, so that they'll have some green space to enjoy in days to come.

But when the rich developers, who often gave money to your party, came to you and said, "Get my bloody land out of the Greenbelt; "I want to build there," how did you push back on that?

I get it.

No, I understand it.

And, you know, there are-- there are always going to be pressing immediate financial imperatives. and the responsibility of leadership is to weigh those against other responsibilities and other accountabilities.

So, we set this up.

It's the biggest urban greenbelt in the world.

They came to me originally and said, "Here's a proposal for 600,000 acres."

And I said, "Let's take a look at this now and let's consult some people "and see how we might make it bigger,"

and we got it to 1.8 million acres.

Okay, let me circle back to the 2007 election now.

We talked about John Tory and the faith-based funding promise; when that promise came out-- and as I say, you two were tied in the polls when that promise came out, and then the you-know-what hit the fan for him.

The only issue with any traction, it seemed, was faith-based funding, and eventually, John Tory backed off.

It turned out to be more divisive than I thought.

The depth of feelings was very strong.

And so, I listened to the people.

Did you immediately understand that that was an opening for you?

Probably not at the outset.

The concern I had was, as I thought about it, is that the theory behind publicly funded education is that we bring all our kids from all backgrounds, all socioeconomic circumstances, all religions together, so that they can learn from each other and grow together.

I remember you making speeches during that campaign, and you went to a Catholic, you know, school system when you were a kid.

Yes. Yeah.

Did you-- I mean, when the words came out of your mouth, did you realize, "I might be sounding a bit hypocritical here?"

Well, that's our constitutional reality.

Would we rebuild a, um... ...two-school system for our Ontario education, if we had to do it over from scratch today?

I don't know if we would.

I don't think we would, but it's our reality.

But I can say that, knowing what I know of the Catholic schools today, you're gonna find all kinds of faiths now going into our Catholic schools.

Yep.

You won a second consecutive majority government on the 10th of October 2007.

Did you know at the time, you were the first Liberal Premier in 70 years to win back-to-back majorities?

No. I didn't think about those things.

Thank you, Ontario.

My friends, those are the first words of the next four years.

(Audience cheering)

Now that you know it, how cool do you think it is?

You were probably the guy that told me about it because you pay attention to those things.

I thought it was-- it was great, right?

And I felt for my team.

And yeah, sure, you know, I'm the leader of the party and I'm the head of the government, but you're only as good as your team, and I had a strong team, and I worked hard to get the best out of my team.

And to harken back to, you know, one of the early life experiences, you know, my dad, six four, 240 pounds, PhD, kind of, you know, towering over us at the dinner table, and one of the lessons he would offer, he says, "Kids, I want you to remember something, "nobody here is as strong as all of us, "nobody here is as smart as all of us."

So, we're here today, and we're talking a lot about my leadership, my premiership, and what I did.

The truth of the matter is - and I'm not saying this to be, you know, unduly... Modest. ...modest,

I had a great team, and I stood on their shoulders.

And you know, if I ever thought, for example, that, um... I was meeting with foreign dignitaries, maybe here in my office, and I thought for a moment, "I may be the best versed on this subject "right now in this room," I thought to myself, "Ontarians are now in deep trouble "because they're relying on this brain alone."

So, I really worked hard to leverage collective wisdom.

Your third election, October 6th, 2011, was, in some respects, the most fascinating one because, of course, you came one seat short of a third consecutive majority government.

And I wonder, at what point does the premier of the day stop asking himself the question, "Damn it all, if only we could have won one more seat, "how different that third term might have been?"

Yeah, it's amazing.

It's amazing, Steve.

And I recall talking to, um, Stephen Harper; he said, "Too bad you didn't have the minority first."

I didn't understand how challenging-- I didn't really understand how challenging a minority government was going to be.

You'd never been part of one.

I'd never been part of one, right?

There was the Rae years, the Harris years, my first two governments.

It was like, you know, easy breezy, smooth sailing here, right?

You want something, then, you get it done.

We got the numbers.

So, uh, talk about a cold shower.

I quickly came to understand how-- and it was not just the, um-- uh, the, um... the parliamentary rules, but the opposition was sick of me.

They were sick of me.

I'd been around.

I had won two in a row, two big majorities in a row.

They thought, "Okay, you know, "it's time for a change up here, right?

"It's time for me to sit over there, and McGinty to sit, "ideally, elsewhere, outside of this place."

So, yeah, we didn't have the best kind of emotional platform upon which to build warm and fuzzy relationships.

I like to note, in history, as well, that, by winning three in a row, you're the most successful Liberal Premier since Oliver Mowat in the 19th century.

Yeah.

Did you know that, as well, at the time?

Once you told me.

(Laughing) Seriously?

You didn't know that before then?

No.

Really?

Okay.

Yeah.

What did one seat short of a majority mean, though, in terms of your ability to get whatever program you wanted to through the house?

It was hell. It was hell.

Like, from budgets to committees, right?

It meant that the opposition was, by and large, in charge, and any progress we wanted to make required the support of somebody on the other side.

So, it became, uh... slow and frustrating.

There was a lot of animosity.

Um... We were at-- you know, I think I would say, in fairness, as a group, all the members of provincial parliament, we were at less than our best in terms of making progress for Ontarians.

And so, you know, that was my reality.

And so, we just worked as hard as we could to find a way to-- you know, we got a budget through at the outset.

I think one of the things that-- the expectations that, in order to secure the support of the NDP, they wanted a tax on the wealthiest Ontarians, which we put in place.

And then, it was kind of a-- you know, kind of a... an as-is basis to see what you can get tabled in the house, passed through committee, and then eventually become, you know, law.

So, it was-- it was a lot of work.

You will be disappointed if I don't raise a few of the difficult times that you had.

I got to go now, Steve.

(Chuckling) No, not yet.

Not yet.

Get comfortable, in fact, because I do want to put a few of them on the record here.

There was a problem around eHealth, where certain corners were cut in order to create a digitised health record system.

Your health minister resigned over that one.

There was the Orange Air Ambulance problem, where they were engaging in some questionable spending and business practices.

Your favourite, without question, was the two gas plants that you ended up cancelling in Oakville and Mississauga, but whose contracts ultimately had to be paid out and therefore, at considerable expense, those plants were cancelled.

I don't want to relitigate all those issues and go through chapter and verse, but I am interested in the bigger question, which is, when a premier is in the midst of scandal, and, every day, he or she comes to office, the papers are awful, the opposition is awful, you can't get away from it, what are the lessons one takes away from succeeding under those circumstances?

Yeah. Okay.

So, there are a few thousand agencies, boards, and commissions for which governments of all stripes are responsible.

If you take your eye off those things, they can come back and bite you, and that's what happened with eHealth, and with Orange, and with the OPA when it came to locating gas plants.

Do I bear responsibility for those?

Of course.

That's how our democracy works.

Those boards are ultimately accountable to me, my government, our cabinet.

So, yeah, that's the challenge, though, is you've got so many-- you got so many balls in the air that it's just a matter of time.

I don't care who you are, what your political stripe is, at some point in time... there's gonna be a slip.

And I think the issue is not whether there's gonna be a slip, it's how you react when there is that slip.

Let me ask about that.

Did you ever come into the office one day and look at your team on maybe day 87 of the gas plant scandal, and say, you know, "Guys, what the hell are we doing here? "Can we please get our act together?"

And like, did you lose your... you know what with the with the team?

I'm not a screamer.

I'm not a screamer, Steve.

You know, I might have, you know, undoubtedly, pulled together my senior team and said, "Hey, you know, are we-- are we going to-- "are we going to drown in this forever? "I mean, is there any-- does anybody here see land? "Are we going to get out of this body of water "and dry off at some point in time?"

These things come and go.

And I'm not trying to diminish their importance, but they are part of a healthy, vibrant, dynamic democracy.

And, um... And people-- the opposition has the right and, indeed, the obligation to point out shortcomings.

No government is going to do things perfectly.

Ideally, they're going to do some good things.

And the public is entitled to see, you know, the government being held to account.

How does, though-- how does the first minister show up for work every day when you can't get away from it? It's in the papers all the time. People are yelling at you, presumably, at protests and demonstrations. Right. How do you keep your sense of sanity under those circumstances?

Right.

For me, it's just a strong sense of duty.

It's your job.

You signed on for it.

There are going to be some easy days, there are going to be some hard days.

You can't just sign on for sunshine.

There are going to be storms on occasion.

And I think the other thing, Steve, is I also took a lot of pride in what we were able to achieve.

Um... We... We were said to have the best schools in the OECD.

We went from Canada's longest healthcare wait times, to its shortest healthcare wait times.

We found family doctors for 1.2 million more Ontarians.

We adopted the HST, right?

That was said to be the third rail.

"You touch that one, McGinty, you're dead."

You're the only guy, I think, who brought in that kind of tax reform and won the next election.

Everybody else lost.

Right.

And it saves-- still today, it saves Ontario businesses over $5 billion every year.

You know, we talk about the coal plants.

When I left-- at their worst, Steve, we had 52 smog days a year in southern Ontario.

Since we shut down the last one, we've had zero.

So, every government is going to screw up from time to time.

It's not whether you do, it's whether you acknowledge it and take steps to ensure it doesn't recur.

For example, just to go back to... me changing my mind and raising taxes, in 2003, after I said I wouldn't - we passed a law in Ontario saying that the books, effectively, have to be made transparent before every election.

That was adopted by every other province and the federal government.

So, you can learn from these things and take steps to ensure they don't recur.

You know, somebody asked me, you know, of which, um... initiative are you most proud?

I think it might be full-day kindergarten - 250,000 kids every year, since we've had that in place, who are benefiting from an early start.

When I think back of my time as leader, 17 years as leader of my party, Jean Chrétien said that I'm the longest serving party leader alive today.

Out of any party?

Out of any party.

Federal or provincial?

Yes.

Huh.

17 years, it's a long time.

So, it gives me a bit of depth of an experience there.

Um... I loved the experience.

I want to finish up with a few personal questions, if I can.

Yep.

Starting with the fact that you are a few weeks away from turning 70.

Right.

Can you believe it?

No.

Are you where you want to be for a 70-year-old person?

Yeah, I feel very lucky.

I've-- I've, um...

For me, Steve, I've reduced it to six questions I already know that I'm gonna ask on my deathbed.

Mm-hmm.

And those questions are, number one... "Was I a good son?"

Number two, "Was I a good brother?"

Number three, "Was I a good husband?"

Number four, "Was I a good dad?"

Number five, "Was I there for my friends? Was I a good friend?"

And number six, "Did I just occupy space and consume goods "or did I make a difference for others?"

How do you answer all the questions you just asked?

Well, I... like to think I'm trying hard to be able to answer a yes to all of those.

And interesting, so "Was I a good premier?" is not one of your questions, or does that come under the sixth question?

That would come under the sixth.

It does.

That would come under the sixth, yeah.

What are you spending your time on these days?

So, I got to know myself again after getting out of politics and discovered that I'm quite entrepreneurial.

And so, I have a kind of buffet of things that I like to do that I've been doing.

Right now, I serve as chair of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute.

I am working on developing a new gap year program for the city of Ottawa.

Ideally, it will have spillover and be adopted by other communities around the country.

I do work with everything from an education technology company, to a, um... a rowing machine company, to, um... a cancer drug development company.

I've just written another book that's coming out shortly.

Um... I'm...

What's it called, the book?

Be a Good One.

It's based on a quote from Jeremy Bentham, who once said, "Whatever you are in life, be a good one."

This one is dedicated to politicians.

And maybe my most important responsibility these days is I'm a granddad.

I've got six grandkids, and I've discovered, Steve, that the interest is even sweeter than the principle.

(Chuckling)

One question I've always wanted to ask you is that there has been a kind of a post-political life that many people who've enjoyed the kind of success you've had in politics take, which is you usually get ensconced at a very big law firm as a senior counsel and then you go sit on, you know, whatever, a dozen different boards of directors and so on, and you get rich, frankly, and you have not taken that path. How come?

How come?

It's not-- well, you know, you got to be-- you got to do what-- what-- what moves you, inspires you, you know, turns your crank.

And so, I didn't-- I didn't-- I'm a fellow at a couple of universities, as well, so I get to hang around young people, and get to understand a world that I never grew up in, and they help teach me things, so I can bring those to bear in decision-making that I may be making elsewhere.

But you've got to-- you know, life is short and you better do-- you better spend it doing things that you really enjoy.

When does a premier stop relitigating or rethinking all of the decisions that he or she made and think, you know, "If only I'd done this. "I should have done that. Why didn't I do it this way?"

Or do you still do that in your own head?

I don't do that.

You don't do that.

I don't do that.

I... I live with what I have done.

I draw what lessons I might from those, and ideally, I'm able to impart that to others.

I speak about leadership from time to time, for example, especially when I'm working with young people.

I mentor young people, a few business leaders, as well.

So, no, I don't look back on my-- any of my time in politics with deep regret.

Could I have done some things better?

Absolutely.

Who couldn't in any endeavour?

But I think that, on the whole, I just-- I feel... very grateful.

I mean, what are there, 16 million people in Ontario now?

15 million people, whatever the heck it is?

One gets to serve as premier.

I got to do that for ten years.

It's just... What a privilege, what an honour.

Were there ups and downs?

How could there not be?

Let's finish on this.

In spite of everything, and boy, you have had some high highs and some low lows, would you do it again?

Absolutely.

Because?

In a minute.

Because it's-- you know, to be in a position to... You know what the real privilege of government is?

You get to define the public interest.

That's heady stuff.

"What do you think is the best for all of us?"

And to be in a position to define that, and then flesh that out, and lend shape to it, and put in place policies, to me, it was so-- Steve, it's just so exceptionally rewarding to have made differences in our schools, and in our healthcare, and the quality of our air, and the strength of our economy.

Where else can you do that stuff?

It's-- you know, I think Davis said-- Bill Davis said, "The best day in the private sector "can't compare to the worst day as premier."

It's just, there's so-- I mean, the world is your oyster when you're in that office, and you can make so many changes.

Premier McGinty, thank you for your time.

Pleasure, Steve.

(Audience applauding)

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