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, Kathleen O'Day Wynne, swear that I will duly and faithfully and to the best of my skill and knowledge execute the powers and trusts reposed in me as Premier and President of the Council and as Minister of Agriculture of the province of Ontario, so help me God.

If you walk along this second-floor corridor here at Queen's Park, you will pass by the portraits of 24 white men, all of whom have been Premier of Ontario since Confederation.

And then, there's this painting, which is a little bit different.

Kathleen Wynne became Ontario's 25th and first-ever female Premier in 2013.

We spoke to her at Victoria College at the University of Toronto about the challenges of being a pioneer in public life.

Premier Wynne, great to see you.

Thank you for doing this.

Thank you, Steve.

Pleasure.

I'm going to play Ralph Edwards here and do a bit of This is Your Life here for the next little while.

So, let's start at the beginning.

You're born in Richmond Hill.

What was your childhood like?

So, born in Richmond Hill, 1953.

Richmond Hill at that time was very different than Richmond Hill now.

It was quite a separate town.

It was sort of self-contained north of Richmond Hill.

It wasn't a-- it wasn't a commuter town at that point.

People lived and worked in Richmond Hill for the most part.

My dad was a general practitioner, family doc in Richmond Hill.

I was the eldest of four girls.

I always feel like it was a very ordinary childhood, you know, in terms of middle-class Ontario, mid-50s, post-war.

It was-- we were part of a growth community, you know.

So, it was that kind of town.

There was lots of optimism.

My parents were involved in the community.

Mom was kind of a radical suburban woman.

She didn't want to be the doctor's wife, you know.

She was involved in the social planning council, and she and a group of people started a youth aid centre because it was the 60s, and there were drugs, and there was turmoil, you know.

It was the sexual revolution, and my parents-- I was a member of the United Church.

I grew up in the United Church.

I kind of enjoyed the structure of it.

You know, in high school, I was on all the teams because there were only 500 kids in the school, so-- in Richmond Hill High School, so...

But you were athletic.

I was athletic enough to be on all the teams that I wanted to be on.

And so, you know, those were really-- those were really important, happy years for me.

The school-- school was a happy place for me.

I can remember my nursery school.

So, I think-- I think the fact that I had two little siblings and then three little siblings made school a happy place away from that chaos.

(Chuckling) So...

Is it stretching it too far to say that a future Minister of Education, a future Premier, would have been influenced by her personal relationships, connection to the public school system back in the 50s?

I think-- I think it's not a stretch at all.

My grandmother had been a teacher.

My uncle was a professor at U of T.

Education was valued highly in our family.

But I think it was my grandmother, Eva Crummer, she taught in the north.

She left Watford when she was seventeen to teach.

She went to normal school for six months or whatever they had to do, and then she started teaching in the early 1900s.

And, um...

And she was her own person.

She'd been orphaned when she was a baby.

And so, she really seized life, and education was everything to her.

She told stories about teaching the Italian immigrants in Sault Ste. Marie, the parents of the kids in her class.

She started doing ESL classes after school because the parents didn't speak English, you know?

So, I guess one of the themes running through my family was, if there's a problem that needs to be solved, you know, you should figure out a way to solve it.

I'm always interested in successful politicians who run for the first time and lose.

And you were one of those kinds of politicians, right?

You ran for school board trustee in Toronto and lost in 1994.

And then, you ran again to win a nomination for the provincial Liberal Party in-- was that 1999?

'99.

And lost.

Lost again.

Why didn't you give up after going 0 for 2?

Well, first of all, I highly recommend losing first, rather than losing after 'cause winning is great, but if you've lost, you know you're going to live.

You know? You know you've got-- you know there's life after.

Why didn't I quit?

Because I loved the exercise.

I loved knocking on people's doors and being able to skip the small talk and just having a conversation about something important.

In that case, it was their kids' education.

You know, I just thought that was amazing.

And so, it actually-- losing actually gave me kind of a glimpse of what it would be like to be involved in that work on a day-to-day basis, and it actually kind of firmed my resolve to do it.

And then, the next test was a nomination race going on in Don Valley West, where I ended up eventually.

But there was some, you know, talk about, "Well, why don't you go and run in Don Valley West?

"You can do that.

"You know, we'll hold the nomination for you.

"We'll wait till you've had time to sell memberships."

And I was kind of going over this in my mind, whether I wanted to do it because I already knew Paul Davidson was working in Don Valley West to be the candidate.

And just a couple of days before I was-- you know, I had set a deadline when I was going to make the decision, one of his friends and supporters came to my house and said to me,

"Kathleen, please don't do this.

"It's the wrong thing to do."

"Don't challenge Paul."

"Don't challenge Paul.

"Don't go in and, you know-- just it will not be a good thing.

"People will be angry."

And I didn't, she convinced me not to do it.

And then, I went and worked for Paul.

Jane and I worked very hard for Paul in that '99 election.

And because of that, it's just...

All the things you do that are the right things, as I've learned in politics, come back at you.

It's kind of like life, right?

They come back to at you.

So, we became good friends.

We'd worked in that campaign.

He didn't win that campaign in '99.

And then, when it came time for him to make the decision to run in 2003, he'd already decided he was moving.

He was going to Ottawa.

He was taking another job.

And he came to me and he said, "Well, I'm not--

"I'm not gonna run,

"and Andrew Bevan will work for you if you'll be the candidate."

So, that's how I connected with Andrew Bevan.

So, I won that nomination in 2002, and we started working.

If you remember, Ernie Eves was--

well, of course, you remember, Ernie Eves was the Premier and we--

there was on again, off again when the election was gonna be called.

We waited and waited, and we had brownouts and blackouts, and it was a mess, the run-up to that election.

Um...

And it was SARS too, right?

There was a lot going on.

And a case of mad cow disease.

And mad cow disease, yeah.

It was really a mess.

But what it did was it gave me a lot of time to get ready.

I went around that riding.

My team and I knocked on 40,000 doors in that-- in that run-up to the campaign.

So, I won the nomination, worked that whole-- you know, the rest of that year and into 2003, and then we went in 2003.

Maybe an odd question, but how well did you know the leader of your party at that time, Dalton McGuinty?

Not at all. I really didn't know Dalton at all because I had worked as an activist and as a trustee, I'd worked with some of the Toronto members.

You know, I'd worked with people like Rosario Marchese and Gerard Kennedy, Mike Cole because we were involved in the anti-Harris education movement, and the Citizens for Local Democracy that was opposing the amalgamation of the city.

So, it was those Toronto members who I knew.

He was Ottawa.

He was in Ottawa.

We just had no history.

So, that was-- that was how we entered government together.

Well, you win your seat, and three years later, you end up in the cabinet.

But those three years that I was in the backbench are important because I didn't know the system at Queen's Park.

I'd been at the municipal level in the school board.

I knew the school board really well.

But I didn't know the system at Queen's Park.

I didn't know it-- I mean, I knew it from afar.

But it was really important for me to serve on committees, to travel with committees, to watch people like Shelley Martel work with delegates and ask intelligent questions and get information.

She was a New Democrat.

She was a New Democrat.

But a role model for you?

But she was a role model for me as we travelled the province on those committees because she really-- she always did her homework, she always had great questions, and I always felt she got the best out of those exchanges in whatever town we were in, talking about electricity, or pharmacy, whatever we were talking about, pharmacare.

So, that was-- those three years were very, very important to me, and I got to talk about all sorts of things in the legislature.

I'm-- (Unclear) a lot in those first three years because I loved that part of the job.

I loved, you know, having my staff do research, and then we put together a speech, and I'd be able to go in and be part of the debate.

So, those three years were not-- it wasn't just like, for me, a leap to cabinet.

How did you get the call that you were about to become Minister of Education in 2006?

Well, that's a funny story.

So, we were about to go to, I want to say Brighton or somewhere east, eastern Ontario, to a caucus retreat.

So, I was going to go the next day, and I had been trying to get a meeting with the boss, with the Premier, to talk about an issue I was really worried about.

I got a call that said, on the Sunday night, that I could get this-- I could get this meeting the next day-- or I can't remember exactly the day, but I would have the meeting late in the day, and I said, "Yeah, but I'm going to the caucus retreat, "so I'll talk to him," whatever.

And they said, "No, you can't do that.

"You have to stay and go to this meeting."

So, I walked into this meeting with Dalton, I still didn't know what was happening, and he said, "Well, Kathleen--" because what had happened was Joe...

Cordiano.

...Cordiano had moved on, and Sandra--

That's a nice way of saying he got fired and quit.

He got fired and quit.

And Sandra was being moved into economic development, and so, I was being put into education.

It was a complete shock.

I had absolutely no idea that was going to happen.

I think I burst into tears.

You know, I was very excited about it.

How much latitude did he give you to run the Ministry of Education?

Well, um, a lot.

You know, I mean, if I think about the implementation of full-day kindergarten, I had-- I had a lot of-- I had a lot of input into that and shepherded it and brought it along and made it happen, really, with Charles Pascal and Michael Fullan.

I mean, we were deciding on the model, and Dalton took our-- he took the advice from me and us when we were doing negotiations.

I can remember sitting in a caucus meeting and sending him a note saying, "Okay, "I know that the elementary teachers don't want to settle, "but here's what I think we need to do,"

and he said, "Fine."

You know, so...

So, um...

I felt that I had a lot of authority over the work that we did.

Now, education was a special case, in that he saw himself as the education minister.

You know, it was really important to him.

He called himself the 'Education Premier'.

He did.

And not 'Minister', 'Premier'.

Yes, he called himself the 'Education Premier', and other people called him the 'Education Premier', and it was very important to him.

So, there were times when we didn't agree.

For example, I was not as-- I was not as convinced that our focus on test scores and improving test scores was-- was as important as he thought it was.

You know?

So, we had a little bit of back and forth about that a few times.

2007, you seek re-election.

Right.

And I want to know what you thought when you found out that the leader of the PC party, John Tory, intended to run in Don Valley West against you.

Well, my heart sank a bit because I had just been made Minister of Education in 2006, and it was shortly after that appointment that I learned that John Tory was going to come and run against me.

I think I was mad, I was mad.

It felt like, "Why are you doing this?"

You know? "Why don't you stay in Dufferin-Caledon "where you, for sure, are going to win?

"Why are we going to go through this exercise?"

I...

That was the one election that I really did think we weren't going to win, you know, that I wasn't going to win.

You thought he'd beat you.

I thought he'd beat me, and lots of other people thought he would beat me.

You know, I had members of the caucus say to me, "You know, you could look at another riding, "you should look somewhere else."

I said, "No, I'm not going to do that."

But, you know, the leader of the opposition usually wins.

Did you tell him you were upset with him for running against you?

No.

You never said it?

No.

Okay.

You mean did I tell him after the fact?

No, no, no, at the time.

No. Oh, no.

No, no. No.

After your time as Education Minister, what did you feel was better about our education system?

Well, there was way more staff, and the class sizes, across the board, had gone down.

We were in control of that issue.

There were supports for students who needed them.

So, we had specifically put in place teachers in grade 9 and 10 to help with credit recovery.

So, students who were falling between the cracks, we were trying to catch them before they got into the upper grades.

There were more possibilities for specialization.

We put in a thing called a specialist high skills major, so kids could bundle together courses and graduate with an agriculture specialist high skills major, for example, you know, which was an interesting way of combining real-life experience and academic.

We had early-- we had full-day kindergarten in the province, which was a major change, particularly for kids who didn't come to school necessarily ready for school, you know.

So, it made a huge difference to them and it made a huge difference to their parents because there was a-- there was a-- there was a childcare aspect to it, although that's not what it was about.

It was about giving kids a good head-start.

So, I felt good about that.

I felt that we had a better relationship with the unions and the federations, which was important to me.

Now, with one exception, the elementary teachers were kind of mad at me because of the 2008 negotiation.

But overall, I felt that our working relationship with all the education partners was better.

We had a partnership table that brought together heads of unions, heads of school boards, people like Annie Kidder, parent activists.

We brought them together when we were bringing in legislation, and we had a way of kind of collaborating on curriculum and on legislation.

I felt that we had done a lot of work around parent involvement that gave parents more of a role in the systems.

Indigenous education and the importance of, not just the-- not just the support of Indigenous kids in the system, but the importance of all kids learning a different version of our history that's more honest, that was really important.

It was work that I started when I was Minister of Education and then completed when-- or carried on when I was Premier.

What did I not get done?

(Sighing)

I still feel that we are missing the boat in terms of the physical, arts, sort of-- not extracurricular, but the non-academic in our schools.

I think we have allowed the academic of, you know, science and technology and language and math-- those are all really important things.

But the first time I took part in education activism was in 1987, and I was walking the picket line with elementary teachers in Toronto.

So, this was before the amalgamation, before any of that, and what they were striking about was having more prep time.

But prep time meant having more art teachers, more phys ed teachers, more music teachers in the schools, and I think that we do not do enough of that in our system.

I did put in place grants for outdoor education and local priorities, like phys ed programs and so on, but it wasn't enough to make it as systematic, systemic as it should have been.

So, I think we're making a big mistake in not giving kids a richer kind of experience.

After education, Premier McGuinty shuffled you to a few other portfolios.

You had transportation, you had municipal affairs and housing, you had Aboriginal affairs.

Do you think, in hindsight, you were able to bring the same kind of emotional, passionate involvement to those portfolios that you did to education, which clearly is...

Yeah.

...I think, your first love?

Absolutely.

I have to say I surprised myself.

I actually did get passionate about those other things.

I just didn't know about them at first, you know.

So, I had to learn about them.

But what those first three years in government had shown me was how important all of the things were and how interconnected all of them are.

At what point did it occur to you that Premier McGuinty might not be the Premier forever and that you might want to think about replacing him?

I think when we won the minority in '11.

But honestly, at that point, I was not thinking about running for the leadership.

That was not something that-- it was not something that I had, you know, thought was in-- would have thought was in my scope at that point.

I didn't think I was ready for it.

So, right at that time, I didn't think about it.

It wasn't until a bit later that I started thinking about it, into that year.

Was it after he announced he was stepping down?

No, it was before that.

It was before that.

It was before that.

When you got called to that sort of special late afternoon caucus meeting that day, did you know the Premier was going to step down at that meeting?

So, at that point, it was like, "Okay, this is weird."

It was six o'clock at night, I think.

Yeah.

Right?

It was very weird.

And when I absolutely knew was when we saw Terri McGuinty come into the room.

But not before?

No, no.

I mean, people were-- people were...

Speculating, for sure.

...speculating on what was going to happen.

But it was when Terri walked in there was, "Okay, there's no way it's anything else."

You don't bring the wife to Queens Park unless...

Right, the family-- because this is a family decision.

He was such a family guy, you know, it would have been a decision they made together.

Was there a particular person-- since you've told us you weren't really thinking about running for leader well before that, was there somebody who said something to you that made you realize, "I should be in the conversation, "I need to think about this"?

(Exhaling sharply)

I think um...

I think Andrew Bevan, probably, because Sheila Ward had been talking-- but Sheila, bless her heart, she talked about me being premier when I was a school trustee.

It was like, "Okay, Sheila, settle down."

Settle down.

"This is not happening."

And I just thought that was her fantasy and her living vicariously, whatever.

But I think when Andrew seriously said, you know-- he said, "Of course you're thinking about it," in his Northern English way.

Then, I kind of seriously had to say, "Okay, does this-- does this make sense?"

And then, Linda Jeffrey, she was one of my early supporters, and she said---

Brampton MPP.

Brampton MPP.

"You're gonna run, right?"

And that made me-- that gave me pause, as well.

Let's talk about how you put your bid together because-- and I'm gonna do a bit of a lead-up here.

You are unique in the history of the province of Ontario in as much as you not only had to raise money to run a candidacy, and develop policy, and line up supporters and all of that, but you also had to figure out how you were going to deal with the issue that no one else has ever had to deal with.

Number one, being a woman.

We'd never had a woman premier before.

Number two, openly gay.

We'd never had an openly gay premier before.

I want to put something on the table.

Is Ontario ready for a gay premier?

You've heard that question.

(Audience cheering)

You've all-- you've all heard that question, but let's say what it actually means.

Can a gay woman win?

That's what it actually means.

(Audience cheering)

As you sat down with your people to figure out how you wanted to handle all that, let us in on those conversations.

Well, I think the really salient conversation was about how open I was going to be about that throughout my-- throughout my campaign, my leadership campaign.

And because I'd made a decision when I first went into public office in 1994, when I ran as a school trustee, it was-- it was clear that it was going to be part of who I presented to the province, right?

So, I think, right down to what was going to be in my speech, the leadership speech, which laid it on the table and said to people, "This is-- you know, "This is who I am," we talked about that.

I mean, I had members of my riding association come to me and say, "Kathleen, please don't run "because you cannot be the premier, "you cannot be elected because you're a lesbian, "and please don't run."

And, you know, that kind of conversation only firmed my resolve that it was important for me to run because that's how homophobia works, right?

Important for you to run, but not necessarily, if I can use this expression, put it in the window.

You could have run without ever referencing it.

Right.

...but you didn't do that.

No, I didn't.

Well, there was no point in that.

There was no point because I had been open all along.

I mean, one of the-- one of the committees that kind of vaulted me into thinking that I could run for school trustee was called 'education against homophobia'.

You know, I had been-- I had been leading a parents group to improve the equity education on LGBTQ issues at the Toronto Board of Education.

So, there was no point in me pretending that that wasn't going to be part of-- part of my presentation to the province.

We are the Ontario Liberal Party, the best party, in the best province, in the best country in the world.

Thank you!

(Audience cheering)

So, you gave the speech on Convention Day at Maple Leaf Gardens.

How do you think it went?

I think it was wonderful.

I mean, for me, it was a wonderful experience.

I loved doing it.

I felt in my skin.

I loved the feeling in the room.

Well, I was going to say, you were not the frontrunner going into that convention.

No.

Sandra Pupitello was the frontrunner.

Exactly.

Do you think that speech moved votes and helped you win?

I know it did.

I've had people tell me they switched their vote.

They came in as Pupitello delegates or they came in-- you know, whatever.

I think the difference-- and I don't know.

And I'd have to-- I haven't actually had this conversation with Sandra.

But I think that, because I took a less pugilistic tone, I think because I said, "I'm gonna talk to Tim Hudak, "I'm gonna talk to Andrea Horwath, "you know, we gotta work together," and I didn't say, "I'm gonna try to beat them down," you know, and then, in fact, we extended the life of the government for a year because of that, and I-- you know, I met with Andrea, so, I think that tone was what the party was looking for.

Because remember, we figured we were going to lose the next election we went into, right?

It was 2013 or 2012.

2013, by the time we had the convention, we didn't think we were going to be able to get up off the mat, which is probably why the party was willing to try a woman.

You know, that's the story.

But I think they were looking for somebody who was bringing something a little different in terms of tone.

And so, that was-- I think that was part of what convinced people to support me.

So, what was the thinking on your part then?

"I'm going to run for leader, I'm going to win, "I'll be premier for however long this term lasts, "then I'll end up on the opposition benches, "and maybe, if I'm lucky, somewhere down the road, "I'll get back in"?

So--

Because that doesn't sound...

You know, you're-- you give me-- I think you give all of us way more credit for a long-term plan...

(Chuckling)

...than we deserve.

You know, I saw work in front of me that needed to be done.

I felt that the work we were doing as a government was important.

I didn't want to see that undermined.

I didn't think that the opposition had a plan that was going to was going to help the people who I knew needed help in the province.

I felt that we had, of course, made mistakes.

There were bridges I wanted to rebuild.

You know, we had gotten on the outs with the education workers.

I wanted to rebuild that bridge.

So, I saw that work ahead of me, and I didn't know whether we could win an election or not, but I thought it was worth a shot.

This is just the most clichéd question in the book, but I have to ask it anyway.

How meaningful was it to you, at the time, to be sworn in as the first-ever female premier in the province of Ontario?

You don't go into things to be a role model, but once you're there, I think it's important to recognize who's watching.

I'm just trying to imagine what it was like, though, when you walked down the hallway of the second floor of the legislature and you passed all of those portraits of all of those...

older white men, knowing that, someday, there would be a portrait of a woman up there and it would be you.

Do you remember that moment?

I do.

Well, you know, what I remember is, moment after moment, when I was elected in 2003, walking down those halls over and over again and looking at the pictures, not just of the premiers, but of the parliaments, all these guys with their big long beards, and you know, looking at the dates and realizing that was when my grandmother was a kid, you know, and realizing what a male bastion it was.

So, yes, the reason I moved very quickly after we lost the election in 2018 to get my portrait on the wall quickly was just that, because I wanted the kids who came into the legislature to see a woman on the wall and to realize that it was possible for them to be there.

Okay. One of the first things that you felt you needed to do after you became Premier was, apparently, apologize for all of the screw-ups related to the gas plants, and you did a bit of a circuit.

I remember you came on The Agenda, and you said, "I apologize," I think, 11 times in that interview, about the fact that--

And I must have done at least 11 events where I apologized.

I want to address the issue particularly of the relocation of the gas plants.

The decisions around the relocation of the gas plants that were made were wrong.

I've apologized, I've taken responsibility for those decisions, but they were wrong, Suresh.

And there was public money that was wasted in those-- in those decisions, and that shouldn't have happened.

You didn't make that decision to cancel the gas plant, and I wonder if, at any point, during all of that, you thought to yourself, "Geez, is this what it's going to be like?

"I'm gonna be spending the next however long I'm Premier "cleaning up the messes of the previous guy?"

Um...

So, I was part of the government that made that decision, right?

My name was on the order, um, with his.

I...

My hunch is you weren't the decider, though.

I was not the decider.

No, no.

The timing of that decision was dreadful.

It was in the middle of the election.

It was just a disaster.

It should have been-- the decision should have been made months before that.

Was I resentful of that?

No.

I mean, I knew that I was going into a challenging situation, a government that was already long in the tooth.

I knew that I was going to be carrying the accomplishments and the mistakes of that government.

But for me, Steve, the accomplishments outweighed the mistakes.

And I was willing to-- I was willing to kind of own up to, come clean on, talk about, you know, the things that people had really disliked about our government.

I was proud of the work that we'd done.

We'd made a mistake around the gas plants.

And there were things I was going to do to rectify other things.

One of the biggest ideas you brought forward during your time as Premier was the notion of selling a chunk of Hydro One, the publicly owned-- you're closing your eyes already and nodding your head 'cause you just love talking about this.

You think I've had to talk about gas plants a lot?

Let me tell you how many times I've had to talk about Hydro One.

Well, I mean...

let's refresh people's memories.

The idea was to sell a chunk of this publicly owned electricity distribution company and take those billions realized from the sale and spend it on public transit.

Right.

And have some cash to leverage building transit, yes.

(Stammering)

Why?

Well, no, I get it.

I get that that was the idea, but it-- I mean, somewhere along the way, it clearly went off the rails, and it became sort of Exhibit A of terrible idea to do.

What happened?

So, here's the way-- here's the way I've talked about this many times.

(Both chuckling)

We were in a situation where I had made a commitment that we were going to build transit.

We were in a situation, if you remember, we were still building our-- sort of climbing out of the economic downturn.

We had a deficit, I think, of about $10 billion, which now doesn't seem like a big deal, but it was then.

And so, we were running out of room.

The finance officials were saying, "You can't keep borrowing.

"You know, you're going to get a downgrade "from the bond rating agencies.

"You've got to do something to-- "you need some liquidity here."

So, I brought in some financial advisors, Ed Clark led that team, and we talked about-- we talked about the LCBO, we talked about OLG, so the Lottery Gaming Commission, and we talked about Hydro One.

Basically, what are the assets that we own as a province that we could leverage to build new assets, right?

Distribution of electricity was already at least partly privatized.

Hydro One only delivered about 25% of the electricity to about 25% of Ontarians, and so I thought, "Okay, we can-- "you know, we can find a way to communicate this."

The other interesting thing was Hydro One was not a very popular company when we went into this whole exercise.

It became the darling of everyone as we went through the process.

But, um...

So, I was convinced that this was a good idea in terms of policy.

I wasn't convinced that it was a good political idea, and it is the thing that kept me awake at night for weeks and weeks, as we made the decision because I knew it ran against my brand.

You know, I knew that people saw me as a left-of-centre Liberal, that, you know, the public sector was near and dear to my heart, which it is, and so people would look askance at me selling off-- partially selling off this asset.

It's a bit of a Tory thing to do, isn't it?

It was a bit of a Tory thing to do.

But I will say, I don't think it was the wrong policy.

I am pragmatic.

I'm a Liberal because I am not ideological, you know, and I actually do believe that, where there's an idea that makes sense, we should do it, if we can protect the people who need to be protected.

I was very keen on there being the possibility that the head of Hydro One could be removed by government, which Doug Ford did right after he was elected.

I was very keen on there being commitments around, you know, delivery to rural and remote northern customers.

So, there were those kinds of things that were built into the sale.

But it was a terrible political idea.

You know, it was a terrible political idea, and it came at a time when electricity prices were going up.

So, the opposition, particularly the NDP, could conflate the notion of selling off part of Hydro One and increased electricity prices, even though the electricity prices were not going up because of the partial sale of Hydro One.

They were going up because we had made billions of dollars of investment in electricity infrastructure.

But the two things happened at the same time, and so, politically, it was, um-- it was a disaster for us.

What were your expectations going into the 2014 election, which would have been your first as leader?

That we had a shot, but that it was a long shot to win.

I...

You know, there were a couple of times in my political career-- I always had a plan B, but in 2007, when John Tory ran against me, and in 2014, Jean and I did have a plan B.

You know?

That-- Which was what?

Well, we-- in 2007, our thought was maybe we'll go for six months and live in Ireland, you know, like, do a break from Ontario.

That was probably something like what we would have done in 2014, definitely get away, because I knew how hard it was going to be to lose.

So, that was-- that was my expectation in 2014.

When did you know you had a shot to win?

More than just a shot, actually, that you had a good feeling about winning?

So, there are a couple of moments in that campaign that I remember clearly, and one of them-- because a lot of it gets to be a blur.

But we went to Walkerton, and we talked about regulations because the Tories were talking about reducing regulation and red tape and that kind of stuff.

And I remember standing in Walkerton and talking about what happens when you don't have protections in place, and you know, referencing the people who had gotten so sick in the Walkerton-- in the water crisis.

So...

Thousands.

Thousands, yeah.

Thousands of people.

And I remember thinking, "This is a message that is going to resonate," and it did.

But it was when-- you know, Tim Hudak made a mistake on the calculation of the numbers of jobs.

First of all, he announced he was going to cut a number of jobs, and he was talking about how many he was going to create, and he got the numbers muddled, and I could see our guys were going to make hay of that, and it undermined his campaign.

So, when I listen to the pundits now talk about that campaign, it's like that's all it was.

It was that Tim Hudak and his campaign weren't able to keep the numbers straight and make their argument, that that's what made it possible for us to win.

I like to think there was a little bit of the positive on our side, but I know that the Tory campaign faltered, and it was those moments where I felt it personally.

When Tim Hudak announced, I think in Barrie, that he wanted to eliminate 100,000 positions, not fire 100,000 people, but eliminate 100,000 positions in the public sector, broader public sector, did you immediately understand that that was something you could seize upon?

Absolutely.

I mean, it's easy to make the argument that, if you take 100,000 positions out of a government that actually functions pretty well, something's gonna fall through the cracks.

And that's-- that's when-- that's when we were able to make the argument that, you know, if you remove these protections, you remove this work, then bad things are going to start to happen.

And it wasn't just about-- to your point, it wasn't just about people losing their jobs.

It was about the work of government, the work of safety, the work of community protection, not being done.

Did you know, election night, you were gonna win?

We did this!

(Audience cheering)

Thank you!

My team, I think, did.

I think, you know, I was less convinced of that.

Certainly not convinced we were gonna get a majority.

You know, that was-- and we didn't have a huge majority.

I think it was like four or five seats in the end.

So, I was definitely hopeful that we'd be able to eke out a win.

But would we get to a majority that was actually comfortable enough for us to govern?

I didn't-- I didn't know that for sure.

And when you saw that you did...

That was pretty exciting.

It was-- it was very, very cool.

I, um...

Yeah, it was one of those-- it was one of those moments where you'd sort of pinch yourself and think, "Okay, did this really happen?"

And we'd worked so hard, and the team was so happy.

And it felt-- it felt like a huge validation, Steve, of the work that we had done.

Okay, so, you inherited a minority, you got a majority.

That doesn't happen all that often, so it's a pretty good vote of confidence.

How much of a honeymoon do you think you got after that majority?

(Chuckling)

A couple of days.

It seemed kind of short, didn't it?

Not very much, yeah.

Why do you think?

Well, because we weren't a new government, you know, and we were-- we were in the traces, we were on the job, and I had said we were going to come right back, and, you know, we got right-- we got right to work, and it was stuff that we had promised we were going to do.

Your numbers started to decline, like, fairly precipitously, I think, after a couple of years.

A couple of years.

It was around 2016, yeah.

Yeah.

Do you know what did that?

I don't know whether I had just not been able to keep it new enough or to do enough...

brand new things that made people feel that we were-- you know, that we were on-- that we were on a good track.

Because the first couple of years, the economy was good.

I mean, the economy was getting better.

The economy was actually pretty good at the end of our term in 2018.

I haven't seen polling on this, but I do remember, anecdotally, hearing people at the time saying, "She seems very preachy now."

Yeah.

Were you picking that up?

Well, yeah, I think-- that's what I mean, but I think people-- or maybe I was, maybe I was.

There's a lot of being a woman connected to all of that, and I've never used the excuse that I was a woman for why we lost.

But I do think that there's a different standard that women have to live up to or abide by than men do.

And people think of women in leadership differently.

So, there's no doubt that, yeah, people got tired of me; people didn't like the way I sounded, maybe they didn't like the way I looked, whatever.

I grated on them, and that's a painful thing for me to have to say, but I think that's the reality.

They said, back in the day, that, when Leslie Frost really wanted to know what the people thought, he'd go for a haircut and his barber would tell him, give him the unvarnished truth.

Did you have somebody like that in your life who was sort of not very plugged into politics, but plugged in enough to give you the straight goods on what people were thinking?

I probably didn't have enough people like that, but I had people around me who-- you know, who listened to right-wing radio, for example, and would say, "Okay, things are not going well."

You know?

But you were never going to get them necessarily.

Well, no, but there were-- the tone started to shift around 2016, you know?

And I remember having a-- having a dinner with members of my team, and, you know, them kind of laying out for me what was happening in the numbers.

I mean, we had very honest conversations about what was happening, and I go back often to those nights and thinking, "Should I then have said, I'm going to step down?"

You know, it's 2016, but I don't-- I'd been there since 2013.

I was in the middle of my first term, you know?

It's not-- it's just that I was in the extended term of a government that had already been in office for three terms, you know?

So-- so, it was a really challenging situation.

I don't even know I can honestly say that, if I went back, I would leave, but it certainly would be more of a question, knowing what I know now.

But I don't think we would have won anyway, you know, if there'd been another leader, and that was my thought.

So, if I leave-- and this was starting 2016-2017, if I leave and we go into the tank anyway, then you got a new leader who's got to deal with this.

At least if I lose, I've had this time, and we'll rebuild.

I didn't know we were going to go down to seven seats.

If I'd known that, then I probably would have said, "Well, I've got to go.

Because if I'm the person who's going to take us to seven seats, then, you know, I think we need to try something else.

Okay, that's interesting because I wondered at the time whether or not there were any discussions happening among your inner circle about whether-- even though you were only in your first term, whether you wanted to give it a second shot or whether you thought about stepping down.

Yeah, we did.

You did think about it.

And what the numbers were telling us was that I had the best chance of winning and I had the best chance of losing badly.

And so-- so, I made the decision to stay.

Sadly, we went on the loss-- you know, the bad loss side of the ledger.

So...

And don't think I don't carry that around with me every day.

You know?

Still?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Because we haven't recovered as a party yet, you know?

And I feel like, if we hadn't gone to seven seats, we would potentially be the official opposition at least right now.

And, um...

Yeah, I feel like I had a hand in that.

It wasn't me alone, but I had a hand in that, for sure.

As much as you love talking about Hydro One, let me remind you of another decision you made in the 2018 election campaign, and I'm sure you know where I'm going here.

With a few days left to go in the campaign, you had a very unusual press conference, I think, in Michael Coteau's riding.

What's that?

Don Valley East.

In a playground, Don Valley East.

In a playground...

Playground, yeah.

...in which you said, "Look, "I know I'm not gonna win "and send as many liberals as you can back to Queens Park "because we got to keep the new government honest."

And there was a great... stir in the land about whether a sitting Premier should ever acknowledge, with however many days it was still to go...

A week.

...a week to go, that I have no chance of winning.

Yeah.

What went into that decision?

So, it's interesting.

About two weeks into the campaign, I got a call from somebody who said, "Kathleen, you've got to-- "you've got to, um, step down."

Okay?

Because this person--

In the middle of the election campaign?

Do what I did a week ahead, do it then.

And I said, "I'm not doing that."

And I hadn't wrapped-- at that point, I hadn't wrapped my mind around us losing that badly, right?

And I said to-- I remember I said to Andrew Bevan, I said, "So, this is what this guy's called and said to me," "because he was working on one of the campaigns and he said, "'You know, we're going to the door and people are saying, "'We love your candidate, we love him, "'but we can't stand your leader,"' "and that's why he said, you've got to step down."

So, I said to Andrew, "This is what he has said to me. "What do you think?"

And he said-- he said, "Well, no, you're not doing that."

And then, he said, "Not yet."

Ooh.

So, that was my-- you know, that was my, "Okay, we are in deep trouble, "and this is not going to-- "we're not going to pull this out of the bag."

So, then, it was another couple of weeks before we actually got to the point.

Hang on.

When he said "Not yet," did you say to him, "What the hell do you mean 'not yet'?"

No, because it was-- Andrew and I have this funny relationship, where there's a kind of a mind-reading that goes on, and I-- and I thought, "Okay, you don't need to say any more than that."

You knew what it meant.

"I know what this means.

"We're not gonna-- I'm not gonna sob yet.

"You know, I got work to do, "so I'm just gonna carry on and do my work, "and then you'll tell me what comes next."

And I guess, in my mind, part of me was thinking, "Well, maybe the numbers will get better."

And I don't think I realized at the time, Steve, that there really-- there were lots of candidates who didn't want me in their riding.

You know?

I don't think-- I mean, my team shielded me from that a bit.

It was just very tough.

I knew that, um...

I had to, basically, cut my candidates loose.

You know, I had to-- I had to give them the ability to go to the door and say, "You know, she's not going to be the Premier, "so you can vote for me and..."

'Cause we were staring down zero seats.

Honestly?

Honestly.

At that moment, had the election happened that day...

They were worried we'd get no seats.

...you would have had nothing.

Yeah, yeah.

We were worried.

This is not a concession speech.

I conceded I would not be Premier days ago.

Your team felt awful about letting you down.

Awful.

They apologized to me,

I was apologizing to them.

You know?

It was-- it was just an awful-- it was just an awful juncture, you know?

You feel like you've let people down.

I felt like I'd let all those candidates across the province down.

I mean, it was-- it was brutal, it was brutal.

So, election night, you have to sit there and watch the returns come in.

Yeah.

What was that like?

It was horrible because we were losing.

You knew what was coming, right?

We were losing everybody, and I just-- I just felt sick.

I've said it's a difficult night.

It is a difficult night.

I know it's a difficult night.

You've been working so hard.

Even, you can be intellectually prepared for something, but to actually sit and watch your friends lose their jobs and lose the-- lose all the work that they had done, it just-- it just felt dreadful.

And for all the young people who work in the campaigns, I mean, it's a tough, tough game, politics, you know?

Because, for every-- every campaign office that was feeling what we were feeling, there was a campaign office across the street that was thrilled, right?

So, all those young NDPers who were winning and the Tories who were winning, they were excited.

So...

(Inhaling sharply)

Yeah, it is what it is.

You won your own seat.

I did.

Did you want to?

It felt like...

(Sighing)

I mean, there were people who said, "Oh, I hope you lose," you know?

But...

It's cleaner if you lose; you can walk away.

I guess so.

I guess so.

But having won, I felt like, "Okay, well, "I won this seat in a sweep that went the other way," and so, in an odd way, that was validating of my work and my team.

I didn't win by much.

I think it was a couple of hundred votes.

You know, you want to-- you want to win your riding.

Um...

But yeah, it made it complicated for me because, then, for the next couple of days, weeks, the question came at me constantly, "Are you going to stay? What are you going to do?"

I mean, I stepped down from the leadership because I'd already said I wasn't going to-- I wasn't going to stay in the leadership.

So, I stepped down that night.

But everybody said to me, who was close to me, said, "Don't-- don't say tonight "whether you're going to stay or not," you know?

And then, I made the decision with my constituency team that, you know, I'd been re-elected on this terrible night, and it felt like, "Why would I step down "from people who have put their trust in me yet again?

"Plus, we've only got seven seats.

"If I step down and we lose a by-election, "you know, I will never get over that," right?

So...

So, I also felt that staying and being part of this little team, supporting John Fraser was important, and it became even more important as the weeks went on.

I am so glad I stayed, Steve.

It was-- for me, personally, it was a really good thing to do.

I also have had enormous feedback over the years since then, people saying how brave it was, they liked that I stayed, they thought it was a strong thing to do.

"Other leaders don't stay, but you stood and you-- you know, you were..."

I was a different voice in the legislature than other voices because I had been the Premier, and I felt that, and that's not-- that's not self-aggrandising.

That's just the reality that I knew more about what was going on in the government than a lot of the members on the other side of the House did.

And so, it was I felt that I had something to offer, and so, I'm really glad I made that decision to stay.

As you look back on your five years and 138 days as Premier--

(Chuckling)

Only you know that number.

Now I do.

What stays with you?

Oh, man...

(Sighing)

Um...

Like, a specific thing or what stays with me?

I mean, my immediate answer is the honour of having been in that chair, the ability to, uh...

make a difference.

So, I'll use the example of some of the, um...

violence against women curriculum that we-- or not curriculum, but policy that we brought in when the beginning of the Me Too movement thing was happening.

To be able to say to my staff, "Okay, I want you to go to the ministries involved...",

so Ministry of Health, Ministry of the Attorney General, the Women's Directorate, "...I want you to go to all of these places, "and I want you to-- I want you to ask them "to bring forward policy and ideas "that we could move on very quickly "that could strengthen this sector, "that could put more "protections in place for women, "for victims of assault and so on."

I mean, to be able to move that quickly on issues that were so important, to be able to put into budgets direct funding for increases of salaries of female-dominated professions, our first budget put money directly into early childhood educators, developmental support workers and personal support workers, you know, to be able to pull those levers that would have a direct and immediate effect on people's lives was-- it was amazing.

When we raised the minimum wage, you know?

To this day, there are people who work in grocery stores who will say, if we hadn't had that increase to $14 an hour, then we wouldn't be where we are now.

You know, we raised the floor and changed people's abilities to earn a living.

So...

(Inhaling sharply)

...the ability to make change like that is-- it's heady stuff, and it's what I feel is the reward for all the other crap that you put up with.

How long does it take before a former Premier doesn't pick up the paper every day or look at an article on her smartphone and think, "If I were in that chair still, "here's what I would do about that"?

Well, I don't know because I'm not there.

(Chuckling)

It hasn't happened yet.

Just, finally, what are you doing these days?

Well, I talk about this stuff.

I'm teaching.

I teach a couple of public policy courses at U of T.

So, I get some first-year kids in September and some fourth-year kids in January, and we talk about all these issues.

I've had lots of practice talking about Hydro One, when we come on that issue with the fourth-year seminar.

So, I feel like everything I'm doing right now-- outside of my six grandkids and my family, but everything else I'm doing is trying to help people have an opportunity to ask the questions they wanna ask about how government works, about what it's like to have been in that role, and about why we made the decisions that we made and how they were made, because people don't understand how government works.

Why should they?

You know, most people haven't been there.

And I always remember there were only 24 of me before, you know, 24 people before me in that chair.

So, I kind of feel I have an obligation to be available if people have questions, and people do have questions.

A lot of people want to know what it was like, and they want to know how we got to where we were.

Last question: when one of those students that you're teaching comes up to you, as I suspect somebody has done, and says, "You know, Premier Wynne, your example has proved to me," especially if it's a female student, "that I never want to go into politics "because I just couldn't stand all that crap you went through," what's your response?

Well, actually, some of them say that at the beginning of the class.

They come in and they will say, "I really-- you know, "I don't like politics, "and, you know, I'm just-- I'm taking this course "because I need to know more about Ontario," whatever the reason is.

"I don't really like politics, "it's an elective," you know, but they don't say it at the end.

And there-- I have had-- what I've had young people say is, "You've changed my mind about politics, "you've changed my mind about what can get done," and that's my mission, you know, is to help young people understand that, while it is tough, it is so worth it, you know?

I just can't imagine anything that's more worthwhile than making sure that little kids have decent schools to go to.

You know?

So, I think that it is really important that politicians talk about the good and the bad and the ugly because there's always going to be bad, there's always going to be ugly, but there's also always good, and it is a worthy pursuit, no matter what.

You know, there are pundits who talk about, you know, the elected politicians like they are nobody.

They're not nobody.

They are somebody in their communities, and they are somebody who is trying to solve problems, and we can't forget that.

Thank you.

You're very welcome.

♪