By Tony Dean

Premier Dalton McGuinty’s double-barrelled announcement on Monday caught most people by surprise. Prorogation of the legislature has been a possibility for the past couple of weeks but very few people expected the Premier to step down.

There will be a boatload of speculation about what all this means in terms of political strategy; and to what extent it is tied to the furor over the cost of relocating two electricity generating stations originally slated for Oakville and Mississauga. A lot of that will be political hot air.

Was this a snap decision?

My strong guess is that the Premier’s decision to step down in 2012 was made several months ago, with only the timing left to be decided.

Yes, that was before ORNGE became incendiary, before contempt accusations were brought against Energy Minister Chris Bentley and before public sector wage curbs started to bite. And it was well before the September byelections.

In fact the germination of Monday’s announcement likely occurred when the general election results were known a year ago but the Premier was inclined to give minority government his best shot.

A third term in government is hard to achieve these days and it would have been tough to maintain momentum even with a majority government. But that was just out of reach.

Winning a first term in government with a minority still brings a sense of euphoria as we have seen in Quebec but a third term minority is not a whole lot of fun.

The safest way to make minority government work for the Liberals would have required a Steven Harper-style, winner-take-all and go-for-the jugular style of politics. That is not the Liberal way.

Without that, it would take some cooperation from the opposition parties to make a go of a minority but it just wasn’t there. Andrea Horwath at least went through the motions but when the chips were down, the NDP opted for short term politics rather than longer term policy gains. All sights are now trained on a 2013 election – which makes leadership renewal timely.

As for prorogation, it will suspend the work of the legislature and committee hearings for a few months but will importantly create some runway for a Liberal leadership convention and hopefully create a less acrimonious atmosphere for labour talks.

Monday’s announcement was classy, principled and sincere with a nice touch of humour. These characteristics define the Premier. I saw them first-hand in working closely with him as his Cabinet Secretary and head of Ontario’s public service during his first mandate.

I met Dalton McGuinty for the first time the morning after the 2003 election in the office of the leader of the opposition at Queen’s Park as his staff started packing for the trip one floor down to the Office of the Premier.

He was calm amidst the euphoria of his staff and keen to tell me about his commitment to public service. He made a point of saying that he thought of himself, first and foremost, as a public servant.

It was a great first meeting and the person I met there and in the weeks and months that followed have not changed to this day. He is a steady and principled leader who wants to do the right thing for Ontarians.

McGuinty is smart, intellectually curious and you will not find a politician with more integrity – which naturally made me wonder whether he would survive beyond one term in the cynical arena that politics has become. Nine years and two further elections later we know the answer to that.

It was my job to tell the incoming Premier that the balanced budget he had heard about from the outgoing governing party looked more like a $5.6 billion deficit (now there was a big hidden number). He took the news calmly and without recrimination and said the government would chart a course to deal with the deficit over time, and report on progress as it went.

The Liberals subsequently enacted budget accountability requirements that held their government to a higher standard of fiscal transparency and tougher scrutiny from the Provincial Auditor than any of their predecessors. It did the same in the area of government advertising, which had arguably been used for partisan purposes by some previous governments.

The Premier’s stand-out policy achievements – and his main legacy items – are in health and education. I recall a conversation in which McGuinty told me that he “only had a small number of priorities.” The challenge for me and the public service was that two of them involved boosting the standardized test scores of Ontario’s students and reducing wait times for several high-priority hospital procedures.

Having been around government for a while and understanding the complexity, relative autonomy and slow pace of change in these sectors, I was seriously unsure about whether this could be pulled off.

Success would require the Premier personally driving these initiatives from the top of government, building strong relationships with key professionals and making tough decisions to make these initiatives budget priorities as well as policy priorities. And, at the Premier’s insistence, there would have to be transparent reporting on progress being made.

All of this was done with unprecedented success and it is no surprise that the Premier talked with such pride on Monday about moving Ontario’s hospital wait times from the longest to the shortest in the country – and moving Ontario’s student achievement from mediocre to among the best in the world.

Add to this the significant reduction in high school dropout rates, the massive boost in spaces for post-secondary students, the elimination of coal burning power generation in Ontario, the creation of the Greenbelt and a number of gutsy decisions on infrastructure investments, and you have a very impressive legacy.

In all of this the Premier brought a thoughtful, fully rounded and deliberate approach to his decision making. He would have taken precisely the same road in weighing up the decision announced Monday.

My proudest professional achievement was being alongside the Premier during the federal-provincial negotiations for the 10-year health accord in Ottawa in 2004. It was Ontario’s turn to chair the provincial/territorial side of the table and McGuinty was the new guy in town among heavyweights such as Alberta’s Premier Ralph Klein. And some weight was being thrown around.

The Premier rose to the challenge wonderfully and led his colleagues to a funding deal and annual escalator that provincial premiers would kill for today. This put the fluently bilingual McGuinty firmly on the national stage and cemented his stature with other provincial and territorial leaders.

There was a lightness of being around Dalton McGuinty in our very first meeting and it was there again in Monday’s announcement. But it has also been there through the toughest moments at Queen’s Park over the past few months.

That has been the surest clue that one of Ontario’s most accomplished premiers had already made a decision about his future. I’m sure he feels a little lighter again today.

Tony Dean is a former Secretary of the Cabinet and head of the Ontario Public Service. He is currently a professor at the University of Toronto’s School of Public Policy and Governance and continues to advise governments on public policy.

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