Headlines

Former premier Dalton McGuinty manages the neat trick of making news out of something that's been coming for a while now: the Ottawa South MPP will announce later today that he's resigning his seat in the legislature, adding another byelection to the list current Premier Kathleen Wynne has to schedule for the summer. (Kudos to CTV News Ottawa for getting the story first.) A Liberal nomination meeting for McGuinty's soon-to-be-former riding is expected for June 20.

The province's civil service stepped in to stop political staff from deleting emails, cabinet secretary Peter Wallace told the justice committee yesterday. Sources told the Globe and Mail that when Wynne took office, one of her first acts was to order the end of any email deletions—a move those sources called an end to "slipshod" record-keeping in the Premier's Office.

TVO's Steve Paikin shakes his head at how the McGuinty-Wynne transition has been handled or, more aptly, bungled. Even the news of McGuinty's departure, he notes, disrupts the news cycle the new Liberal leadership had been hoping to fill with the budget passage yesterday. Paikin says the two Liberal teams are "plenty ticked off" with each other, which is both believable and as close to an obscenity as Dalton McGuinty ever gets.

The Ottawa Citizen reports this morning that the long shadow of the McGuinty era hasn't passed yet, with Ontario Provincial Police expected at Queen's Park today as part of an investigation into emails that staff in McGuinty's office deleted in the final days before Wynne replaced McGuinty in the Premier's Office. Officers from the anti-corruption section of the OPP are expected to speak with PC MPPs Vic Fedeli and Rob Leone, who signed the initial complaint to the OPP.

The head of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance calls for the government to halt the refurbishment of Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, with Jack Gibbons penning an op-ed in the Toronto Star calling for Ontario to simply buy hydro power from Quebec instead.

Toronto City Council asked for a number of changes in Ontario's municipal election law yesterday: reform advocates asked the province to allow municipalities to use ranked balloting instead of the traditional first-past-the-post system for council seats. Council also asked the province to allow landed residents to vote in local elections. The rules that govern municipal elections in Ontario allow almost no substantial experimentation at the municipal level without provincial permission.

Finally, the Toronto Star's Christopher Hume reports that the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario has some pretty new digs, with a four-storey HQ designed by architect Bruce Kuwabara.

Events

Premier Wynne will appear at the opening ceremony of Phase One of the new Women's College Hospital with remarks at 10 a.m. in downtown Toronto, followed by the kicking off of OPS Pride at 11 a.m. in the Macdonald block's St. Lawrence Lobby and marking Philippine Independence Day on the legislature's front lawn at 11:50 a.m. For a change of pace, she will then spice things up with a cabinet meeting at noon in room 275 of the legislature.

Tory Leader Tim Hudak will address the media at 10:30 a.m. in room 351 at the legislature on the most recent sitting of the legislature which ended yesterday with the passage of the budget implementation bill.

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath is out of town today after helping the government pass its budget yesterday, and will be having a nursing-themed day in Kingston. Horwath will start by speaking to the Ontario Nurses Association at 11:45 a.m. at the K-ROC Centre, then meeting with the director of Queen's University's School of Nursing at 2 p.m. Horwath's day will wrap up with a 2:45 p.m. meeting with nursing students.

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