Kathleen Wynne

We folks here in Ontario have just gone through a leadership contest to choose a new boss for the ruling Liberal Party, which has been in power under Premier Dalton McGuinty since 2003.

McGuinty started well, with a big lead in the legislature (still less than half the votes though), but a series of missteps, blunders, and wasted money, led to him losing his majority by one seat in the 2011 election. He bought off a Conservative, hoping to win her seat, but lost the by-election to the NDP. Swimming in scandal and self-doubt, he suddenly resigned in mid-October and prorogued the Legislature, which resulted in the just-concluded leadership race.

Sandra Pupatello, a centre-right candidate like McGuinty, but with more personality, sat out the last election and so could claim to have clean hands when it came to most of the scandals. But she also lacked a seat in the Legislature and would have had to lean on someone in her party to resign so she could run. There was also the prorogation problem. Pupatello said most Ontarians didn't care, but waiting another three months for the Legislature to sit was seen as a problem. However, she had the most votes going in, and in fact led on the first two rounds of voting.

But then a surprising thing happened: weaker candidates, and the party brass, shifted to the close second-place candidate, Kathleen Wynne, on the third ballot, making her the eventual winner.

Kathleen Wynne is an interesting choice for the Liberals. A Toronto school board trustee prior to entering Ontario politics, Wynne did do so in a big way, defeating Conservative cabinet minister David Turnbull in 2003 and Conservative leader John Tory in 2007. She was minister of Education, Transportation, and most recently, minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing and Minister of Aboriginal Affairs. She is gay and from Toronto, two factors that most of the "experts" saw as points against her.

Since winning the Liberal leadership, she has been saying all the right things: reaching across the aisle to the leaders of the other two parties in the Legislature, Tim Hudak and Andrea Horwath; meeting with the teachers' leadership with whom the Liberals have had a stormy relationship the past year; speaking out on Toronto's crippling traffic problems; and pledging progress on social issues.

So far she has raised the Liberals slightly in the polls, but it's been only a week and she won't face any big issues until after she takes power officially on February 11. She laughed-off Conservative attack ads on the radio, and seems inclined to make peace with the NDP's Horwath. But the NDP has much to fear from a re-energized Liberal party, and might not be willing to play along. And there's still the ORNGE and the power station brouhahas to be gotten through. How she handles these will determine whether she wins the next election, or is an opposition leader.