The maligned former premier, having returned from exile at Harvard, is pleased to discover, post-Liberal majority, that he is back in the political fold and no longer radioactive to Bay St. He’s also working on his political memoirs, to be published next year.

On a sunny July afternoon, Ontario’s 24th premier came in from the cold.

Hair shaggier than usual, he looked tentative as he walked alone into the legislature to listen, with other dignitaries, to the throne speech that would outline the agenda of his successor, Premier Kathleen Wynne.

The tall man who had ruled this chamber for a decade had not set foot in it for more than a year.

His three election victories and policy achievements in education, health care, poverty reduction and tax reform‎ were distant memories, clouded by fallout from the politically motivated cancellation of two gas-fired power plants.

Any reticence about such a public coming out‎ would be understandable, but‎ warm hand shakes and smiles from Liberal ministers and opposition MPPs left him appearing at once relieved and rejuvenated.

And when Wynne embraced him on the floor of the legislature, a crescendo of news photographers’ cameras clicking in unison heralded the revivification of Dalton James Patrick McGuinty, Jr.

Safely re-elected on June 12 — with a surprise majority government — Wynne could afford to be magnanimous toward someone with whom relations had been, if not strained, then certainly complicated.

Less than an hour later, McGuinty, her hug having cloaked him in the imprimatur of acceptance and acceptability, emerged from the assembly to a media throng, grinned and declared: “I can’t begin to tell you how much I’ve missed you people.”

The last few times he attracted so much press attention were considerably less convivial.

There was his sudden resignation on the night of Oct. 15, 2012, proroguing the legislature in a last-ditch bid to defuse the maelstrom around his decision to scrap gas plants in Oakville and Mississauga in order to win five Liberal seats in the election a year earlier.

There were his two pugnacious appearances before the opposition-dominated legislative committee probing a debacle the auditor general says could cost taxpayers and hydro ratepayers up to $1.1 billion over 20 years.

Finally, there was the revelation on June 5 — one week before an election that then seemed too close to call — that he had been interviewed by Ontario Provincial Police detectives investigating the alleged wiping of some computers in his office during his final days in power.

But that was then and this is now.

McGuinty, who had been on a self-imposed exile to Harvard University in Cambridge‎, Mass., since last fall, is back at home in Ottawa.

Reassured by the Liberals’ re-election that he is not radioactive, Bay St. is again looking approvingly at him. Seats on prestigious boards loom.

He is working with an artist for the formal portrait that will hang alongside the massive paintings of all Ontario premiers on the second floor of the legislative assembly outside his old office.

Unsurprisingly, this voracious reader is writing his autobiography.

Working with Ian Urquhart, the Star’s former Queen’s Park columnist, ‎ McGuinty is writing a political memoir to be published next year by Dundurn.

“All coming out in the book — you are in the book,” he joked with reporters during a six-minute scrum July 3 that reminded journalists his only peer in Canadian politics when it comes to parrying with the press, is the equally unflappable Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

“I’m done with Harvard, I’m back in Ontario. I’m delighted to be back here. I’m pursuing a few opportunities and I’ll have the opportunity to speak to more about those in more detail in the future.”

McGuinty’s tome is part of a broader strategy to burnish a reputation his loyalists feel has been unfairly tarnished by the gas-plants’ affair.

“One of the things that I’ve had a lot of opportunity to do is to take courses and do some teaching at Harvard. And one of the things we talked about is how we need to distinguish between reputation and character,” the former premier said.

“Reputation is what people think you are and character is what you are truly. In this contact sport where there are no referees — and that distinguishes this contact sport from all the others — it can be very hard to protect reputation,” he said.

“But you can always protect your character. How do you do that? You do what you think is right and that’s what I always tried to do.”

Indeed, one of McGunity’s mantras, which he used repeatedly to justify axing the gas plants, is “it’s never too late to do the right thing.”

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Nor is it is ever too late for the eldest son in a large and feisty Irish-Canadian political family to settle a few scores.

McGuinty, who kept his powder dry and his mouth shut for the past year or so to avoid causing Wynne any further headaches, had some choice words for the Progressive Conservatives and New Democrats who helped make his final minority term in office so aggravating and so brief.

“One of the opportunities I had being outside of the country for close to a year is I get a bit of perspective,” he sermonized to reporters.

“And the truth of the matter is we did not do minority government well in Ontario and I place full responsibility for that at the feet of the opposition. They had no genuine determination to find a way to work with the government to advance the public agenda.”

In the end, McGuinty said, that’s why voters punished former Conservative leader Tim Hudak and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath and rewarded Wynne’s Liberals with a majority.

“Ontarians saw through that at the end of the day. They said that they were uninterested in the name-calling and the muckraking. I think they felt this place had lost sight of their fundamental priorities: health care or education, their economy, their jobs, their environment.”

“So they made a wise choice: a government that’s actually committed to those fundamentals that we put in place over the course of 10 years. We built a very strong foundation.”

To his mind, that includes measurable improvements to Ontario’s schools, colleges and universities, as well as its health-care system and the business-friendly harmonization of the provincial sales tax with the federal goods and services tax.

“I can’t begin to say how proud I am of my party and my leader … it’s good news for our party, it’s great news for me personally, but I think it’s even better news for Ontarians.”

While Wynne served in his cabinet and was co-chair of the party’s re-election campaign in 2011, she and McGuinty have never been close.

She is an extrovert activist from Toronto with a wide network of friends from many walks of life; he is an introvert who keeps his own counsel, preferring the company of immediate family members.

Still, Wynne was effusive in praising McGuinty on July 3.

“I was very happy to see Dalton here today. I’m very, very pleased that he was here, that he thinks that we’re on a very good track,” she said.

“He has been away, he has other things that he has been doing, but I had talked to him afterward,” Wynne added.

“The plan that we are putting forward builds on the work that I did, that we did, under his leadership when he was premier.”

With that emphatic statement, Ontario’s 25th premier signalled that its 24th is comfortably back in the fold.

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