On Kathleen Wynne’s campaign bus there is an old Liberal couch. It was there during the last campaign when she won a historic majority government and became the first woman to be elected premier of Ontario. It was in Justin Trudeau’s bus in 2015 when he won the top job in Ottawa. Soft, green and worn, it looks like the corduroy pants that were popular when Wynne first burst onto the political scene in the 1990s, a community organizer and mother of three from North Toronto fighting against then premier Mike Harris’s cuts to education, protesting against the megacity.

As part of Citizens for Local Democracy, she railed against the government’s plans to cut school boards and was one of a few ushered away by security after showing up at a Queen’s Park cabinet room, looking to confront the education minister. (Unruffled, she later denounced the megacity to a legislative committee.) She chaired meetings where thousands of people showed up, worried about amalgamation, but she was calm, on top of the agenda.

“She has a real presence. I think people realize she hears their opinions,” said John Sewell, a former mayor who founded the anti-megacity group, which opposed the province’s amalgamation of former Toronto municipalities. “She doesn’t want to dispute with them; she’s got the ability to find common ground, which is very extraordinary. As a politician, she hardly ever attacks other people in a personal kind of a way.”

Two decades ago, she was one of the people who marshalled anger towards change, but now, it appears the anger has ricocheted towards her. With the election days away, the Liberal party, in power since 2003, are polling in third, and her own riding of Don Valley West, where she has been MPP for almost 15 years, is going to be a fight. On Saturday, Wynne conceded that her party cannot win provincewide.

“I don’t know who voters will choose but I am pretty sure that it won’t be me. After Thursday, I will no longer be Ontario’s premier,” she said in an emotional speech urging voters to vote Liberal to avoid a majority NDP or PC government.

Speaking last week, Wynne said she never hesitated to place herself in the public eye. She said she was “kind of a rabble rouser” as a child in Richmond Hill — the eldest of four sisters, she was bothered “to the core” by the inequality she found, especially between men and women.

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“I just expected to be treated the same as everybody else, and then not to be really got under my skin,” she said.

It was her training as a mediator that helped her turn anger into something constructive, which was helpful during the Harris years, when she helped lead the movement against the cuts. “That was amazing hands-on training for dealing with the anger that comes with politics.”

But how does it feel to be on the other side of it?

“The Harris government was tearing things down. What I’m doing is building up,” she said as the final week of the campaign approached. “I feel that whatever the antipathy is, whatever the anger is, it doesn’t have to do with the building that we’ve been doing.”

She believes the anger comes from the changing world, the uncertainty, and that her government has tried to find solutions. She knows the anger is personal too, and has made it a point of her campaign: I’m sorry more people don’t like me, but not sorry for what I’ve done.

“Some people have said that sounds disingenuous or arrogant, but I honestly am sorry that whatever has happened in our relationship between me and the people in the province, that there isn’t more affection,” she said, listing the things she is not sorry for — university tuition for low-income families, prescription medication for those under 25, the minimum wage increase, “because they are helping people.”

But not everybody is on board with that self-assessment of her time in office. The Ontario director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has criticized Ontario’s rising debt and “this bloated government’s wasteful spending.” The Progressive Conservatives have also criticized the Liberals for wasting “hard-earned” tax dollars on “schemes that only benefit Liberal insiders and political elites.”

In an unprecedented gambit for a sitting premier, Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne on Saturday pleaded with voters to elect as many Grits as possible to prevent a Progressive Conservative or NDP majority government.

New Democrat Leader Andrea Horwath has blamed the Liberals for strikes at post-secondary institutions, including York University, where contract faculty and teaching assistants have been out for months. Horwath has said that Wynne’s government “squeezed” funding, leading to more part-time and casual work, and the current strike. (The Liberals tried to introduce back-to-work legislation before the election, but the NDP blocked it.)

And then, there’s hydro. The other parties have been hammering Wynne for the government’s sale of a majority stake in Hydro One, the province’s transmission utility. Both the Tories and NDP claim the move has contributed to higher rates, even though those are controlled by an independent regulator and there is no direct correlation between the privatization and prices.

When asked if she has any specific policy regrets, Wynne said that issues around electricity have not been articulated well. She maintains electricity rates went up because of infrastructure investments, but she wishes her government had acted faster to stem the rising costs. (Those rebates have themselves been controversial for using borrowed money). Selling shares in Hydro One — a separate issue, she emphasizes — was not explained very well. The government didn’t sell the whole thing, she noted (they sold 53 per cent of the utility) and the part they did sell was so they could build infrastructure. She wouldn’t change anything, but she would go about each differently, she said.

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Wynne had been sitting at a picnic table deep in the CNE on a sunny Wednesday evening, explaining all of this, when a former staffer of a Windsor MPP came walking through the park with her infant twins and recognized her. It appeared to be a nice break from talking about not being liked, even if the mother warned the babies might cry. Wynne leaned in to the stroller to say hello to the babies in bucket hats. Nobody cried.

Soon, the bus had to leave for the next stop. Wynne cheerfully offered a tour of the back of the bus, behind the pop cans and packs of gum in cup holders, the staffers on computers, the man yelling, “Rolling slowly!”

Wynne’s spouse, Jane Rounthwaite, sat at a table in the back, near a flat screen, and drily chimed in: “That’s the TV that doesn’t work.” There were a handful of greeting cards on the wall, a hamster in a tea cup “just popping up to say howdy-do.” A new card added every day, words of encouragement from current and former staffers. Wynne said she will keep them after the campaign is finished.

“Kathleen is beloved by her staff,” said Liberal campaign co-chair Deb Matthews, sitting next to Wynne on the old couch. There is a lot of warmth here, even though outside the bus it’s a different story.

“Why people don’t like her, I don’t get it,” said her old ally Sewell, who agreed with a recent column by John Barber: “She’s much better than we deserve.”

“Maybe that party has been in power too long. I think probably she’s wearing all of the problems of (former premier) Dalton McGuinty, but I have the utmost respect for her,” he said. “I mean how do you deal with the situation where everybody says, ‘Nobody likes you, we’re not voting for you?’ Well she is calm and she is rational. I think she’s a real star.”

In March, Wynne’s government announced an election-year budget packed with promises for expanded health care and child care that came with a $6.7-billion deficit. Not long after, the province’s financial accountability office warned the deficit would actually be $11.7 billion this year, not $6.7 billion. The Liberals dispute the assessment.

The financial accountability officer warned about shifting the burden “from current taxpayers to young Ontarians” and noted that such deficit and debt levels would leave the province vulnerable in a recession.

Wynne said her strategy is to make it clear that the Liberals have a practical plan to help the most people. She says the NDP are too ideological, and she fears a return to Harris-era austerity under a Doug Ford-led PC government. She said he is not giving the costs of his platform because “he doesn’t want to tell people exactly what they need to hear.”

Back when she was “social activist Kathleen Wynne,” the Star asked her what she thought when then federal finance minister Paul Martin wiped out a $42-billion federal deficit. Wynne said that Martin needed to think about whether he’d leave a “numerical” legacy or a human one.

“We get caught up in all this talk about tax cuts and the deficit, but that’s not the real stuff of politics,” she said in 1999. “That’s not what affects people’s lives. Are my children going to be able to work? Will I be 65 years old with my kids still living at home?”

Wynne turned 65 in late May, and the social activist has now become the pragmatic politician. Last year, her government tabled a budget with a spending plan that was balanced for the first time since the 2008 recession. But in this election, Wynne is campaigning on a platform of “care over cuts,” which comes with billion-dollar deficits every year until 2024. On the campaign trail, the Liberals have said they would legislate to direct budget surpluses to pay down Ontario’s debt, which has doubled in the past 10 years and is currently $325 billion, a number critics say is unsustainable.

So what will her legacy be? Numerical or human?

“I hope it’s both,” the social-activist-turned-premier said. “I’m in an election campaign to continue building a strong economy, but my idea of a strong economy is an inclusive economy. Having young people able to go to college and university — that’s part of the economy.”

With files from Kristin Rushowy, Robert Benzie and Star archives

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