In politics, timing is everything.

As provincial Liberals elect a new leader, the party’s last premier holds an awkward place in their history: Kathleen Wynne merited an official tribute and informal shout-outs over the weekend, a reminder of her stunning rise and stupefying fall from power.

Her trajectory is a tale of both redemption and rejection that speaks to the party’s past and future. In 2013, Wynne became Ontario’s 25th premier with exquisitely unexpected timing — a woman, a lesbian, a Liberal.

Back then, many wondered if a female could win in Canada’s most populous province; some doubted a gay politician could prevail; and most seemed certain that after a decade in power the desperately unpopular Liberals were doomed. Until Wynne won a surprise majority government in the 2014 election.

But it’s hard to beat the laws of political probability in every election. After five years as premier and 15 years of Liberal rule, weighed down by personal baggage and party barnacles, her time was up.

Wynne’s Liberals were pummelled — reduced to a rump of seven seats and stripped of official party status. Adding to her humiliation, Wynne was defeated — if only by default — by an unlikely foe in Doug Ford.

It’s fair to say voters didn’t so much drink the Ford Kool-Aid as hold their noses. Never mind his right-wing populism, Ford was in the right place at the right time when the Liberals were no longer palatable.

Timing, and the passage of time, are everything: Wynne was unelectable at the end of her days as premier, while Ford is almost as unpopular today, midway through his mandate.

It is easy to forget that when she first won power, before voters vilified her, Wynne benefited from a reservoir of genuine goodwill from many Ontarians. They thought, as pollsters later explained, that she would do politics differently.

She did and she didn’t. Wynne had an unconventional style — she could come across as earnest, empathetic, authentic, articulate.

She listened (and made lists) to the point of listlessness. She consulted and sought consensus until the government seemed leaderless.

The public seemed pleased at first. After all, Wynne had inherited a minority legislature that required compromise and consent.

She soon promised to govern from the “activist centre,” outflanking the NDP and outmanoeuvring the PCs.

Wynne put forward a bold new Ontario public pension plan, forcing Ottawa and the other provinces to improve the outdated CPP. She emphasized the environment by building mass transit while embracing cap and trade carbon pricing. She liberated beer from the grip of the big brewers who owned the Beer Store, delivering it into supermarkets. She achieved her promise of a balanced budget (until the auditor general, with peculiar pre-election timing, moved the goalposts). And she appointed a new minister of Indigenous affairs to foster reconciliation.

It grew into an ambitious agenda, and then a complicated program, and then a contradictory strategy at cross-purposes with itself. How to balance the budget while investing big money in mass transit without raising taxes? How to reform campaign finance while raising big money for her own party? How to promote renewable energy while preventing electricity rates from rising?

To square the circle, Wynne tried to triangulate. If she couldn’t boost taxes or blow the deficit, she would sell off other nonstrategic assets.

Thus was born the big idea of selling off the copper wires of Hydro One, the publicly-owned electricity distributor, to pay for the steel rails of mass transit. Wynne called it “asset rotation” and “broadened ownership,” but she got all tangled up.

People confused Hydro One with the defunct Ontario Hydro. Outdated hydro poles were conflated with electricity strategy, even though Ontario Power Generation (OPG) was never on the auction block.

It was Wynne’s undoing. Instead of demonstrating her open-minded approach to practical problem solving, the public took it as proof of the premier’s betrayal of provincial values of public ownership.

The die was cast. Only by resigning could Wynne have escaped her preordained fate, allowing someone else to lead the Liberals to certain election defeat (though perhaps not such a drubbing if a lesser known leader presented less of a target).

Perhaps Wynne still believed she could reintroduce herself to voters in the last campaign and recapture her aura of authenticity. For a fleeting moment, she won over at least one hardbitten journalist in the person of the late Christie Blatchford, who described Wynne up close in her National Post column of May 16, 2018.

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“It’s so obvious it hardly bears saying,” Blatchford wrote after hopping on her campaign bus. “Kathleen Wynne is so clearly heads and tails smarter, better informed and more capable than Doug Ford that it borders on the ridiculous…He simply shouldn’t even dare to hope to line up to carry Wynne’s briefcase … because she’s frankly so good.”

Weeks after Blatchford’s column ran, Wynne lost to Ford, badly. Her time was up no matter what any columnist concluded.

As Liberals reflect on her legacy and rally around her successor, their new leader will have the chance to go up against Ford’s Tories. He or she will do so free of all that accumulated baggage and barnacles while Ford, in turn, is weighed down by the passage of time — and bad timing.

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