“When,” a senior Liberal was complaining the other day, “are we going to start doing stuff that people like, instead of just pissing them off all the time?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Premier Dalton McGuinty provided an answer on Thursday: Um, immediately.

Following just 54 hours of protest from a few conservative religious leaders and parents, McGuinty abandoned Ontario’s new sex education curriculum.

The proposed guidelines, two years in the making, would have modernized a teaching plan that dates back to 1997 – a prehistoric era before Google, YouTube, Twitter or Facebook.

As of September, Grade 1 students were to be taught body parts, including the correct terms for genitalia, which experts say can help prevent sexual abuse.

More controversially, Grade 3 students would have learned about homosexuality and, in Grade 6, masturbation. Concepts of anal and oral sex were part of the Grade 7 lesson plan.

That led social conservatives like Charles McVety, president of the Canada Christian College, to charge the new curriculum was pandering to “a special-interest group” of homosexuals.

Various Roman Catholic organizations also expressed concern their publicly funded schools would have to teach subject matter forbidden by the Church, leading to threats of a constitutional challenge.

Behind the scenes, some leaders in the south Asian community, an influential constituency in the Ontario Liberal Party, warned the courses offended traditional values.

While the education ministry bungled by furtively unveiling the new curriculum on its website in January without even a press release, suggestions that McGuinty was kept out of the loop have insiders puzzled.

He runs one of the most centralized administrations in Ontario history and is the self-styled “education premier.”

The physical health and education curriculum revamp began in 2007 and involved a full year of research and consultation with public and Catholic school boards, university faculties of education, and health and parent groups.

After an initial draft, it was then was sent back for public feedback and the education ministry received 3,000 responses before it was fact-checked and finalized in late 2009.

So any claim by opponents that rogue mandarins—or former education minister Kathleen Wynne, Ontario’s first openly lesbian cabinet member—quietly pushed a personal agenda are implausible.

This was official government policy and, as the premier himself said on Tuesday, two days before his flip-flop, “why wouldn’t we recognize we live in an information age and why wouldn’t we try to present this info in a thoughtful, responsible, and open way?”

But when McGuinty realized he had enabled social conservatives to frame the sex education debate and was losing ground in the court of public opinion—or at least on talk radio and in the right-wing press—he retreated.

“We can only fight one war at a time,” a Liberal strategist confided Friday.

“Right now it’s the pharmacists and that should be over by the time the HST hits,” the insider said, referring to the current battle over prescription drug prices and the July 1 implementation of the 13 per cent harmonized sales tax that blends the provincial sales tax with the federal GST.

There are also internal skirmishes for the premier – on Thursday, 15 Liberal MPPs joined Progressive Conservatives and New Democrats to pass second reading of legislation by maverick Grit Kevin Flynn to stop a gas-fired power plant in his Oakville riding.

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Flynn’s private member’s bill is unlikely to pass third reading—McGuinty has railed against NIMBY-ism and emphasized the need for new generation in Oakville—but the 28-1 vote shows Liberal MPPs aren’t afraid to assert their independence.

With caucus dissent over the electricity plant and lingering fears about the political cost of the HST, the last thing McGuinty needed was socially conservative Ontarians hounding Liberal MPPs.

Seventeen months before the next election, the premier wants to start putting out fires, not stoking them.

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