When he quit this week after 23 years as an MPP, a backbencher named Dalton McGuinty didn’t go out with a bang or a whimper but a written statement:

“I leave politics,” reads his last testament, “with my idealism intact.”

Idealism?

As premier, McGuinty was many things to most voters: practical, likeable, electable and re-electable. Until he wasn’t.

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Even in the best of times, idealism was hardly top of mind when McGuinty’s name came up. Now, in the worst of times, he is seen as less of an idealist than an opportunist.

His inauspicious departure brings to mind Richard Nixon’s undignified exit in 1962 when he famously mused (before his presidential comeback): “You don’t have Nixon to kick around any more.”

Ontario, however, still has McGuinty to kick around. Not just journalists but the entire province seems to be piling on.

The former premier’s final days in power have come back to haunt him, tainting his entire time in office. And for that, McGuinty is surely kicking himself.

Stacked up against his environmental and educational legacies, his liabilities will fade one day. Today, however, his mishandling of two gas-fired power plants overshadows all else.

It’s not just those expensive cancellations, but an unseemly prorogation, and cynical email deletions to cover-up soaring costs. The privacy commissioner condemned his office last week and the OPP is investigating this week.

Hardly an idealistic exit strategy.

His successor, Kathleen Wynne, has made the best of a bad hand by shifting the blame for her inherited troubles. Transference is her McGuinty legacy strategy.

As she deftly offloads the negative karma onto McGuinty, her popularity ratings rise (and his reputation sinks). The more critics complain about Dalton’s misdeeds, the more she implies he let the province down. Wynne doesn’t disown him, just distances herself.

Might that explain McGuinty’s unhelpful timing this week, raining on Wynne’s parade by departing on the very day she triumphantly secured passage of her first budget?

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It’s probably not pique — he’s just preoccupied. As McGuinty always said: “Never a wrong time to do the right thing.”

Seems that holds true whether cancelling a gas plant or ending a political career.

The former premier has other things on his mind, like making some money after 23 years in politics. With the lease up on a posh Toronto house provided by the Liberal party, McGuinty is moving back to his suburban Ottawa home.

What to do? A former defence lawyer, McGuinty is not about to recast himself as Perry Mason. Corporate directorships await, perhaps some foreign work that reconnects him to his favourite destination, China.

One thing he will not do is rise again from the politically dead as Nixon did in 1968. Dalton is done.

Hard to believe that, when announcing his impending resignation last October, McGuinty teased journalists by leaving the door open to a reincarnation as federal Liberal leader. The speculation over his ambitions was flattering but short-lived.

Public frustration over prorogation quickly brought the McGuinty-for-PM trial balloon down to earth. And opposition anger over his lowballing of the gas plant costs reached a fever pitch. Summoned by a legislative committee last month, McGuinty made a rare appearance to show his hands were clean. He exuded his customary calm and charm, but failed to clear the air.

Now, in the rush to judgment, he is a much condemned man.

The only consolation is that history will probably be kinder to him. It’s easy to forget, in the current anti-McGuinty climate, that he won three elections — two of them after bringing in unpopular taxes (health premiums and the HST). He reduced class sizes and expanded university enrollment; balanced the budget and then primed the pump for the 2008 economic crisis; weaned us off coal-fired power plants and preserved the greenbelt.

McGuinty’s victories were partly dumb luck: he had the good fortune to be in the right place when the public tired of the Tories in 2003, and again when voters lost faith with them in 2007 and 2011.

But last year, as premier, his luck ran out. This week, as MPP, his time was up.

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