Premier Dalton McGuinty is pleading with teachers to “do what they’ve always done” and provide extracurricular activities in schools.

Imploring educators to set aside outrage over his legislation that freezes wages, strips away collective bargaining rights, and rolls back perks, McGuinty reminded them Wednesday their “beef” is with the Liberal government — not students in classrooms.

“Teachers can do whatever they want, of course, at election time. What I’m saying is let’s save it for election time,” he said at his first public appearance since his minority Liberals joined forces with the Progressive Conservatives Tuesday to ram through the new law cutting teachers’ sick days in half to 10 annually and scrapping bankable sick days that can be cashed out upon retirement.

In response, some 136,000 Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario and Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation members launched a one-day protest across the province.

Their union advised them to refuse to do voluntary extracurricular activities and high school teachers were asked to wear black clothes or black armbands.

Still, McGuinty repeated his warning of two weeks ago that other public servants — including police and firefighters — can also expect a mandated wage freeze.

Yet there is mounting concern among Liberal MPPs, who held a lively caucus meeting on Tuesday afternoon, that the party has needlessly alienated the education unions that have long been Grit backers.

On CBC Radio’s Metro Morning, Municipal Affairs Minister Kathleen Wynne told host Matt Galloway the party must “take some lessons” from the debacle, which helped the NDP win the Kitchener—Waterloo byelection last Thursday. The Liberals finished third behind the Tories.

“Believe me, there will be internal discussion about that,” said Wynne, who later insisted to reporters at Queen’s Park that she was not criticizing her own government.

“My point is that we wanted the collective bargaining process to work . . . I’m a part of the team. What I said was I wasn’t at the negotiating table and that’s true, I wasn’t. But I’ve been part of the strategy all along,” said the former education minister and Liberal election campaign co-chair.

Wynne — like ministers Chris Bentley, Dwight Duncan, Deb Matthews, Glen Murray, Charles Sousa, and Liberal president Yasir Naqvi, who is also the MPP for Ottawa South — is seen as a possible future party leader.

But McGuinty, who has been party chief since 1996 and premier for nine years, stressed he “absolutely” plans to lead the Liberals into the next election, which could come as early as spring.

McGuinty is not expected to face any hurdles in a leadership review vote at the Liberals’ convention Sept. 29.

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“I have no magic number in mind and I’ll leave it up to the good people of my party,” the premier said, joking that support of “50.0001 per cent would be fine with me.”

In April, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath received a 76.4 per cent from her party and in February Tory Leader Tim Hudak garnered 78.7 per cent from his.

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