A year from now, Kathleen Wynne may no longer be the premier of Ontario.

But many of the measures she’s been putting in place — from pharmacare to a guaranteed income — may well have taken root in Canada’s most populous province.

That’s what’s fascinating about Ontario right now. All these policy pronouncements coming from Queen’s Park are part of a political strategy with an obvious aim: to keep the Liberals in power. But they also form part of a large-scale experiment in progressive governance — in finding policies to fight the politics of grievance, populism and polarization.

Basically, Wynne and her Liberals have their eyes trained on two different sets of opponents as 2017 rolls to an end.

One set is the Conservatives and New Democrats they’ll be fighting in the 2018 provincial election. The other is Donald Trump — not Trump exactly, of course, but the rage-fuelled politics that powered his rise to the White House a year ago.

It’s this latter battle that is being watched closely from afar, according to David Herle, the veteran Liberal public opinion expert and strategist who is serving as Wynne’s co-chair for re-election. Herle pulled off Wynne’s surprise victory in 2014 and was a key player in the Trudeau election team of 2015.

I asked Herle on Tuesday, as Wynne’s government was getting ready to release its economic statement, about how Ontario had become a laboratory for policy experiments over the past year or so.

“For people living outside Ontario, it is recognized as the most ambitious plan in the world to use liberalism to address the growing inequities in the economy and the political tumult that results,” Herle said.

These measures have to be seen in the context of that larger policy laboratory — an experiment in using liberalism to address inequality. These measures have to be seen in the context of that larger policy laboratory — an experiment in using liberalism to address inequality.

“There is more to do,” he added, “(but) the entire thrust is to attempt to recreate the idea of solidarity among citizens. Rising tides have not been lifting all boats for some time now, and it has corroded support for our system of government, our institutions and capitalism itself.”

Oddly enough, that “rising tides” phrase also came up in provincial Finance Minister Charles Sousa’s speech to the Ontario Legislature on Tuesday.

The big news in his latest economic statement revolved around small businesses and the taxes they pay. (The mere mention of that constituency and that issue provokes shudders now in Liberal Ottawa, after the botched attempt to tighten tax rules for private corporations.)

Sousa announced that corporate income taxes for small businesses would fall to 3.5 per cent on Jan. 1, down one whole percentage point from the current 4.5 per cent rate. That measure is intended to soften the blow of the pending increase in the minimum wage in Ontario — $14 an hour next year and $15 an hour by 2019.

The Ontario government also plans to channel more than $124 million to businesses to hire and retain young workers between the ages of 15 and 29.

Wynne’s government seems to believe that populist dissent can grow and thrive in the small business community. (Perhaps they got that tip from federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau?) By sticking to its hike in the minimum wage, however, Wynne’s government also seems to have its eye on the low-income earners.

And those measures have to be seen in the context of that larger policy laboratory — an experiment, as Herle puts it, in using liberalism to address inequality. In just over a year or so, Wynne also has introduced the following changes:

Full-day kindergarten and increased child-care spaces.

Improvements in the Ontario pension plan, which led to a larger, federal-provincial set of improvements to the Canada Pension Plan, including a sizeable increase in the annual maximum payouts by 2025.

Pharmacare coverage for Ontarians 24 years of age and younger.

Free tuition for students from low-income families. About 185,000 students were reported to be receiving free tuition this fall, and Herle said this program alone has led to a spike in post-secondary enrolment in Ontario.

A pilot program for a guaranteed, basic income, launching in the spring in Hamilton, Lindsay and North Bay, giving about 4,000 low-income earners an annual wage of $17,000.

A year from now, we’ll be able to judge how well this policy laboratory is working by employing three basic tests:

Did these policies help keep Wynne in power? Did any of her rivals promise to reverse them during the election campaign? And the hardest test of all — have any of these measures inoculated Ontario against the Trumpian politics of zero-sum grievance? Anger is an unpredictable factor in any political contest. Can the rage we see roiling so many Western democracies really be tamed with policy experiments?

No sensible politics-watcher is making big predictions these days; it’s just too easy to be wrong. So I’m not counting Wynne out (or in) when the election does come in Ontario. Besides, what’s most interesting in this province these days is the potential longevity of the policies — not of the premier.

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