Is Ontario ready for Premier Kathleen Wynne? In 2013?

Ask yourself that question, because it’s the question Liberal delegates will wrestle with on the convention floor when choosing their next leader on Saturday. If somehow delegates could correctly divine your answer, they’d have an easier time choosing the province’s next premier.

Here’s the dilemma that’s driving them crazy, causing much second-guessing and soul-searching:

Wynne is a savvy, gutsy, progressive, reflective politician. Stacked up against her rivals, she would arguably make the best premier.

The best listener, best problem-solver, best (Harvard-trained) mediator and a proven doer, Wynne is a 59-year-old grandmother who gets it. She also gets people onside.

Oh, and she’s a lesbian. From Toronto.

A non-issue, says the politically correct crowd.

A non-starter, says the politically canny crowd.

Who’s right? Not so easy when you’re a Liberal delegate empowered to keep the party in power.

For many Liberals, the primary motive is winnability: Who can win the next election for their local candidate and keep their team at the top of the heap?

For the rest of us, it’s a different question: Who would make the best premier of our province?

One of Ontario’s best-known progressive premiers has told people privately he’s rooting for Wynne. That’d be Bill Davis, the pipe-smoking pink Tory who watched her approvingly as a Liberal education minister, husbanding his legacy of college expansion. (Sorry about blowing your cover, premier — it didn’t come from Wynne.)

Among New Democrats, Wynne is also a force to be reckoned with — an authentic progressive who could best peel away votes at a time when popular NDP Leader Andrea Horwath is biting into Liberal support.

For Liberals, however, Wynne remains a gamble. Measured and thoughtful in her public persona, she perhaps seems too poised when stacked up against her main rival, the dynamic and forceful Sandra Pupatello.

And yet Wynne is a bold risk-taker. Willing to do the right thing — for her, or perhaps the province — even when it’s unpopular.

Unlike her major rivals, she doesn’t flinch when asked how she’d deal with the most pressing issues of the day. Uniquely among her rivals, she also has an ability to reach out to her political opponents to find common ground.

Think about that last line, because many Ontarians (and Liberal delegates) tend to forget this axiom: No one party is likely to win a majority government for the foreseeable future, which means the three leaders need to make our minority Legislature work — this one, and the next one.

Can Wynne stickhandle the in-house tensions? It’s instructive to look at how she handled her own personal life after coming out in the 1990s as a lesbian (not so easy), while collaborating closely with her ex-husband to raise their three children. You can’t help marvelling at Wynne’s personal courage in driving transformation (the latest government buzzword) at home.

“Quite honestly, I’ll never do anything as hard in my life — ever,” she told me as her campaign bus wheeled along the 401 over the weekend. “You’ve transformed your family in the face of judgment from the community.”

Does that act of personal salvation and family reconciliation help or hurt her political career?

“Politics is about people — it’s about relationships,” she points out.

And ever since, in her political career, Wynne has forged unlikely alliances: First as a school trustee; as a parliamentary assistant serving two of her leadership rivals (Gerard Kennedy and then Pupatello); and reaching out to small-town Ontario and aboriginal leaders in her recent portfolios. As vice-chair of the 2011 Liberal campaign, she also connected with ridings across the province.

Up close, she is disarmingly direct. In cabinet, she is persuasive. On the podium, she doesn’t consume all the oxygen in the room — but then neither did most other successful premiers.

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What about Wynne’s winnability in the next election? She boasts of being a dragon-slayer with her 2007 upset victory over PC Leader John Tory in her Don Valley West riding.

The interesting thing about Wynne, the politician, is that she acts like a grownup — and grows on people the more they get to know her. If she wins on Saturday, Wynne has the potential to grow on Ontarians as their instant premier — ahead of the next election. By which time her once-interesting private life could be overtaken by no less interesting public achievements.

Or, come Saturday, she might never get the chance.

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