She’s the boss.

Premier Kathleen Wynne made history Thursday, outrunning her opponents and leaving predecessor Dalton McGuinty’s controversial legacy in the dust with a stunning majority victory.

The first woman elected premier of Ontario — and Canada’s only openly gay first minister ever — Wynne bested Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak, who announced his resignation, and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath.

“Whoa, we did this!” the 61-year-old grandmother told cheering supporters at the Sheraton Centre in Toronto, never once mentioning McGuinty by name.

“This is a beautiful, inclusive place we live in,” she said, noting “anyone can be the premier” in such an open-minded province.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you, Ontario. We are going to build Ontario up for everyone in this province — everyone. You voted for jobs, you voted for growth.”

Wynne will recall the legislature July 2 for a throne speech then reintroduce the same May 1 budget that sparked the election because it would not have passed the minority legislature.

With the fourth straight electoral triumph, she returns the Grits to majority status in the house for the first time since 2011.

At Liberal headquarters, activists were surprised at the loss of so many Conservative seats.

“Whether Tim (Hudak) blew it or not is a question his own party will have to answer,” said campaign co-chair Tim Murphy when asked if the Tories went too far with their plan to cut 100,000 public-sector positions.

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It was a nasty campaign — Wynne is suing Hudak for libel over his statements about her alleged role in the Liberals’ gas-plant scandal and Horwath accused the Grits of being “corrupt” almost every day of the writ period.

While she had promised to stay positive on the hustings, the premier demonized the Conservatives as hell-bent on firing public employees and slashing services and the New Democrats as Tory enablers.

At the same time, Hudak and Horwath constantly reminded voters Wynne was essentially the second coming of McGuinty and deserved to be punished for transgressions during his 2003-13 tenure.

Despite hyperbole about the ex-premier’s costly scrapping of gas-fired power plants in Oakville and Mississauga to win five Liberal seats in the 2011 election — and an ongoing Ontario Provincial Police investigation into the debacle — the vote did not turn out to be a referendum on him.

Wynne weathered blistering attacks over McGuinty-era debacles from her rivals in the only televised debate leaders’ debate and insisted she has cleaned up the mess she inherited.

In doing so, her majority victory ended Hudak’s five-year reign as Tory leader and derailed his hopes to revive the spirit of the 1990s’ Common Sense Revolution of former premier Mike Harris, his mentor.

“Nobody should mistake this result as an endorsement of the status quo. Kathleen Wynne promised very different behaviour from what we’ve seen these past 11 years,” the 19-year MPP said in Grimsby as he announced he would be stepping down from the helm.

The PC leader since 2009, he also took his party to defeat in the last election and on that occasion reduced McGuinty to a minority.

“We did not receive the result that we wanted,” the PC leader said, putting a brave face on a staggering defeat.

“I will lead our party and caucus only until that new leader is elected.”

Longtime Tory Paul Rhodes, a key campaign guru and fellow Harris acolyte, said the party was well aware “that it was an uphill struggle right from the beginning.”

Conservatives in Ottawa and at Queen’s Park have quietly been jockeying for Hudak’s job for months and federal ministers Tony Clement, Kellie Leitch, Lisa Raitt, and MP Rick Dykstra as well as MPPs Christine Elliott, Vic Fedeli, and Lisa MacLeod as well as party president Richard Ciano are mentioned as possible successors.

The defining issue of the campaign was Hudak’s “Million Jobs Plan,” which was designed to create that many private sector positions over eight years.

His key advisers Tom Long, Ian Robertson, and Clark Savolaine wanted to make a big splash with an eye-catching number so the platform was essentially reverse-engineered from the title with little input from the grassroots.

The Tories claimed there are 1 million unemployed in Ontario — though Statistics Canada says the figure is closer to half that, 550,000 — and hammered home that message for the first weeks of the campaign.

But it was another dramatic number, 100,000, that captured voters’ attention.

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That was the number of positions Hudak would eliminate from the 1.2-million-member broader public service within four years in order to balance the budget in 2016-17.

Reasoning that Ontario’s $12.5 billion deficit needs to be paid off as soon as possible, the Tories said the province could not afford to wait until the Liberals’ target of 2017-18.

Wynne pounced on the cuts, repeating every single day in her stump speeches that Hudak planned to “fire 100,000 teachers, firefighters, nurses, and water inspectors and meat inspectors.”

Tory candidates confided the pledge was so “sticky,” they heard about it over and over again at the doorsteps and it was easy fodder for their Liberal and NDP opponents.

“We never explained it well,” complained one PC flag-bearer.

Unions blanketed the airwaves with attack ads criticizing the scheme.

Equally problematic was when several prominent economists revealed that the Tories had miscalculated the number of jobs in the platform.

The campaign brain trust confused “person years of employment” with permanent position created, so each was counted eight times over the eight-year plan.

But for all Hudak’s problems, Horwath was also a loser in the campaign as she no longer holds the balance of power she had since 2011.

The NDP leader triggered the vote, which Elections Ontario estimates will cost around $90 million, when she said May 2 that her party, which propped up the Liberals in 2012 and 2013, could not support a left-leaning budget.

Wynne caught the New Democrats flat-footed when hours after Horwath’s gambit she asked Lt.-Gov. David Onley to dissolve the legislature, plunging Ontario into an election.

The Liberals had two campaign buses — wrapped at a cost of $100,000 apiece — ready to go and staged a large downtown Toronto pep rally for staffers that night while the NDP stumbled out of the gate.

“I know people weren’t hoping for this particular result tonight but New Democrats are fighters and we’ll keep fighting for the things that matter most,” Horwath told supporters in Hamilton.

Even though she first proposed an Ontario pension plan since 2010 — and ran on it in the 2011 election — she inexplicably dropped it from the New Democrats’ policy handbook after the Liberals included a similar scheme in their left-leaning budget.

It was the most visible example of her distancing herself from the party’s past.

In a debilitating mid-campaign move, 34 past and present NDP supporters wrote a letter proclaiming that she was “abandoning” progressive principles in a desperate, populist appeal for votes.

At the same time, a flaccid NDP platform, unimaginatively entitled “Andrea Horwath’s Plan That Makes Sense,” failed to capture the voting public’s imagination.

At dissolution, the Liberals held 48 seats in the 107-member legislature, including the speaker, the Tories had 37, the NDP 21, and there was one vacancy.

With files from Richard J. Brennan, Bruce Campion-Smith and Rob Ferguson

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