There are few conflict resolution assignments a trained mediator like Kathleen Wynne won’t take on.

Now, Ontario’s new premier-designate is grappling with a dysfunctional Legislature, trying to make minority government work.

This job is different: No mere facilitator, she is now leader.

After her formal swearing-in as premier Feb. 11, Wynne will wield governmental power — just not absolute power. The balance of power rests with the third-place NDP, whose 18 MPPs punch above their weight in the 107-seat Legislature.

Henceforth, all eyes will be on Wynne and her NDP counterpart, Andrea Horwath: The two leaders who need each other, yet still eye one another warily.

They have much in common. Both come across as authentic, progressive politicians — direct, disarming, dismissive of testosterone tactics, with longtime friends in the union movement and among NGO activists.

Yet for all their commonality, they seem reluctant to make common cause just yet — for fear of undermining their rival power bases. Liberals and New Democrats both want to change the world, they just want to remake it in their own image, on their own terms.

Can the two parties find a modus vivendi in Ontario? And can Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives play a constructive role, or will they once again be relegated to the role of doomsayers on the sidelines?

Wynne wants a “balanced” approach that brings both opposition parties to the table, with Liberals perched between left and right.

“The advantage of being a Liberal government in this situation is that we actually do straddle the centre,” she said in an interview with the Star.

Warming up to the topic, the premier-designate dips into her mediator’s tool kit to evoke the imagery of the classic Venn diagram: two intersecting circles illustrating where common ground exists despite broader differences.

With the Legislature devoid of Zen, Venn offers a way out: The middle way.

“We straddle the middle, so it’s way easier to draw a Venn diagram and find out where we meet than it is to draw a Venn and see where the other two parties meet,” Wynne muses.

It’s an image she invoked later in a private meeting with Horwath in the premier’s 6th-floor hideaway office across the street from Queen’s Park. In their 30-minute conversation, Wynne once again broached Venn diagrams to highlight common ground.

Nice tool, but without political will the process won’t yield progress, Horwath told me the next day.

“You can refer to a Venn diagram or you can refer to goodwill . . . I think all of those things mean the same thing.”

That means focusing on job-creation. Closing corporate tax loopholes. And moving on reforms to social services.

How can the two parties bargain over the budget without lapsing into brinkmanship, as they did a year ago? Horwath wants lessons learned from the sniping of the past, warning Wynne that she wants transparency.

“I’m not really interested in backroom deals,” Horwath continued. “We left the meeting with an agreement that . . . I was planning on talking to the public pretty openly.”

In the coming days, the NDP will put more on the table as their price for support: Demands to ensure deficit cost-cutting doesn’t hurt the most vulnerable; and measures to improve front line health care.

With MPPs finally returning on Feb. 19, New Democrats will also propose new restrictions on prorogation, to prevent a recurrence of Dalton McGuinty’s unilateral suspension of the Legislature last October. That is one area where Horwath can expect a sympathetic hearing from the incoming premier:

“I’m wondering if that’s a conversation I can have with the opposition leaders,” Wynne said in our interview. “Is there some kind of framework that we have to put around prorogation going forward . . . more concrete guidelines?”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

If Wynne and Horwath can agree on prorogation and social service reforms, where does that leave Hudak’s Tories? At a news conference last week, he seemed out of step with his own rhetoric — railing repeatedly against McGuinty’s abuse prorogation as a delaying tactic, but then insisting it be left intact. Hmmm.

Will Hudak once again find himself the odd man out?

Read more about: