So all it took for Premier Kathleen Wynne to start listening to cash-strapped ordinary folks was a public approval rating so low it’s now only slightly above the number of people who believe Elvis is alive.

Clearly, there’s nothing like the prospect of a political hanging - Wynne has to face angry, cash-strapped Ontario voters next year - to focus the mind.

I support Wynne vetoing road tolls in Toronto.

That said, her startling about face on tolls, vetoing on Friday Toronto’s request for them made by Mayor John Tory and city council, is nothing short of spectacular.

Wynne started out as premier informing the great unwashed - us - that she was ready to have the difficult “conversation” about how to finance roads and public transit, through “revenue tools”, including the possibility of road tolls.

In November, Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca told the Star the Wynne government would okay a Toronto request for road tolls if council approved it, which council subsequently did.

In September, Wynne’s government started a pilot project, placing voluntary tolls on a 16.5-km stretch of the QEW, in both directions, between Trafalgar Road in Oakville and Guelph Line in Burlington. Single drivers, if selected for a limited number of permits, could pay $180 for three months to use the left High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lane, offered free to drivers with passengers.

Simultaneously, Wynne’s government issued a request for proposals “seeking innovative technologies that can be used to support tolling, compliance and performance monitoring of HOT lanes ...” to inform “long-term planning for future HOT lane implementation ...”

Now, facing an angry electorate fed up with skyrocketing electricity rates and the hidden, rising costs of her cap-and-trade scheme, Wynne, is trying to change her brand.

Suddenly she’s no longer, according to Liberal spin doctors, a courageous premier telling the public truths they don’t want to hear about everything having a price.

Instead, she’s done a back flip, now posing as defender of the little guy and interfering in local decision-making by vetoing a request from Toronto council for tolls.

That’s the exact opposite of what her government used to say about the importance of municipal autonomy.

Indeed, in 2006 her Liberal predecessor, Dalton McGuinty, passed the City of Toronto Act, intended to give the city more local authority in political decision-making.

We don’t yet know how far Wynne’s, dare I say it, “populist” conversion goes.

That is, whether it’s a one-off (doubtful) or the first of many actions in which Wynne, as she has recently suggested, is about to take various user fees off of individual Ontarians and use general tax revenues - from her debt-ridden government - to pay them.

In other words, to up her chances of political survival by playing shell games with public money, since there’s only one taxpayer.

Personally, I’d rather vote for a real fiscal conservative, rather than one who appears to have seen the light only to try and save her political future.