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During her first year as Premier, Kathleen Wynne took the thorny issue of raising funds to expand public transit and punted it to an expert panel.

The panel was clear in its advice: new transit infrastructure was desperately needed in the Greater Toronto Area, and the proper way to pay for it was to ask the public to kick in a good chunk of the money. Conveniently, this reflected the position that Wynne herself had taken when she ran for the Liberal leadership in 2013. She had insisted that new “revenue tools” — no one was crazy about saying taxes — would have to be part of the plan.

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Months went by, and Wynne did not commit to any sort of transit funding. I was covering Queen’s Park at the time, and ended a column by joking that Wynne might send the issue to another panel.

She sent it to another panel.

The second group of learned worthies provided advice similar to the first, which the Premier promptly ignored. And, along the way, her team was inspired to commit billions of dollars to fund a one-stop expansion of a subway line into Scarborough, for the sole reason that there was a by-election to win there and the Liberals could shamelessly slap “subway champion” stickers on their candidate’s lawn signs.