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To suggest Ontarians have “turned on” the premier may be misleading. It implies there was a time when she was wildly popular. She did win a surprise majority in 2014 after replacing former premier Dalton McGuinty, but plenty of people would argue the Liberals didn’t so much win that vote as the Progressive Conservatives fumbled it away. Tim Hudak, the PC leader at the time, thought it would be a good strategy to announce in mid-campaign that a Tory government would take an axe to the civil service, firing 100,000 people. With public sector unions already pouring millions into ads demonizing the Tories, the declaration was like a torpedo aimed at a rubber raft. The only question was how quickly the Conservatives would sink.

However dubious their victory, the Liberals have done a great deal to make themselves unpopular since. McGuinty stepped down when his support fell to less than a third of the province, making him one of the least popular premiers in the country. Wynne, after less than four years in office, has plummeted even further than McGuinty managed in a decade as premier. Wynne ranks dead last in the latest rankings of premiers, with just one in five Ontarians approving her performance

Her Liberals have lost a string of byelections, are struggling against an outpouring of anger over electricity costs and have been forced to abandon a lucrative fundraising program in which “donors” were pressed into hefty “contributions” in return for exclusive access to Wynne and her senior cabinet members. New restrictions will also prevent the unions from once again spending heavily on attack ads against Liberal opponents in the next campaign, as they have in the past.