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Murray’s departure right now, just as the climate-change plan is kicking in and less than a year before an election due in June 2018, surprised Wynne.

“I didn’t know that this opportunity was in the offing for Glen,” she said Monday morning. But politicians are people and they have jobs with paycheques and this gig at the Pembina Institute opened on its own schedule. “He had to make a personal decision, as people do.”

That he’s going at all is less surprising. After the 2014 election, he ruminated on Twitter about his plans not to run for another term. He spent nine years as a city councillor in Winnipeg and then six as mayor. Eight to 10 years in provincial office would be enough, he said. He wavered a bit now and then but he’d signalled his inclination to leave years ago. On its face, this isn’t a departure that indicates a crisis in the governing party as senior ministers see electoral defeat on the horizon, just a guy moving on.

As the MPP for Toronto Centre, Murray was never perfectly placed to sell a Liberal environmental agenda across the province — maybe not even outside the 416 area code. Probably the only riding in Canada whose name is less appealing to people who don’t live there than Toronto Centre’s is University-Rosedale next door.

Murray made his name as a gay-rights and HIV-AIDS advocate in Winnipeg, spending formative years fighting a plague that killed dozens of his friends. He did his time as a municipal politician, got beaten in a federal election by Tory Steven Fletcher, moved to Toronto and joined the Canadian Urban Institute to push for better-working downtown neighbourhoods.