11.20.2015 12:09 PM

Dalton McGuinty, a great Premier and a great guy

He’s got a book out, and he’s talking to the media, too. Canada AM clip right here.

Miss this guy. We had a great, great team, too. 

13 Comments

  1. SG says:

    “Dalton McGuinty, a great Premier and a great guy”

    Warren, why do I get the impression you’re trolling your own blog with such a statement?

    I get it though, you had a prominent position on his team and you are nostalgic. Perfectly normal.

    I happen to think McGuinty was a disaster as premier, and he was at his worst in the 2007 election when he used vaguely anti-Islamic and anti-Semitic rhetoric to pummel John Tory’s religious school funding plan (a bad policy to be sure, but at its heart was intended to finally end the discriminatory funding of Catholic schools to the exclusion of all others).

    We will need another Common Sense Revolution to undo his damage but I don’t think Patrick Brown has the stomach for it.

    • Rod says:

      Conservatives are the only the only ones that long for the days of Mike Harris and the Common Sense Revolution. It’s no wonder that the PCPO has been reduced to a rural rump. And there in lies the Ontario PC dilema. Move towards the center to appeal to the majority of Ontarians, and lose the base. Swing hard right, the base loves it but the majority of Ontarians are turned off. It is the same dynamic playing itself out with the Republicans in the US presidential race.

      • SG says:

        Rod – a few more stories of the Liberals showering teachers union mobsters with taxpayer money, and just watch the 905 soccer moms turn, and turn they will, just as they did with gusto in 1995 for very similar reasons.

      • Ronald O'Dowd says:

        Rod,

        That’s how Harper turned off the previously lazy, electorally speaking.

  2. Maps Onburt says:

    First Obama now McGinty. Now I know you are having a piss.

  3. Ian Howard says:

    Changed the way the party raised money Sold out to the teachers and the sharpest contributors. Ask Laurel Broten what it was like working for the teachers.

  4. Ian Howard says:

    Threw Bentley under the electric bus too. What a great guy.
    Picked Godfrey for his uncompromising dedication to himself as well.
    I could go no but what’s the point. I hope Butts does better with his latest creation.

  5. Tom Adams says:

    McGuinty’s shining moment, the moment the history books will remember, is the Green Energy and Green Economy Act (GEA). Ontario’s power system has always had governance problems, but it took the GEA to cause the power system to drift into parasitism. Now, the purpose of the power system is to funnel millions into outfits like Loblaws, tens of millions into outfits like the PWU, and hundreds of millions into outfits like Northland Power. In 2004 and 2005, McGuinty created some useful public energy agencies and sustained others. He undid the disastrous Eves rate freeze. His rate plan was based on the sound principle that people have to pay the real cost of power. By 2009, something terrible was happening within the government’s energy brain. The gas scandal cover-up was a symptom of that disease metastasizing.

  6. Jon Evan says:

    The NP sums it up: “But it is remarkable to come face to face with someone so utterly convinced of his own idealism, or so cynical as to insist upon it, so soon after he irrefutably demonstrated his lack of it — by squandering billions of dollars for a few seats the Liberals would probably have won anyway, proroguing the legislature to derail inquiries into same, and summarily resigning to watch the various police investigations unfold from afar.”

    • Tim Sullivan says:

      The National Post, you say.

      I’ve asked 1000 times, in other places too, but not one person has answered the question.

      What would the cost have been for the PCs to close those gas plants had they won the election? They promised the same thing as the Liberals, let’s not forget.

      Was there any costing? What was the cost to be if there was? Why wasn’t there a costing of the promise if there was none?

      It comes down to competence and honesty. The PCs either costed the promise and have not revealed what it would have cost them, or they didn’t, so can’t know.

      • doconnor says:

        According to my calculations based on thr Auditors General’s numbers, 673 million of the 1 billion would have been spent if the gas plants had been moved to thier new locations in the first place.

      • Tom Adams says:

        The cost of cancelling the gas plants was piddly. In the case of Eastern Power, the Auditor General and the testimony of Joanne Butler at the gas scandal hearings made it pretty clear that the cancellation could have been achieved at no charge, because Eastern was so far behind the milestone dates. The big price tag — $1.1 Billion by the AG’s estimate (which I think is low) — came not from the cancellation but from the relocating and recontracting.

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