Courtesy of the provincial opposition, there are annoying signs that Ontario's campaign season has started a full year before next October's election. His rhetoric in the legislature having reached a fever pitch, Conservative Leader Tim Hudak will begin turning up next week - via a new TV ad - in the middle of hockey games and sitcoms to inform Ontarians of the evils of Dalton McGuinty.
But the really worrying campaign-season indicators are the ones coming from Mr. McGuinty's Liberals, this week's flip-flop over plans to build a gas-fired power plant in Oakville first among them.
Setting aside whether one agrees with them, the decisions by Mr. McGuinty's government over the years have mostly been made the right way - which is to say at least partly on the basis of policy merits, rather than just political ones. But struggling in the polls, wary of a grumpy electorate and facing tougher opposition (from both the Tories and the NDP) than they were previously accustomed to, the Liberals seem now to be taking their responsibilities less seriously.
Consider the Oakville decision, which does not appear to have been made the right way at all.
Until this week, the government was sufficiently convinced the plant was needed to meet growing demand that it was prepared to ignore local residents' outcries about putting it within close proximity of homes and a school. Now, it's so convinced the plant is not needed that it's prepared to risk a costly settlement to get out of the contract to build it, and to completely undermine its own energy planning agency, the Ontario Power Authority.
Economic difficulties may indeed have caused demand to grow more slowly than was once projected, as the Liberals insisted after announcing the change in course on Thursday. But it's still high enough that the government is expected to eventually announce other projects, including new transmission lines, in place of the gas plant. And to the extent that the lingering effects of the Great Recession did come into consideration, it's fair to assume they didn't just become apparent this week.
What seems to have changed is the balance between politics and policy. There's a sense that Mr. McGuinty's campaign team is increasingly calling the shots, rather than the people tasked with running the government. So suddenly the prospect of losing a seat like Oakville, where Liberal MPP Kevin Flynn is expected to face a tough fight, just doesn't seem worth it.
In terms of energy policy, the Oakville decision raises all sorts of questions. Will the government still be able to dismiss other complaints about new power developments, including wind turbines, as nothing more than NIMBYism? And to what extent will such a reactive decision scare off investment by an industry that sees fewer risks elsewhere?
What's further alarming is that it's not just one file on which the Liberals increasingly seem to be in reactive mode. As far back as last spring, controversy over a new sex education curriculum prompted an immediate retreat. In the summer, there was the surrender on "eco fees." And earlier this week, opposition attacks prompted the government to suddenly announce new bans on publicly funded agencies hiring lobbyists - something that hadn't bothered the Liberals during their previous seven years in power.
Some of those changes in course were defensible in and of themselves, but each was made because of political pressure. And cumulatively, one gets the sense that the Liberals are either growing sloppy in their initial decisions, or that as they worry about their jobs they're losing the courage of their convictions.
The irony is that being more political may actually be bad politics. Mr. McGuinty has previously come off as a standup guy, occasionally willing to do things he knows will be unpopular but is convinced are the right things to do. (The harmonized sales tax is an obvious example.) That persona has become grating for some Ontarians, but completely muddling it could leave him without much of a selling point when that election finally rolls around.