In the midst of a mayoral campaign that saw his province's largest city elect his polar opposite, Dalton McGuinty tried his best to make sense of these very angry times.
"I think there's some genuine anxiety out there, and understandably so," the Ontario Premier said a couple of weeks ago, perched stiffly behind the immaculate desk of his immaculate office. "Even if you didn't lose your job, if you're one of the two-thirds of Ontarians who don't have a pension, you lost savings. Even if you've earned most of that back now, you are a changed person. You are less secure, less confident. And I understand that."
Then the most successful Liberal leader that Ontario has seen since the Second World War shifted from the empathetic to his slightly sterrner self. "My challenge is to convince Ontarians that the old world is not coming back," he said, "and that we need to do things together to grow stronger, and some of these are not easy to do."
It was the sort of line - earnest, upstanding, even noble - that endears Mr. McGuinty to his admirers. And it reflected a perspective that the man labelled "Premier Dad," a term evocative of his somewhat overbearing manner of trying to look out for Ontarians' interests, is physically incapable of shedding.
But there are signs, more of them by the day, that paternal guidance isn't what voters are looking for in their leaders. On the contrary, Mr. McGuinty's very nature appears to put him diametrically at odds with a political mood that is hardening.
Toronto's newly elected mayor identified that anger and the anxiety. Rob Ford fed into it and preyed on it, telling voters in the simplest terms possible that the current crop of politicians were to blame for all their problems, that there were easy solutions that required no sacrifices, that soon they would be able to pay less to their government and get better services in return. In return for his efforts, he blew opponent George Smitherman, Mr. McGuinty's former deputy premier, right out of the water.
In the Liberal fortress of Toronto, where Mr. McGuinty will need to win nearly every seat in next year's election to earn a third straight majority government, this cannot bode well. A vituperative electorate is shifting allegiances toward politicians who pledge to protect their pocketbooks - not those who speak loftily, as he does, about appealing to their "enlightened self-interest." At a time when voters are looking for someone to feel their pain, Mr. McGuinty is more likely to tell them to pull up their socks.
In the provincial election campaign that will begin little more than 10 months from now, Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak will likely make a similar pitch to Mr. Ford's, albeit more nuanced. And considering that it retailed well on the doorsteps of Toronto, where the Tories don't currently have a single federal or provincial seat, it's not a stretch to imagine it finding an audience in the outer regions of suburbia, in smaller cities and in rural Ontario.
Mr. McGuinty, who has been underestimated many times, may yet navigate his way past the anti-incumbent fervour that has spread across from New Brunswick to British Columbia, not to mention south of the border. At the moment, though, he appears almost uniquely ill-suited to overcome the wave surging toward him. The same life experience that allowed him to become arguably the most successful Liberal politician of his generation now appears to conspire with his opponents against him.
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"He thinks it was normal," a former staffer says of Mr. McGuinty's upbringing. In other words, far from it. He is a better person than most of us, or at least more virtuous. Most of us didn't grow up the oldest son in an Irish-Catholic family with 10 kids. Most of us didn't work summers at a family-run kids' camp or volunteer to assist elderly patients at the local hospital. And most of us didn't get the value of community service driven into us at the dinner table by saintly mothers working as nurses for mentally ill teenagers or by fathers who dragged us out in the middle of the night to plant gardens for kids at the local hospital to enjoy.
His earlier life was cloistered, too. Before he got into politics, Mr. McGuinty's world was rather small. He married his high school sweetheart, practised law with his brother in a strip mall, lived within walking distance and socialized primarily with his own family.
He emerged from all this like a 1950s sitcom father. He's fiercely protective of his four kids, but expects them to strike out on their own. He's so hopelessly devoted to his wife that, when he's been nervous before a speech or debate, his staff have tried to get her into the front row to calm him down. He'll drink a beer, where the situation calls for it, but nobody can recall seeing him drunk. It's all but impossible to imagine him crying, or admitting some past indiscretion, or any of the other things politicians do to show their humanity.
He is a far cry from what the Toronto electorate mostly forgave of their major candidates, both of whom admitted to drug use.
Hardly a bully or blowhard, Mr. McGuinty remained by all accounts an uncannily nice guy, and a bit of a Boy Scout. He never yells at his underlings but is known to express confusion when they leave his office to go make more money in the private sector. He appears to believe that he's doing the work he was put on Earth to do.
For the bulk of his time in office, Mr. McGuinty's paternalistic instincts manifested themselves as a somewhat overbearing concern for Ontarians' personal well-being. Telling drivers they couldn't talk on their cellphones, or smoke with kids in the car. Banning pesticides, or cigarette displays behind convenience store counters.
In a tumultuous political climate, where "government knows best" might not be the wisest slogan, he seemingly realized that he has pushed the nannyism about as far as it can go. He's steered away from further regulating personal behaviour, such as reversing his position on banning mixed martial arts. There is, indeed, a little flexibility in his character. But in the onset of tough economic times, he's played father knows best in a different, more big-picture way, moving from micro- to macro-management.
The Great Recession hit manufacturing-reliant Ontario especially hard, and it's been slow to recover. Mr. McGuinty's response, rather than to attempt some manner of populism by waging war against big business or the public service, was to lean on a small circle of gurus - the kind of people that others would derisively call "elites" - to help him decide what was best for Ontarians.
Emerging from that process, most controversially, was the new harmonized sales tax. The policy is loved by economists, but hated by most consumers, particularly since it came in at a time when Mr. McGuinty's policies already had energy prices on the rise.
Mr. McGuinty's method of selling such policies, which is tinged with missionary zeal, does not necessarily help matters. Amid complaints about the HST, he took pride in billing the reform as "strong medicine." When communities complained about his Green Energy Act imposing wind turbines they didn't want, he offered lectures on the evils of NIMBYism.
Even most admirers concede that relating to common folk with whom he doesn't share blood ties is not Mr. McGuinty's strong suit. Being Premier is an inherently remote experience, and in some ways it's more remote for Mr. McGuinty than most. He acknowledges that he doesn't have a regular social life, beyond the occasional phone chat with an old law-school buddy. "There's the job and then there's my family," he says. "There's very little time beyond that for friends."
His family, he says, is his "single biggest connector to reality." No wonder, then, that everything tends to get framed in terms of McGuinty family values.
Those values, once well-received by a province looking for a kinder, gentler government after the Mike Harris era, no longer seem to be quite as much in vogue. According to pollster Greg Lyle, only 15 per cent of Ontarians recently asked which leader "cares about people like me" chose Mr. McGuinty. (NDP leader Andrea Horwath led the pack at 19 per cent, while 62 per cent chose none of the above or didn't know.) Meanwhile, Mr. Lyle reports that 51 per cent of people now have an unfavourable view of Mr. McGuinty - up from 34 per cent as recently as the summer of 2009.
With next year's election looming, Mr. McGuinty's strategists are trying to steer him toward retail politics, the less punitive side of micro-management. Hence tax credits to help seniors pay their energy bills, and to help parents enroll their kids in sports and other activities. And hence some flip-flops, such as reversing plans to build a new gas-fired power plant in Oakville - the opposition to which Mr. McGuinty had long dismissed.
But Mr. McGuinty's image, by now, is largely carved in stone. And besides, there's only so much that a man can suppress his natural instincts.
Asked in that same interview earlier this month how he interpreted the "Premier Dad" moniker, Mr. McGuinty initially gave the standard politician's answer that he doesn't worry about labels. Then he paused, and considered, and embraced it.
"If by 'Dad' they mean somebody who is prepared to take responsibility, who is prepared to make difficult decisions, prepared to do the right things today to make sure that we're okay in the long run," he said, "then there are worse things that people could call me."
In other, less angry times, he'd probably be right. But at a time when Rob Ford can get elected mayor of Toronto, the market for '50s sitcom dads is starting to look a little thin.
Man about the provincial house
On laundry:
"If we can get you to put the dishwasher on after 10 o'clock and we can reward you by making sure that electricity is less expensive at that time of day, then we've got a wonderful, new, revolutionary system in place."
On domestic animals:
"And pit bulls constitute a real danger to Ontarians. We have a responsibility to address that and make sure that Ontarians are safe and secure in their communities."
On obesity:
"Here's what I am concerned about. We have an explosion of obesity in our children. Public Health is telling us that the cost alone of having to address type-2 diabetes will be horrific."
On lawn care:
"Our generation has taken to the cosmetic use of pesticides and I think, perhaps unwittingly, not fully understanding the dangers it represents to ourselves and, most importantly, to our children," he told a news conference in the back yard of a mid-Toronto home.
"It's the right of kids to play in the grass … without compromising their health."
On driver training:
"But how ridiculous is it that, with zero highway driving experience, your child can legally drive a carload of friends to Ottawa?"
On mixed martial arts viewership:
"Perhaps those who ought to have been registered as lobbyists would be my three sons and my one daughter, who have been lobbying on this incessantly for a long time."
Source: The Globe and Mail, CanWest, Toronto Star
Compiled by Stephanie Chambers