It’s been 13 years since former Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced his sudden resignation. For the most part, he’s reached the point where he can walk around in public without being recognized.
“It depends on the age group,” McGuinty said this week, during an interview on Village Media’s Closer Look podcast. “Younger people don't know who the heck I am, and some older people see me and think there's something familiar about me.”
For a lot of Ontarians, there is one thing they will always associate with Dalton McGuinty: the gas plants scandal.
Quick refresher: McGuinty’s Liberals promised to build two gas-fired power plants in Oakville and Mississauga as part of the government’s commitment to phasing out coal-generated electricity. But as local opposition exploded, construction was abruptly cancelled leading up to the 2011 election.
The move helped save a handful of battleground seats for the Liberals, but the price tag was steep. Although McGuinty had initially suggested the cancellations would cost taxpayers as little as $230 million, the Auditor General eventually pegged the actual cost at $1.1 billion.
Today, McGuinty insists he still would have halted construction.
“Would I have closed those gas plants? Yes,” he told the podcast. “But I would have done it differently.”
He said the government agency tasked with choosing locations for the new facilities made “a bad decision” by selecting sites that were near a hospital and a school.
“But at the end of the day, the buck stops with me,” he said. “People don't know the head of that agency. They know this head…I should have kept that decision-making closer to me and understood before they made that decision about some of the complexities and the environmental considerations and those kinds of things. But these things happen.”
Adding fuel to the scandal was the fact that McGuinty’s former chief of staff was criminally charged and later sentenced to four months in prison for ordering the wiping of hard drives in the premier’s office. A judge described David Livingston’s conduct as “egregious,” saying his plan was to deny the public its right to know about government decision-making with regard to the gas plant controversy.”
McGuinty was not a subject of the police investigation and cooperated with the OPP. Asked on the podcast if he had anything to do with deleting government records, he repeated what he’s said all along: “No, I didn’t.”
He also defended his former staffer, calling him a “decent, honourable, hard-working individual who brought lots of integrity and caring to the undertaking.”
“We're not the worst thing we've ever done,” McGuinty continued. “And if any one of us was to become known for the biggest mistakes we had made — rather than hopefully a lifetime of sincere effort to toe the line and maybe even do good things — that would be unfair.”
Now 70, McGuinty has written a new book about leadership aimed specifically at fellow politicians — “those in the arena,” as he describes them. In fact, he is promising to mail a copy of Be a Good One: Words to Lead By to every federal and provincial representative across the country, as well as big city mayors.
“I'm proud of my record,” he said. “I'm proud of the people that I brought together. I'm proud of the efforts that I made to inspire confidence in the political process and in democracy generally.
“I just think you can get into trouble if you become overly concerned — unduly concerned — with what other people think,” he continued. “I know in a democracy you’ve got to have sufficient popularity, you got to get the votes to get a mandate, and all that stuff. But I think at the end of the day, you've just got to give your best and find consolation and comfort and pride and satisfaction in doing that.”
You can watch our full interview with McGuinty HERE.
Hosted by Village Media’s Michael Friscolanti and Scott Sexsmith, and produced by Derek Turner, Closer Look is a new daily podcast that goes way beyond the headlines with insightful, in-depth conversations featuring our reporters and editors, leading experts, key stakeholders and big newsmakers.
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