The day Kathleen Wynne lost the 2018 election

Without much doubt, Kathleen Wynne is the most-qualified candidate running for premier in the Ontario election. She’s smart, articulate, passionate, knows the issues and to many observers was the winner in last Sunday’s televised debate.

She stands head and shoulders over Doug Ford, who is an embarrassment to many progressives in the Conservative party with his simplistic slogans, inexcusable refusal to release a full platform and lack of understanding of the complexity of many issues facing the province.

Premier Kathleen Wynne during a news conference on government assets in April 2015 where she announced beer would soon be sold in up to 450 supermarkets and Ontario will sell up to 60 per cent of the publicly owned Hydro One.  (Andrew Francis Wallace / Toronto Star)

She’s also a tougher campaigner than Andrea Horwath, whose NDP party is riding high in recent polls, but may have peaked too soon.

But barring a last-minute miracle, Wynne will lose the June 7 election badly.

She’ll lose so badly that her governing Liberals may be reduced to just 12 seats, or even fewer, thus running the risk of losing status as an official party in the Legislature.

And she’ll lose so badly that she may be defeated in her own riding of Don Valley West.

In reality, Wynne lost this election more than three years back, on April 23, 2015. That’s day when the Liberals formally announced in the provincial budget that they would be selling 60 per cent of Hydro One, the provincially owned utility that transmits electricity across the province and distributes it to 1.4 million households. She made the move after embracing the findings of a pro-business panel headed by former TD Bank chair Ed Clark that recommended the sale.

It was her biggest mistake as premier — one from which she never recovered.

On that day Wynne’s personal approval rating was holding relatively steady at about 32 per cent, after having peaked in the low-40s during the 2014 provincial election.

Since then, her approval rating has been in free fall, dropping to as low as 12 per cent in 2017 before rebounding a wee bit earlier this year. Those same trends have hit the Liberal party.

Wynne stubbornly ignored wise advice even from her most trusted political strategists in approving the sale, insisting voters would ultimately see the benefit of using $4 billion to $5 billion from the sale to pay for new roads, bridges and public transit such as buses and subway lines.

But Wynne totally misread the public, who saw Hydro One as belonging to all Ontarians. Also, the utility was hugely profitable, making about $750 million a year, with nearly $300 million going to Queen’s Park.

Polls showed more than 80 per cent of Ontarians opposed the sale, with nearly three in four believing privatization would increase electricity prices. A top Liberal campaign organizer says one internal poll at that time indicated up to 90 per cent of Liberal supporters themselves were against the sale.

What also angered voters was that Wynne had never talked about selling off Hydro One during the 2014 election. Suddenly, even for Liberal loyalists, there were questions about whether Wynne could be trusted. No longer was she seen as a “different style” of politician, but instead had become just like any other politician who says one thing and does another.

How could she have been so out of touch with voters?

After that, everything Wynne did was seen by voters with a different, more critical eye, from her access-for-cash fundraiser, to the Sudbury byelection controversy, to her last-gasp efforts to toss money at everything from free tuitions for students from low-income families to a higher minimum wage.

To this day Wynne defends her decision. She said this week during a Toronto Star editorial board meeting that she knows people were “surprised and angry” with the sale. But she said she “didn’t see how else” she could raise the money to build badly needed infrastructure projects. Of course, she could have raised taxes, but chose the route the business guys wanted her to take.

With just a week before election day, Wynne’s Liberals trail the NDP and Tories in every poll. A survey by Angus Reid Institute even indicates 45 per cent of those who backed Wynne in 2014 now preferring the NDP.

If those polls hold and Wynne loses big, remember April 23, 2015.

Bob Hepburn is a politics columnist and based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @BobHepburn