A Stalwart of High Principle in the Public Good

Honour Among Friends

"I am proud to be representing Desire2Learn before the Ontario government as well as all other governments and businesses around the world."
"I’m done with Harvard, I’m back in Ontario. I’m delighted to be back here. I’m pursuing a few opportunities and I’ll have the opportunity to speak to more about those in more detail in the future."

"One of the things that I’ve had a lot of opportunity to do is to take courses and do some teaching at Harvard. And one of the things we talked about is how we need to distinguish between reputation and character."

"Reputation is what people think you are and character is what you are truly. In this contact sport where there are no referees — and that distinguishes this contact sport from all the others — it can be very hard to protect reputation."

"But you can always protect your character. How do you do that? You do what you think is right and that’s what I always tried to do."

"It’s never too late to do the right thing."
Former Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty

Former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty speaks at the gas plant cancellation hearings at Queen's Park in Toronto on June 25, 2013. Photo: Peter J. Thompson/Postmedia News/Files

How soon we don't forget. From the auditor-general's report into the scandalous waste of a billion dollars in Ontario's eHealth agency's fiasco in 2009 to the Ontario air ambulance service Ornge's corrupt, self-serving CEO Chris Mazza's entitlements, wink-wink, to nepotism at Ontario Power Generation (news: Premier Kathleen Wynne's brother-in-law interim CEO of eHealth), to the wasteful 'new-(clean)energy' sources and giveaways of excess electricity to New York while Ontarians get stiffed, Dalton McGuinty certainly made his mark.

His sloughing off of personal responsibility for his decision to cancel two gas plants to enable him to win another four years in office to continue ruining the Ontario economy and make a laughing stock of law and order when it comes to belligerent First Nations take-overs of private property, threatening people and laughing all the way to highway blockades, certainly gave the voters a chance to turn out the Liberals, but we muffed that one big-time.

But entitlements are entitlements and as long as they're not illegal, they're fair game, even if they amount to ethical black holes. So Dalton McGuinty has decided, as private citizen McGuinty to haul in all those IOUs and get himself a lobbying position with a former recipient of millions of taxfunds. He waited the obligatory year, to exercise his options to convince former colleagues whom he helped to reach public office that whatever he claims about the usefulness of his client to the Ontario taxpayer is right and proper.

As far as personal codes of conduct go, this man proved long ago that he is predatory and oblivious to the need of a public figure to present as unbesmirched by personal interests at the public trough. And so, Dalton McGuinty has launched himself on yet another principled journey to the future, burnishing his prospects on the way, personal morality be damned, because that, my friends, bespeaks his nature, not to be confused by his character which some may think describe one and the same thing.

His reputation was already tarnished, the legacy wanting. So what has he got to lose, after all?

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young   Ontario's Premier Kathleen Wynne greets former Premier Dalton McGuinty as she arrives with Lt.-Gov. David Onley for the Throne Speech at Queens Park in Toronto July 3.