Glen Murray pulled the ripcord. He might not be the only one.
“There are moments in your life that do not present themselves as choices but as imperatives. When I turned 20 years old, AIDS was not a word in my vocabulary but by the time I turned 30, it had taken 43 of my friends and loved ones … For someone who has lived through one global tragedy and is now faced with the greater crisis of climate change, walking away from this fight isn’t in my DNA.”
With those words, Glen Murray, Ontario’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, officially decamped from Queen’s Park to Calgary, resigning his cabinet post for a job heading the Pembina Institute, a clean energy think-tank.
The announcement caught Ontario’s political class by surprise, and naturally prompted much speculation about rodents and sinking watercraft. Despite a small bump in recent polls, the Liberals are still trailing the Tories less than a year from a provincial election. If the trends hold, the Liberals will lose seats even in their stronghold of Toronto — and Premier Kathleen Wynne’s approval rating remains the worst in the country.
Not surprisingly, Wynne pushed back against the reports of her pending political demise. “I do not see [Murray’s resignation] as a vote of non-confidence … I see this as an individual having to make a decision about his life and he is a friend and I wish him well.”
But the scenario conjures up eerie reminders of ministers bailing from the federal Conservative cabinet in the run-up to the 2015 national election campaign, when John Baird, Peter Mackay, James Moore, Shelley Glover, Diane Ablonczy and Christian Paradis took a walk in the snow … and never came back.
Could the Liberals see the same sort of trend at work here? That depends, in part, on where those fleeing the burning deck think they could land; Murray claims his new post is a “dream job” but it’s interesting that he is leaving the province to take it.
Read the full article on iPolitics.