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Glen Murray, Ontario’s minister of environment and climate change, is quitting to head an environmental think tank based in Alberta.
Murray is a longtime ally of Premier Kathleen Wynne’s, a former leadership rival who dropped out and endorsed her in 2013 and the minister trusted with the delicate and complicated job of devising the Liberals’ signature plan to cut the province’s greenhouse-gas emissions.
He’s proud to have had that responsibility, he said in a statement announcing his departure.
“I have also always viewed my life and career as split up into distinct chapters and often in response to serious challenges,” the statement said. “When confronted with a choice between the ‘unthinkable’ and the ‘impossible’, I will always take on the impossible to stop the unthinkable. I ultimately have made the difficult decision, with the support of my partner Rick, to transition from this chapter on to the next chapter of tirelessly working to mobilize to fight climate change at the national level.”
Murray’s departure right now, just as the climate-change plan is kicking in and less than a year before an election due in June 2018, surprised Wynne.
“I didn’t know that this opportunity was in the offing for Glen,” she said Monday morning. But politicians are people and they have jobs with paycheques and this gig at the Pembina Institute opened on its own schedule. “He had to make a personal decision, as people do.”
That he’s going at all is less surprising. After the 2014 election, he ruminated on Twitter about his plans not to run for another term. He spent nine years as a city councillor in Winnipeg and then six as mayor. Eight to 10 years in provincial office would be enough, he said. He wavered a bit now and then but he’d signalled his inclination to leave years ago. On its face, this isn’t a departure that indicates a crisis in the governing party as senior ministers see electoral defeat on the horizon, just a guy moving on.
As the MPP for Toronto Centre, Murray was never perfectly placed to sell a Liberal environmental agenda across the province — maybe not even outside the 416 area code. Probably the only riding in Canada whose name is less appealing to people who don’t live there than Toronto Centre’s is University-Rosedale next door.
Murray made his name as a gay-rights and HIV-AIDS advocate in Winnipeg, spending formative years fighting a plague that killed dozens of his friends. He did his time as a municipal politician, got beaten in a federal election by Tory Steven Fletcher, moved to Toronto and joined the Canadian Urban Institute to push for better-working downtown neighbourhoods.
I believe the more time urban & rural folk take to listen to each other the more we will understand how much we depend on each other.
— Glen Murray (@Glen4Climate) June 11, 2015
Murray’s a downtown Toronto guy. He wears a bowtie and can ride his bike to Queen’s Park. He’s a meandering talker who enjoys discursions on the importance of his own work (just look at his farewell statement). If you need someone to explain the virtues of more expensive gasoline in Sudbury or the benefits of cap-and-trade rules for the cement plant in Bath, Murray would not be your first pick.
Newmarket-Aurora MPP Chris Ballard, who’s been the minister of housing, takes over as environment and climate-change minister immediately. He’s from a Toronto exurb and is a former head of the Ontario branch of the Consumers’ Association of Canada, advocating for the people getting out their wallets when government regulation and corporate rent-seeking increase prices.
He’s also been Wynne’s minister responsible for fighting poverty, which has obvious parallels to his new climate-change job.
He might prove a better spokesman for the execution of the plans laid under Murray. In fact, the single biggest chunk of Ontario’s effort to combat climate change is a $900-million plan to subsidize the owners of apartment buildings — both public and private — to refit them to be more energy-efficient, so Ballard’s experience as housing minister should be directly useful. Maybe Ballard will do better than Murray did at convincing Wynne and the transportation and infrastructure ministers not to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at widening highways in the mistaken belief that that reduces congestion.
With a general election due soon, Wynne isn’t required to call a byelection to fill Murray’s seat after he resigns as an MPP in a month and she won’t, she said, because it’s an unnecessary expense.
Murray’s departure led to a couple of other tweaks to Wynne’s cabinet Monday. Former Toronto city councillor and planning-committee chairman Peter Milczyn takes over from Ballard as housing minister.
Ottawa-Orléans MPP Marie-France Lalonde’s job changed very slightly, as well. She’s still community-safety minister (responsible for policing and jails) and the minister in charge of francophone affairs, but the latter has been elevated from an office into a tiny but full-status ministry. Wynne said that’s meant to indicate francophones’ importance to the government. Lalonde’s business cards will now say she’s minister “of” francophone affairs instead of minister “for” francophone affairs.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
Murray is a longtime ally of Premier Kathleen Wynne’s, a former leadership rival who dropped out and endorsed her in 2013 and the minister trusted with the delicate and complicated job of devising the Liberals’ signature plan to cut the province’s greenhouse-gas emissions.
He’s proud to have had that responsibility, he said in a statement announcing his departure.
“I have also always viewed my life and career as split up into distinct chapters and often in response to serious challenges,” the statement said. “When confronted with a choice between the ‘unthinkable’ and the ‘impossible’, I will always take on the impossible to stop the unthinkable. I ultimately have made the difficult decision, with the support of my partner Rick, to transition from this chapter on to the next chapter of tirelessly working to mobilize to fight climate change at the national level.”
Murray’s departure right now, just as the climate-change plan is kicking in and less than a year before an election due in June 2018, surprised Wynne.
“I didn’t know that this opportunity was in the offing for Glen,” she said Monday morning. But politicians are people and they have jobs with paycheques and this gig at the Pembina Institute opened on its own schedule. “He had to make a personal decision, as people do.”
That he’s going at all is less surprising. After the 2014 election, he ruminated on Twitter about his plans not to run for another term. He spent nine years as a city councillor in Winnipeg and then six as mayor. Eight to 10 years in provincial office would be enough, he said. He wavered a bit now and then but he’d signalled his inclination to leave years ago. On its face, this isn’t a departure that indicates a crisis in the governing party as senior ministers see electoral defeat on the horizon, just a guy moving on.
As the MPP for Toronto Centre, Murray was never perfectly placed to sell a Liberal environmental agenda across the province — maybe not even outside the 416 area code. Probably the only riding in Canada whose name is less appealing to people who don’t live there than Toronto Centre’s is University-Rosedale next door.
Murray made his name as a gay-rights and HIV-AIDS advocate in Winnipeg, spending formative years fighting a plague that killed dozens of his friends. He did his time as a municipal politician, got beaten in a federal election by Tory Steven Fletcher, moved to Toronto and joined the Canadian Urban Institute to push for better-working downtown neighbourhoods.
I believe the more time urban & rural folk take to listen to each other the more we will understand how much we depend on each other.
— Glen Murray (@Glen4Climate) June 11, 2015
Murray’s a downtown Toronto guy. He wears a bowtie and can ride his bike to Queen’s Park. He’s a meandering talker who enjoys discursions on the importance of his own work (just look at his farewell statement). If you need someone to explain the virtues of more expensive gasoline in Sudbury or the benefits of cap-and-trade rules for the cement plant in Bath, Murray would not be your first pick.
Newmarket-Aurora MPP Chris Ballard, who’s been the minister of housing, takes over as environment and climate-change minister immediately. He’s from a Toronto exurb and is a former head of the Ontario branch of the Consumers’ Association of Canada, advocating for the people getting out their wallets when government regulation and corporate rent-seeking increase prices.
He’s also been Wynne’s minister responsible for fighting poverty, which has obvious parallels to his new climate-change job.
He might prove a better spokesman for the execution of the plans laid under Murray. In fact, the single biggest chunk of Ontario’s effort to combat climate change is a $900-million plan to subsidize the owners of apartment buildings — both public and private — to refit them to be more energy-efficient, so Ballard’s experience as housing minister should be directly useful. Maybe Ballard will do better than Murray did at convincing Wynne and the transportation and infrastructure ministers not to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at widening highways in the mistaken belief that that reduces congestion.
With a general election due soon, Wynne isn’t required to call a byelection to fill Murray’s seat after he resigns as an MPP in a month and she won’t, she said, because it’s an unnecessary expense.
Murray’s departure led to a couple of other tweaks to Wynne’s cabinet Monday. Former Toronto city councillor and planning-committee chairman Peter Milczyn takes over from Ballard as housing minister.
Ottawa-Orléans MPP Marie-France Lalonde’s job changed very slightly, as well. She’s still community-safety minister (responsible for policing and jails) and the minister in charge of francophone affairs, but the latter has been elevated from an office into a tiny but full-status ministry. Wynne said that’s meant to indicate francophones’ importance to the government. Lalonde’s business cards will now say she’s minister “of” francophone affairs instead of minister “for” francophone affairs.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
