Dalton McGuinty would really, really like to talk to you about early childhood education. "It works for all of us on so many different levels," the Ontario Premier enthuses. "I could go on for probably two hours."
A cynic would suggest that, in six years in office, Mr. McGuinty has done more talking than anything else. That would be a little unfair. It's just that, when it comes to education, it's taken him a term and a half to get to the really interesting stuff.
By the account of Charles Pascal, the education expert he enlisted to craft an ambitious model for early childhood learning, Mr. McGuinty is more committed to education than any Ontario premier since Bill Davis. Mr. Davis, though, was a builder who launched his province's community college system and presided over a broad expansion of the elementary, secondary and university systems. Mr. McGuinty has been more of a fixer - attempting to improve the existing system, not expand it.
That's about to change. Midway through his second term, Mr. McGuinty is set to put his own indelible mark on public education. Having taken an interest in early childhood education for as long as he's been in politics - "The very first question I asked, as leader of the Official Opposition, was about children," he proudly points out - he's set to start rolling out a provincewide program starting next year.
The obvious question is what took him so long. Mr. McGuinty's Liberals put full-day kindergarten, the new system's centrepiece, on the table before they were elected in 2003. Why begin moving forward only now, when the province's revenues have dried up and Mr. McGuinty is probably more than halfway through his time as premier?
The Liberals' argument is that after the tumultuous Mike Harris era, there was a lot of fixing to be done. Funding had been cut; kids weren't getting the attention they needed; teachers' morale was low; parents' were weary of constant labour-related strife.
"We've made a number of dramatic improvements in our schools - much more than just increasing funding by, I think, close to a third," Mr. McGuinty says. "We devoted ourselves to introducing stability, and putting in place the kinds of supports that help our kids achieve better academically."
An argument Mr. McGuinty would be loath to make, but others do, is that those academic achievements are not quite what he had hoped.
Mr. McGuinty boasts of continual year-to-year improvement on the province's standardized tests. But for all the money poured into education - smaller class sizes, "turnaround teams" for troubled schools, etc. - his 2003 platform promise that "75 per cent of students will meet or exceed the provincial standard on provincewide tests" is nowhere near fruition. Among grade school students, most cohorts have not cracked the 70 per cent barrier.
In a first term characterized by incrementalism, Mr. McGuinty might have been happy enough to settle for that. But according to his special adviser on education, Michael Fullan, the Premier made a "self-conscious, comparative decision" heading into his second term. Dr. Fullan, a Toronto-based author and academic, came to Mr. McGuinty after advising Tony Blair's British government, and lessons were drawn from that experience.
"Tony Blair had great focus in 1997-2001," Dr. Fullan says of the former prime minister's education commitment. "He helped us, in Ontario, to know what that looked like. But for a combination of reasons, he lost the plot from 2001 onward.
"We in Ontario, including Dalton explicitly, were very aware of that. He said, 'We're not going to do that. We're not only going to not lose the plot; we're going to get better.' " Something closer to home also seems to be driving Mr. McGuinty. It is natural for a leader in his second term to seek a legacy. But he is also struggling to avoid going down as the premier who fiddled while the economy burned, and so he has responded to Ontario's precipitous industrial decline by attempting to refashion himself as a risk-taking activist.
He casts full-day learning in that light. "On what basis do we choose to compete at the beginning of the 21st century, an era of globalization and a knowledge-based economy?" Mr. McGuinty says. "I want to compete on the basis of knowledge."
It's not so controversial an idea as, say, a harmonized sales tax. But attempting to rush it out, with the limited funds available, carries risks of its own. If the program begins in chaos, or the model put forward by Dr. Pascal collapses when parts are left out, his dreams of joining Mr. Davis as an "education premier" may go up in smoke.
"As my old man used to say, the best way to begin is to begin," Mr. McGuinty offers. "So we're going to begin." At long last, the talk will be put to the test.
