With apologies for the heavy Ontario focus of late, I'm not sure there's a more interesting political story in the country right now than Dalton McGuinty's ongoing attempts to reinvent himself as a hard-ass.
This does not always go well, as evidenced by the great fun the Toronto Star has had with the Premier's untimely musings on the potential need to forego minimum wage increases. In that instance, he looked rather alarmingly like the Dalton McGuinty of 1999 - the one who was uncertain of his own platform's numbers.
The fight he's picked with David Miller, on the other hand, is - along with last week's uncharacteristically bold budget - much more representative of the persona McGuinty is trying to craft for himself.
Until recently, it would not have been a gigantic stretch to lump McGuinty and Miller into the same general brand of politician. The Premier is considerably to the right of the Mayor, less beholden to different interests and factions, and has proven much smoother at handling his government's day-to-day affairs (though in fairness, Miller is leading a fractious council over which he doesn't have all that much real power). But both have generally governed as low-risk, low-reward managers without much appetite for ambitious projects or overhauls of government.
Only one of them, though, has dramatically changed his approach in response to the economic crisis that's hit Ontario - including Toronto, though less so than elsewhere in the province - especially hard. And now that McGuinty is desperate to avoid going down as the Premier who fiddled with incrementalism while his province burned, he evidently sees Miller as an obstacle rather than a potential ally.
McGuinty wants to be seen as a doer - and whatever else Miller is known for, getting things done quickly is not one of them. Nor, for that matter, is that a reputation that follows most other municipal politicians - a group particularly prone to the NIMBYism that McGuinty has vowed to make himself an enemy of. So he's decided to send a message, to them and to the public, by punting them all from the board of the regional transportation agency that will largely set the standard for the province's ability to modernize its infrastructure.
No doubt there are other mayors less than thrilled by this development, though Hazel McCallion - the one whose wrath would be most unpleasant - isn't one of them. But it's Miller who's been most visibly snubbed, and his reaction yesterday showed that he knows it.
While publicly saying nice things, it's improbable that McGuinty and his ministers will do all that much to mend hurt feelings. If they want to juxtapose McGuinty against Miller, it might be in their interest to pick a few more strategic battles along the way. And if they seriously believe the Mayor is an impediment to progress, they could go a step further.
In 2003, provincial Liberals were more or less split between Miller and his main opponent for the mayoralty, John Tory. If they decided to throw their considerable organizational weight behind a candidate in 2010 - which, unlike 2006, is unlikely to be a re-election cakewalk for Miller regardless - they could do him considerable damage.
More foreseeable is that party members will again divide themselves between Miller and whoever runs against him, but that McGuinty will make life difficult for the Mayor by cutting him off at the knees wherever possible - something he has plenty of opportunity to do, given the highly dependent relationship between the city and the province.
Or maybe, given that he's now fired a shot across Miller's bows, McGuinty will simply sit back and see how the Mayor responds.
Regardless, the fact that he's not actively avoiding a fight speaks to the degree to which McGuinty is remaking himself. If nothing else, at least Ontario politics has gotten a lot less boring.