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When George Smitherman left Ontario's cabinet last week, the focus was mostly on the job he will be seeking.

Lost in the shuffle were the jobs he had promised 15,000 other Ontarians.

Those jobs, and $7-billion in investment, were what the former energy and infrastructure minister said his "framework" green-energy agreement with South Korea's Samsung Group was worth. And in normal circumstances, that probably would have been good enough for other provincial Liberals, given the amount of latitude Mr. Smitherman enjoyed during most of his six years as a senior minister.

Instead, the deal got caught up in internal Liberal politics. Mr. Smitherman's perceived conflict, as he simultaneously plotted a mayoral campaign and served as a senior minister, led colleagues to question his motives in making Samsung an unusually favourable offer to develop wind and solar power. That led to a blowup during a cabinet meeting, some details of which were leaked to the media. And that in turn helped lead to Mr. Smitherman's exit a month earlier than he had planned and before he had a chance to announce the fruit of his negotiations.

As a result, the debate over the Samsung deal continues without the participation of its main champion. Meanwhile, the ministers most actively engaged in the file since his departure hardly seem like natural advocates for it.

No member of Dalton McGuinty's cabinet may be less eager to attach his name to a potential controversy than Gerry Phillips. An elder statesman in the Liberal caucus, the risk-averse, process-oriented veteran MPP is practically the antithesis of Mr. Smitherman. Now, temporarily installed as Energy Minister - a job he held previously, before deciding it was more than he wanted to deal with at this stage of his career - he's at least nominally charged with determining the deal's fate.

To help with that task, sources say, Mr. Phillips will meet with Finance Minister Dwight Duncan and Economic Development Minister Sandra Pupatello, neither of whom is a charter member of Mr. Smitherman's fan club. Ms. Pupatello, in particular, is said to have been a ringleader of the "gang tackle" at the cabinet table. Throw in the rumours that Mr. Phillips was critical of the deal as well, and none of this seems like a recipe for putting it on the fast-track.

Whether that's a good thing depends on how one interprets Mr. Smitherman's motives in trying to speed it along in the first place.

From the perspective of his rivals, the Samsung negotiations were all about scoring a big green-energy hit before he headed out the door. They believe his willingness to compromise the open bidding process he himself had set up to encourage green-energy investment - by promising Samsung a big chunk of the province's limited transmission capacity and possibly even higher premiums than the generous ones being offered to other alternative energy suppliers - was largely about his own political interests. And they think he was perfectly happy to leave his colleagues cleaning up any mess.

Mr. Smitherman's defenders counter that he was asked by the government to generate tens of thousands of alternative-energy jobs in a hurry, and that this was the best hope of making major headway. With much of North America now competing to build green industries, they argue, a lack of urgency or decisiveness would result in Samsung - which is looking to make a big wind-energy splash - taking its business elsewhere.

Mr. McGuinty, it bears noting, seems to fall into the latter camp. Mr. Smitherman did not exactly go rogue: By most accounts, the Premier's office was actively aware of his negotiations, if not engaged in them.

If he wanted to, the Premier could simply force the deal down his ministers' throats. But after a pretty brutal fall, in which he's been forced to deal with one controversy after another, he's surely not eager to sow the seeds of dissent within his cabinet.

A better prospect is that, with some tweaks, the Liberals will be able to arrive at a compromise deal that's acceptable to both the cabinet and to Samsung.

Otherwise, the entire saga will represent a major miscalculation on the part of Mr. McGuinty and Mr. Smitherman. The implicit understanding seems to have been that Mr. Smitherman would stick around to see the deal through. Instead, his continued presence may have scuttled it.

Maybe that would be a curse; maybe it would be a blessing. But the many billions of dollars at stake, and all those promised jobs, are a helpful reminder that all the drama surrounding Mr. Smitherman's departure was about more than just one man's ambitions.