An era ends, an era begins.
Just before 1 p.m. yesterday, nearly 45 minutes behind schedule, Mike Harris opened the door of his Queen's Park office to give what promised to be the last summing-up of his 21 years in Ontario politics.
A couple of hours earlier, his cabinet colleagues had stood to applaud the Premier who had led them through some of the fiercest political battles in provincial history.
It ought to have been the stuff of high drama and, indeed, Mr. Harris acknowledged it was an emotional meeting.
How emotional? Well, it doesn't sound like it was two-hankie Oprah material.
"We did some business and we spent a little bit of time reminiscing on some of the challenges we had, mostly personal experiences that we had together," he said. "They were a lot of very private, personal feelings that we all had."
The soon-to-be-departing Premier wasn't a lot more effervescent about what he has accomplished since his Progressive Conservatives stormed into office in 1995.
He boasted that his government has kept 97 per cent of the promises it made in the last election campaign in 1999 and 99 per cent of the commitments made in the last Throne Speech. But he didn't mention his fabled Common Sense Revolution, and he didn't even raise the fact that his government had tamed the $11-billion budget deficit monster it discovered when it moved into Queen's Park.
Instead, as his legacy, he mentioned simply that his government had introduced drug testing for welfare recipients, had set up a telephone medical-advice line and was bringing in mandatory testing of teachers.
A couple of hours later, 75 kilometres away in Orangeville, it wasn't a whole lot more scintillating.
Ernie Eves, the premier-designate, descended from an elevator in a senior citizens home 25 minutes behind schedule to explain why taxpayers are being asked to cough up about $300,000 for a by-election to get him into the legislature.
He rejected the suggestion that there was no mandate for the government he will form on April 15 since Mr. Harris had fulfilled 99 per cent of his promises. He didn't need to call a general election because there was much to be done, he said.
"It's important for the people of Ontario to see by acts, not just by words, how you're going to put a new face on the government," he said.
There were, for example, some tax-cut pledges he had talked about as finance minister two years ago that were still to be implemented. There was a need to get textbooks for the new school curriculum and there was . . . well, actually, that was about it.
Mr. Eves was perhaps more successful in defending his decision to run in Dufferin-Peel-Wellington-Grey rather than in the Nipissing constituency that Mr. Harris vacated on Tuesday.
He said he wasn't persuaded by the fact that the Orangeville-area riding being vacated by backbencher David Tilson is the third-safest Conservative seat in the province. And his choice had nothing to do with the fact that Mr. Harris won his seat in 1999 by fewer than 3,000 votes.
Dufferin-Peel is the "obvious choice," he argued, because it's an easy commute to Toronto and because his partner, Isabel Bassett, has for nearly three decades owned a home just down Highway 9 that he has been coming to nearly every weekend for the past two years.
He is, he insisted, just coming home. "Everybody knows me at the local grocery store; everybody knows me in Howard's butcher shop," he said.
"They certainly know me at the local Canadian Tire store; they certainly know me in the local bookstore; we were in there Christmas shopping this year, so I do feel at home."
Lurking off to one side, Liberal MPP (and party president) Greg Sorbara was snickering about the premier-designate's choice of a constituency.
"I think they did their numbers [in Nipissing]and they knew that the ease of the campaign would not be as great as perhaps here [in Dufferin-Peel]" he said.
He pledged that the by-election would be toughly fought and that the new era of Ernie Eves would not begin as quietly as the old era of Mike Harris ended.
"The suggestion that we should just sort of step aside and allow the premier-elect an easy path back to Queen's Park . . . just isn't acceptable."