Premier Kathleen Wynne says that she won’t waste energy worrying about her personal popularity, even with an election less than six months away.
Polls have consistently placed Wynne behind Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath when it comes to popularity but in a year-end interview with CTV News Toronto on Tuesday the premier said that she “can’t control” what people think about her and would rather focus on crafting policies that are popular ahead of an election that has to come before on or before June 7.
“Whether they like me or not it is kind of beside the point,” she told CTV’s Paul Bliss. “It is not really about popularity. It is about making sure that we have the supports in place that people need. At the end of the day if people have those supports then they will make their decision about who they are going to vote for.”
One recent Forum Research poll found that only 15 per cent of respondents approved of the job that Wynne is doing as premier while 74 per cent disapproved and 10 per cent offered no opinion.
Speaking with CTV News Toronto in the hallways of Queen’s Park, Wynne conceded that some people may avoid voting for Liberal candidates because they don’t like her but she said that her hope is that those people will have still benefited from policies implemented by her government.
“That is the point of being in government from my perspective,” she said.
College strike was ‘painful’
Reflecting on the past year, Wynne said that her government’s efforts to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2019 was a proud moment.
As for low lights, she said that a four-week faculty strike at Ontario colleges left her personally distraught.
“It is very worrisome. I am glad that 90 per cent of students are back working to finish their semester but it is painful to me that kids left because they felt like they couldn’t complete it,” she said of the estimated 26,000 students who dropped out as a result of the strike. “We need to look at the way such labour unrest affects kids. Right now there isn’t anything in the rules that allows a separate entity to say ‘The year is in jeopardy and so the government needs to step in.’ We need to look at whether that is something we need to change.”
