By Greg Van Moorsel, The London Free Press
Buying a hockey jersey with No. 99 on the back doesn’t make you Wayne Gretzky. Any couch potato will tell you. Wearing a Spider-Man mask and red-and-blue tights doesn’t confer Spidey’s powers on you. Even kids know better.
How, then, does slipping on a pair of bright red Wellington boots and walking around in barnyard muck make one an agriculture minister? The truth is, it doesn’t. It’s about time someone told Ontario’s rookie premier just that.
Two months ago, when she was sworn in as premier, Kathleen Wynne decided she’d do double duty — but only for a year — as the minister in charge of the province’s largest industry. Other premiers before have moonlighted, usually as intergovernmental affairs minister.
Wynne, however, would be different in the farm beat. While clinging to office by her fingernails, learning to be a premier and trying to hold a fragile minority government together, Dalton McGuinty’s successor would — what, on her lunch breaks? — also tend to a complicated industry that employs more than 700,000. Read article
