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Kathleen Wynne, and the people around her, had rarely looked happier on the campaign trail.

It was the final day before Ontario's 2014 election and, with the wind at her back, the Premier sailed across Toronto's core, stopping in to all five of the city's NDP-held ridings for buoyant events alongside Liberal candidates.

This was not the typical itinerary at this stage of the campaign for the leader of a party whose fortunes are typically made and broken in suburbia. But Ms. Wynne, an urbane activist, was not your typical Liberal Leader. She wanted downtown Toronto and she got Toronto – more than her predecessor Dalton McGuinty, more than NDP Leader Andrea Horwath. A day later, three of those five orange ridings turned red and, though Ms. Wynne would have won a majority government anyway, the heart of the city took on an outsized role in the narrative of her triumph.

Less than three years later, any illusions that Ms. Wynne would foster a dramatically different relationship with the city from past premiers – that this was Toronto's moment – have been shattered.

Ms. Wynne's social progressiveness, manifested in rhetoric and in broader policies such as the province's update of its sex-education curriculum, may play better downtown than anywhere else in the province. But when she recently steamrolled over Toronto Mayor John Tory – abruptly announcing she would block the city's attempts to impose tolls on the highways into it – she served a reminder that even with the most Toronto-oriented premier Ontario will see for some time, suburbia still rules provincial politics.

Although hardly a panacea, the proposed tolls for taking the Don Valley and Gardiner Expressways were meant as a way for the city to take a little more control of its own finances – to slightly reduce both its reliance on unstable cash streams, such as the land-transfer tax, and its need to go cap-in-hand to the province for help with funding shortfalls. Instead Ms. Wynne made it even more reliant on (insufficient) provincial charity, promising that in a few years Queen's Park will start transferring to Toronto an extra share of Ontario's gas tax, albeit probably not as much as the tolls would have brought in.

Given that Ms. Wynne came into office as a champion of mechanisms such as tolls to pay for modern infrastructure, and initially encouraged Mr. Tory to introduce them, her about-face was in one sense shocking. But in terms of regional politics, it was pretty much par for the course.

Because about 40 per cent of the tolls' revenues would have come from residents in outlying suburbs who don't actually live in the city that would have been collecting them, there's a temptation to translate this into a simple 416 versus 905 tension. But it's not quite that simple, as evidenced by only a small number of Liberal MPPs standing up for Mr. Tory's plan, while many more of them rebelled at contentious cabinet and caucus meetings that prompted Ms. Wynne's reversal. Plenty of residents of inner suburbs that are part of the city, such as Scarborough and North York, also rely daily on the DVP and the Gardiner. So the core of the city was the only place there wouldn't have been much anti-toll sentiment.

Such political isolation is a familiar feeling for the old city of Toronto, especially since then-premier Mike Harris amalgamated it with the inner suburbs two decades ago. It may be the province's economic engine, or at least the biggest cog in it; it's relied upon, on a daily basis, by a whole lot of people who don't live in it; it's certainly where you'll find the most impassioned and wonkish discussions about modern urban planning. But even at the municipal level, the core is often overruled by those inner suburbs, where there are more votes. And when Toronto's government is willing to move forward with a policy that will be most popular downtown, the combined weight of the inner suburbs and the outer ones – the various Greater Toronto Area municipalities – can evidently be enough to sway even a Premier who is most naturally aligned with downtown.

From the provincial Liberals' perspective, to borrow a turn of phrase from late Toronto mayor Rob Ford: The urban seats are nice to have, but the suburban ones are need to have. As much as Ms. Wynne might very much like to hold onto a handful of vulnerable ones in the core, it's the dozens of battlegrounds to the east, west and north that she needs to somehow hold to avoid electoral disaster.

That's not to say her party necessarily won't paint downtown red again in next year's election, possibly even as it gets wiped out in most of the rest of the province. But if it does, it will be because neither of the other two major parties' leaders – both of whom, not coincidentally, immediately and unequivocally opposed Mr. Tory's toll plan – are much interested in playing to it at all.

Ms. Wynne may still be the closest thing downtown Toronto has to a champion among Ontario's prospective premiers, if only by default. But she may want to check any impulse to go on another triumphant tour of it.

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