After a decade in the political wilderness, Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives returned to majority power on this date in 1995. Led by North Bay, Ontario’s Mike Harris, the PCs won a commanding 82 seats, compared to 30 for the Liberals and 17 for the NDP. Premier Harris then went on to implement his party’s platform, the Common Sense Revolution, over the following four years. In 1999 Harris was re-elected with another majority mandate granted him by Ontario’s voters.  He would step down as Premier and party leader in 2002. Below is a column I wrote for the Kingston Whig-Standard in 2020 to mark the 25^th anniversary of the first Harris victory. By Arthur Milnes I will never forget the day I met Michael D. Harris. I was a Queen’s University student.  It was 1988 and I appeared as a witness before a committee of the Ontario legislature studying the Meech Lake accord.  After I presented my paper and spoke to the MPPs, the questioning began. A couple of the committee members asked me questions and seemed to brush me off.  As the questioning continued, I began to get mad.  It seemed to me, all of 21 years old, that these politicians were brushing me off due to my youth. Harris, however, was different.  The first thing that hit me is that he’d obviously read my paper before he questioned me.  He had serious but fair critiques of my views, and Harris was treating me like an equal.  The future premier’s questions went on for a while, and as we sparred, my respect for him grew each time he engaged me. More than a decade later, I had my next lengthy encounter with Harris.  It took place when I was a reporter for the Whig-Standard.  He was in Kingston and was then the 22nd premier of Ontario.  My editor, Claude Scilley, had tasked me with interviewing Harris. So, I walked into Harris’s room at the Holiday Inn and our interview began.  Hospital restructuring was the big issue of the day, and I had been prepped to ask him some very detailed local questions about the situation in Kingston.  Harris began to answer them in equal detail. He had no briefing material in front of him, no aide hovering around to assist him.  Premier Harris was in charge, and he was very familiar with his Kingston brief.  It was one of the most impressive performances I ever witnessed from a political leader during my reporter days. I’ve been reflecting on these memories of Harris for some days as I planned to interview him for the 25th anniversary of his first being elected premier on June 8, 1995.  As I look back today with a more historical perspective, it is clear that one could embrace Harris’s policies, or not.  What you couldn’t do — now or then — was dismiss him. “Hindsight is great,” he told me last week in an email interview ahead of his anniversary.  “I wish I could have done more to make the public education system better and more accountable.  I am not sure we need four systems and bureaucracies in every district.  Perhaps the Alberta model and the province, not elected school boards, having control of public education with empowered parent councils would give us better accountability and results.  Alberta’s costs are lower than ours and testing results are better and teachers are paid about the same.  I wish we had had time to look at other models for reform.” Of course, I asked him what he considers to be his and his government’s greatest legacies — 18 years after leaving the Ontario premiership. “I am proud of many of our accomplishments, but the economic trifecta of cutting taxes to create private sector growth and jobs and balancing the budget, while increasing spending at the same time, stands out,” he said.  “Most economists and reporters said it couldn’t be done in five years like we promised.  We did it in four years! “We made structural changes to government that hadn’t been contemplated before: In health care with hospital restructuring, (and) in education with moving to a new, tougher, curriculum in K-12, not K-13.  (With) accountability (such as) province-wide testing, (and) taking education off the residential property taxes. (We also) instituted welfare reforms to help those trapped in a cycle of dependence to getting a job, tax reforms to make our businesses more competitive and to give families more money in their pockets.” I also asked Harris what he hoped history’s verdict might be. “I hope,” he said, “future historians will reflect on the many accomplishments of our government. … I hope they say about me that, ‘He did what he said he would do and that made him unique in politics.’” For me, I’d suggest another enduring legacy of his is the positive example he set for other conservative-minded leaders and parties (particularly when compared to many of today’s practitioners of American conservatism). Harris’s conservatism was economic.  He refused to drag his party — or our province — through the wasteland of endless discussions of abortion and other social issues conservatives can be distracted by.  One of his finest appointments, for example, was to appoint former Kingston MPP Keith Norton, who was openly gay, to the position of chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. There were and are no shades of grey in considering Mike Harris, but all can agree on this: He indeed did what he said he was going to do. That’s not a bad legacy to leave in your political wake, I’d say. caption id="attachment_563107" align="aligncenter" width="423" Official Portrait of former Ontario Premier Mike Harris/caption Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist.  He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy.  A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.