All were on hand — McGuinty family members dotted through the crowd like raisins in a Christmas cake — to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Premier Dalton McGuinty’s election to the Ontario legislature, to toast the nice guy who’d finished first, the local boy who’d made good.

It was the same hall in which the tall, impeccably postured lawyer had announced his 1996 campaign to lead the Ontario Liberals. On tables and easels along one wall were old news clippings, the buttons and bumph of campaigns past, photo albums chronicling one of the most unlikely success stories in Ontario’s political history. 

Dalton James Patrick McGuinty, Jr., was an accidental premier, a man seemingly without natural attributes for politics, but the squeaky-clean owner of an otherworldly self-discipline, persistence and capacity for improvement. Save for biological imperatives, an acquaintance joked that night, it was easy to have pictured him wearing a clerical collar as a popular young parish priest in his neighbourhood of Alta Vista.

Elected in 1990, after the sudden death of his MPP father, Mc- Guinty put in six years of famously anonymous service in opposition at Queen’s Park. He shocked his own Liberal colleagues with McGuinty an audacious run for the party leadership in 1996. Then, just popular enough to be a grudging compromise candidate, he won the job on the fifth ballot of a comically bizarre convention at which, of the six serious candidates, he stood fourth on the first two ballots.

Even to some Liberals, it seemed a perverse mistake, the latest miscalculation of a party that seldom blew the chance to miss an opportunity. But the most consistently under-estimated politician in Canada would have the final chuckle on his legion of doubters, recovering from an initial campaign defeat in 1999 to win the premier’s job in 2003 and 2007 with back-to-back majorities — the first Ontario Liberal leader in more than half a century to do so.

In office, McGuinty evolved into an assured leader of unshakeable composure, a calm he maintained even as Ontario endured wrenching economic transformation, the near-death experience of the auto industry, and humiliating descent into have-not status in Confederation. Through it all, none who worked with him can recall the leader losing his temper or so much as raising his voice. That night in Ottawa in 2010, the guest of honour, still remarkably fit at 55 and only modestly greyed by the cares of high office, told his longest-standing supporters that while the corrosive nature of politics tends to strip away idealism, he’d never lost his. Still, for all the goodwill of the evening, the satisfaction of past triumphs and shared memories, a nagging thought might have troubled the minds of the savvier politicos in the hall. What the fall of 2010 also marked was the closing of a window, the last sure opening gone for Dalton McGuinty to make a graceful exit from Ontario politics, to walk into the history books as near to the top of his game as unforgiving political reality allows. McGuinty was once asked, when former premier Mike Harris announced his resignation in October 2001, whether his adversary had left too early or too late. Harris had done it just right, he said.

After 22 years as a politician, 16 as party leader and almost a decade as premier, what will be McGuinty’s legacy? In ‘Quiet Evolution,’ Toronto Star feature writer Jim Coyle chronicles one of the most unlikely success stories in Ontario’s political history.

To get the full story, simply go to stardispatches.com starting Jan. 11 and subscribe for $1/week. Quiet Evolution is also available for single-copy purchase at itunes.ca or starstore.ca for $2.99.