Three scenes from the making of a quandary, beginning in January, 2013: Outside Maple Leaf Gardens, where the Ontario Liberals had convened to select a new Premier, hundreds of public-sector workers stood on Carlton Street in a heavy snowstorm to shout slogans and wave placards as party members filed in. Many of the signs bore the picture of an elephant; a reminder, the protestors said, that they would remember the way the outgoing Liberal leader had strong-armed them. “We won’t forget,” they yelled.

April, 2014: Just before Kathleen Wynne’s second budget was tabled, officials with AMAPCEO, the union representing skilled professionals, held a press conference at Queen’s Park to announce overwhelming support for their first strike vote in 22 years. Government negotiators, they said, were making unreasonable demands, including a four-year wage freeze. “We thought it was over in 2012, that the nightmare would end,” said president Gary Gannage. “But it’s back in 2014.”

His members, he said, while typically not confrontational, did not want to “wear a deficit that was not of their making.”

June, 2014: In a packed, sweaty bakery on Royal York Road on the day before the election, candidate Peter Milczyn introduced Kathleen Wynne to the thronging mass in red. This is the person who has the plan to build Ontario up, he said. “And she will do it with no cuts!” He hit the last two words hard. Cheers erupted.

They are scenes that, taken together, illustrate the kind of pickle that Kathleen Wynne finds herself in now. Fresh from a remarkable victory in which the Liberal leader demonized the Progressive Conservative plan to freeze public-sector wages and shrink the size of government, Ms. Wynne will in short order have to confront how she will live up to her own promises to balance the budget on schedule, ramping down spending with, as Mr. Milczyn put it so enthusiastically on Wednesday, no cuts.

In the very short term, the business will be easy. A majority government will allow the Premier to bring her failed budget back for quick passage shortly after the legislature returns on July 2. That budget pushed the messy problem of expense restraint another year down the road, which meant that it did exactly what it was supposed to do on the campaign trail: it made vanquished PC leader Tim Hudak isolated in his call for austerity, and allowed Ms. Wynne to assert that hers was the gentle, painless path to balance.

That charade ends right about now. Once the budget is passed, if not sooner, the Liberal government will have to begin negotiating in earnest with the province’s major public-sector unions, who are nearing the end of the two-year contracts that were signed, under the threat of binding legislation, not long before Dalton McGuinty left office, thanks in part to the push of the union boot. Ms. Wynne has often expressed regret for the way that process unfolded and she has been consistent, dating back to her leadership run, that she would not pursue similar tactics. When her government ripped up contracts with Ontario’s two largest teachers’ unions that had been imposed under Mr. McGuinty, language in the new, negotiated agreements specifically said that changes to compensation measures in future deals would be “the subject of collective bargaining.” This is in keeping with all of the Premier’s public statements on contract negotiations: she will respect the bargaining process.

But what that means, essentially, is that Ms. Wynne has forfeited her only avenue for leverage in those contract talks. Her budget states that there is no new money available for compensation increases, something she repeated often on the campaign trail, but it is no secret that the unions aren’t about to accept an opening offer full of zeroes. Even a friendly union like AMAPCEO is preparing to man the barricades, while the teachers’ federations have been telling members to prepare for the possibility of work stoppages in the fall, as they top up their strike funds. The comments from Mr. Gannage last month are a good representation of what labour leaders have been saying since Mr. McGuinty began his austerity push two years ago: the deficit isn’t our problem, so don’t put it on our backs to fix it. There’s also a lingering feeling that unions that promised not to strike in 2012, in hopes of getting the Liberals to blink first, were burned when the government imposed contracts anyway. There’s little appetite for repeating that process.

The next round of negotiations, then, will have unions uninterested in continued compensation restraint pitted against a government that has no money to offer and whose leader has promised to allow the bargaining process to play out. And Ms. Wynne can’t trade pay increases for layoffs, because, no cuts.

It is quite difficult to see how these positions, poles apart as they are, can be resolved. Will the Premier hope that asking nicely will convince the unions to fold? Will the unions force work stoppages, bringing about the labour chaos that Ms. Wynne just spent six weeks telling everyone would be avoided if they voted Liberal?

Or, does her commitment to bargaining extend only so far as determining a deal within the government’s fiscal parameters cannot be reached? In that scenario, the prospects of legislatively imposed contracts remain. But this is a labour movement in Ontario that just spent untold millions in aid of the Liberal cause. (That cause being: don’t vote PC.) Would the Wynne Liberals in 2014, in other words, pick the same fight with the unions that the McGuinty Liberals did in 2012?

Given all that Ms. Wynne has said and done since taking office, that seems highly unlikely. The irony is, had Mr. McGuinty had the same majority then that Ms. Wynne enjoys now, it’s a fight he would have won.