Everybody hates Bonnie. That's why she's so successful.

Plus: Fresh regs, staff shakeups, and Ford busts a move

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Q+A — BONNIE LYSYK has been a thorn in the side of governments of all stripes. It’s something she’s honed into a particular skill — especially when pitted against increasingly hostile powers over the past decade as Ontario’s Auditor General.

That comes with the territory when it’s your job to call out government waste and mismanagement — but even journalists have come out swinging against her sometimes non-traditional methods.

“I never Google myself, but my communications team Googled and they said: You know what comes up all the time — you’re ‘ineffective.’ And I said: My predecessor’s legacy was that he’s a man of integrity. Mine is gonna say she was ineffective,” she tells me, laughing.

Sure, her methods have made a splash — like the time she sent undercover mystery shoppers to casinos to assess money-laundering protections, or when she went toe-to-toe with the then-ruling Liberals over the accounting of pension assets. Then there was the time she lost a court battle …