Michael Bryant was, until recently, the best-dressed member of the McGuinty government: designer suits by Swank and Tiger of Sweden, statement ties (you don’t see a lot of Windsor knots around Queen’s Park), eyewear more indie rocker than MPP. He frequently sports a red Novesa watch (“my liberal bling,” as he calls it) that pokes out from his sleeve every time he gesticulates, which, for the record, is often.

I meet Bryant on his first official day off in 10 years. By Bryant standards, he is dressed down (imagine weekend wear in a Harry Rosen catalogue) but still immaculate. It’s been barely a week since he abruptly announced plans to leave his post as minister of economic development to accept a gig as CEO of Invest Toronto. Why? He says he started to get “itchy” and was ready for a new challenge when the opportunity to serve as Toronto’s head pitchman landed in his lap.

That he accepted the position came as a shock to many observers who viewed Bryant as a rising star in the Liberal party, but it’s easy to see why he was offered the job. The man works a room with the kind of confidence most people reserve for singing in the shower, and given Toronto’s pathological modesty, a jolt of his unabashed look-at-me-ness could be just what we need.

Invest Toronto is a new organization, operating at arm’s length from city council, to promote Toronto as a destination for big business. The plan is to model it after World Business Chicago, which helped transform a post-industrial lummox with a beer-gut image into a resurgent lakeside metropolis Torontonians now drool over. The basic idea, says Bryant, is to firewall economic development off from politics—sort of like Singapore does, he says, but “without the canings.” Never mind Chicago or Singa­pore. In the next 10 years, Bryant casually suggests, Toronto’s economy could very well surpass those of New York, London and Paris. That’s a helluva tall order, but thinking big hasn’t failed him yet.

You could safely call Bryant—father of two, husband of high-powered entertainment lawyer Susan Abramo­vitch—an overachiever. He was born and raised in B.C., and by the age of 33, when he entered politics, he had four degrees under his belt (including a master of laws from Harvard), along with career stops at the Supreme Court of Canada, law firms in New York and Toronto, and the University of London, England. As the youngest attorney general in Ontario history, he famously pulled the plug on pit bull ownership (“ticking time bombs,” according to Bryant), and sought to maximize restrictions against Karla Homolka after her 2005 release—both headline-grabbing initiatives he clearly relished. At Aboriginal Affairs, he negotiated a landmark gaming revenue–sharing agreement with First Nations and returned blood-soaked Ipperwash Provincial Park to their control. As minis­ter of economic development, he headed the province’s response to the auto industry collapse until late May, when he abruptly gave his notice, resuscitating rumours that he and McGuinty just couldn’t get along. Bryant scoffs at the idea, describing each of his high-profile cabinet portfolios much as a teenager might describe a skateboarding video: “awesome,” delivered from the back of his throat.