In the process, he had achieved something unprecedented in Canadian politics. In 2010, a Corporate Research Associates poll showed Newfoundland voter satisfaction with its government at a giddy-making 93 per cent. Williams’s personal popularity, even after he’d taken heat for traveling to the United States for heart surgery, topped 81 per cent. An Angus Reid national poll declared Williams the most popular politician in the whole country, scoring 20 per cent higher than his closest rival premier.

It would have been easy enough, and more than somewhat tempting, to stick around for another election or two, to reap the rewards of what had become his decade’s investment in politics.

Instead, just a week after unveiling his finger-in-the-eye-to-Quebec Muskrat Falls deal, Danny Williams announced he was resigning from politics.

Quitting, it turned out, was the easy part.

By the time he’d reached the end of the first three months of a vague plan to take life easier (“I was 60 years old, I had four kids, seven grandkids I needed to be around, so I decided I had to take some time, enjoy what I worked so hard to achieve”), Danny Williams admits he was full-blown “stir crazy.” He still played hockey once a week, golfed “maybe twice a week,” watched TV (“Breaking Bad, Damages, foolish reality TV, anything”), enjoyed his collection of expensive cars, including his white Bentley and his black Maserati Quattroporte (“I like cars”) and read obsessively but selectively (“I don’t read leisurely and I don’t read novels; I’ll read The Economist and Forbes, Maclean’s“), but none of it ultimately scratched his itch for action.

Luckily, it turned out to be easy enough for him to find distractions. Invited to help lure the American Hockey League’s Manitoba Moose franchise to St. John’s, Williams not only became the renamed (he renamed it) St. John’s IceCaps president, CEO, logo designer and chief cheerleader, but he also helped micromanage a break-even-at-best labour of love into a paying proposition, consistently filling every one of Mile One Centre’s 6,300 seats and corporate boxes.

Within a few months of the IceCaps first-season opening game, Williams was off on yet another track, announcing a grand $5-billion scheme to develop what amounts to a brand new community the size of Gander (complete with its own industrial park, big-box shopping complex, 5,000 private homes, condos, town houses, apartments, even a seniors’ apartment complex all built around a village square with neigbourhood shops, restaurants, pubs, schools, a hospital, recreation complex, walking trails and even a skating pond) on a 2,400-acre plot of what is still mostly hilly rock and bog on the western edge of St. John’s.

Williams had bought the land at auction (he was the only bidder) during his 1990s, pre-premier era, and then built Glendenning, a golf course, on one 100-acre corner. After he became premier, of course, the land, along with the rest of his assets, ended up in a blind trust. Today, thanks in no small measure to the city’s newfound, Williams-goosed prosperity, the property has become the last best chunk of developable real estate around St. John’s.

Site work for the new community, which will be called Galway, he says, to honour his mother whose maiden name was Galway, was slated to begin this spring with the first lot for sale in 2015 and the first retail spaces to open in 2016.

This latest project, Williams says, is no different than his cable television empire. “It’s incremental. One phase will help finance the next, and the yield won’t come for 25 years.”

Twenty-five years? Williams will be 65 in August.

“For the kids,” he shrugs.

Retirement?

He laughs. “I guess I’m going to die at my desk.” he says.

Danny Williams, of course, is far from the first entrepreneur to have fantasized about what he would do if only he had the opportunity to wield political power. But he is one of the few to have done it, one of even fewer who can claim to have smoothly skated from savvy, wealthy businessman to popular, accomplished politician and back with his reputation for both, not just intact but enhanced.

When he first decided to “get off the pot” back in 2000, Williams admits today, he naively assumed he’d spend six or seven years – “max” – in politics, and then move on. He hadn’t taken into account the reality that the Liberal government of the day would hang on as long as possible before finally calling a general election for October 21, 2003. “That wasn’t in the plan,” he concedes, but the truth is he needed that time to figure out how politics really worked. “When I started, I knew nothing about government,” he says.

He learned. “I went in thinking I’d be the general manager” of the business of government, but quickly discovered there was more to being premier than “just running the office. People hold you in esteem because you’re the premier. I remember thinking when I got off that plane in Ottawa (to negotiate the Atlantic Accord), ‘if I fail here, I will have let the people down.’ Everything was on my shoulders. It wasn’t for the greater glory of Danny; there was an esteem for the office and you had to live up to it…. You end up more respectful of the office.”

There were advantages to being an extremely successful businessmanturned- politician, of course. With his “count-the-zeroes” wealth, “I never had to think about fundraising, never had to worry about the next election.” Which gave him the freedom to look beyond the four-year political cycle and think about how a policy decision might play out 10 or 20 years into the future. “I think of myself as an end-game player,” he tells me.

Though he insists he’s happy to have put electoral politics behind him, he’s still sought out for – and still happy to offer – his always quotable comments on matters of interest to Newfoundland.

During a recent media event about his new real estate development, for example, Williams was asked for his opinion on a Conference Board of Canada report predicting Newfoundland’s population would decline by tens of thousands of people in the years to come. “In my opinion,” he said while the cameras whirred and editors nervously cleared their throats, “it’s absolute bullshit. That’s the simplest way I can put it.”

When I tell him that the cab driver who drove me from my hotel to his downtown office told me he wished “Danny” would seek the once again vacant job of leader of the PC Party and premier, Williams smiles.

“I wasn’t a reluctant bride,” he admits of his own initial run for office. “And I’m glad I did it. But that’s done now. I can’t go back, and I don’t want to go back.”

He leads me to the window, points to a barren, hilly speck of land in the distance. “That’s the future now,” he says.