The Method Behind The Madness

Like his Orange Cousin to the south, Doug Ford is a disruptor -- and a master of distraction. Mitch Potter writes:

From the vengeful, shock-and-awe downsizing of Toronto city council to the ham-fisted and ultimately failed attempt to install old family friend Ron Taverner atop the Ontario Provincial Police, isn’t Ford still simply bumbling forward with a haphazard bagful of random ideas, still clumsily feeling out the limits of his new-found power?

In the midst of the madness some people see a method:

No, according to many veteran scholars of Ontario politics, who see in this government’s latest moves — and in the distractions themselves — clear evidence that old, tried and true Progressive Conservative patterns now are taking hold around Ford. They now see sophisticated method in the seemingly populist madness.

It is no accident that every time the tough stuff comes out (the budget, the transit plan), the Ford government has a companion piece to go with it to take the conversation elsewhere,” said Tim Abray, a doctoral candidate at Queen’s University’s department of political studies who specializes in the effects of political communication on voter behaviour.

“The Ford government is getting very good at popping these things out and the best example is the biggest story of the last week — the seemingly trivial and largely symbolic and meaningless licence plate slogan change to a 50-year-old phrase from the summer I was born — ‘A Place to Grow.’

“It’s worthy of discussion — but is it worthy of dominating discussion? That’s not lost on the government’s communications strategists. It’s a weird and very different hybrid — a populist premier with an unclear, uncertain agenda together with a highly orchestrated, carefully modulated communications machine that, when things get hot on contentious issues, is able to bait discussion away from policy and toward symbolism.”

That symbolism, not by accident, signals to a specific thread of nostalgia that has coursed through Ontario conservatives for decades.

Some see Ford as Mike Harris 2.0. But Nelson Wiseman isn't so sure:

Wiseman, a veteran professor of Canadian Studies at University of Toronto, is an outlier among the scholars interviewed for this article, in that he now sees Ford more closely aligned with Donald Trump in style and substance than he did a year ago.

“I threw water on that idea. But I see it more now because it is clear that like Trump he feels he can dictate by fiat and to some extent he can. It’s entertaining, it’s disruptive and it’s disturbing — and it is consistent with someone who doesn’t know the system, doesn’t know how it works and what he does know he doesn’t like — and feels like he has a mandate to blow it up,” said Wiseman.

“What’s clear is that while the majority of his MPPs didn’t want Ford as leader — and a good number of them, I believe, think he is the yahoo that he is — they are also frightened of him because of course he holds their future in his hands. He can keep them from running as a conservative in the next election.”

This gray head has concluded that, at this point in time, we've displayed a talent for electing the pathologically stupid. That's the method behind the madness.

Image: The Toronto Star