He's Running Out Of Scapegoats

In another two days, Doug Ford will have been premier of Ontario for a year. And, after a year, the Ford operation is beginning to smell. But Ford blames others for that smell. Martin Regg Cohn writes:

First, he fired Vic Fedeli — faulting his finance minister for the worst budget rollout in recent memory. Leaving the premier faultless as usual.

Next, he parted ways with Dean French — blaming his once-powerful chief of staff for the most pungent patronage appointments in recent memory. Leaving the premier blameless as usual.

Those appointments were particularly egregious:

Never mind the bizarre appointment of a 26-year-old French family friend to be Ontario’s handsomely paid envoy in New York — a posting shut down decades ago but revived by the supposedly parsimonious PC government.

Never mind the New York posting that Ford belatedly cancelled when word got out. Former PC party president Jag Badwal, a realtor, is still being rewarded with a sinecure in Dallas as a new trade representative to promote investment in Ontario. If that patronage plum — a pretend job — still passes Ford’s smell test, he needs new nostrils.

And have we forgotten the Washington patronage pigginess that the premier proclaimed with evident pride last October? “I am so happy to announce,” Ford boasted back then, that PC loyalist Ian Todd would be Ontario’s new trade representative at an annual salary of $350,000 a year — a hefty $75,000 more than his predecessor Monique Smith, a former cabinet minister appointed by Wynne, and considerably more than Canada’s full-fledged ambassador to Washington, David MacNaughton (whose pay band is $248,000 to $292,000).

Emboldened by his own hubris, Ford arranged for a job to be created specially for his longtime Etobicoke crony Ron Taverner, a 72-year-old cop, at the Ontario Cannabis Store for $270,000 a year plus bonus — a pay hike of nearly $90,000 over his police job. When Taverner had second thoughts, the premier’s office paved the way for him to become commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police at $275,000 (the original job qualifications were lowered, allowing him to apply despite lacking the required rank).

The uproar prompted a three-month probe by the legislature’s integrity commissioner, laying bare the shamelessness in the premier’s office that scandalized the province. A chastened Taverner withdrew his name, but Ford remained unrepentant, insisting that the final report amounted to “complete — I repeat a complete — vindication.”

This is the same premier who once thundered against “Liberal insiders getting rich off your taxes,” while solemnly promising to “put the people ahead of insiders and elites.” What about Tory insiders getting rich off our taxes?

Ford claims that none of this was his fault because, Cohn writes, "Ford doesn’t do introspection nor retrospection, not even recognition of where he’s gone wrong."

However, he's running out of scapegoats.

Image: twitter