The Dumbest

 Max Fawcett writes that Doug Ford is dumbing down Ontario:

At an announcement for a new medical school at York University, Ford suggested that he wanted to get rid of all the province’s international post-secondary students. It does not appear to have occurred to Ford that those students currently make up 18 per cent of the student body at Ontario’s colleges and universities or that they’ve helped keep these institutions afloat after Ford’s government cut tuition by 10 per cent in 2019 and kept it frozen there ever since. “I’m not being mean, but I’m taking care of our students, our kids first,” he said. “I want 100 per cent of Ontario students going to these universities.”

This is the sort of narrow-minded parochialism you might expect from Quebec’s government, not Ontario’s. But then, even describing Ford’s remarks as parochial gives them credit they don’t deserve since it presumes he’s at least thought about the issues at play for more than a few seconds. As The Canadian Press reported, “Ford then lamented the fact that some kids and parents have said some Ontario students study abroad and then do not return home after they meet someone.”

That’s right: Ford is willing to risk bankrupting his province’s post-secondary institutions because sometimes people leave Ontario to study and don’t return. And while Ford will walk this back in due course, it’s just the latest demonstration of his monumental intellectual shortcomings that are turning the province he governs into a second-rate echo of its former self.

Ford takes the same position when it comes to housing:

Nowhere is that more apparent than on the housing front, where Ford’s enthusiasm for building housing quickly evaporated after it became clear he couldn’t use it to enrich developers and other friends and donors. First, he made it clear he wasn’t about to allow municipalities to build fourplexes as a right, in part because he doesn’t even seem to understand what a fourplex is. “You go in the little communities and start putting up four-storey, six-storey, eight-storey buildings right deep into the communities, there's going to be a lot of shouting and screaming. That's a massive mistake.”

An even bigger mistake would be turning down the federal government’s new offer of billions of dollars for housing simply because you don’t want to meet their conditions, but that’s exactly what Ford sounds like he'll do. Ford has tried to defend this indefensible decision on the basis that he won’t tell local governments what to do, but as David Moscrop pointed out in a piece for TVO, his government has done just that in issuing almost 10 times as many MZOs (minister’s zoning orders) since 2019 as the previous Liberal government did during its 15 years in power.

“The government has no problem meddling in municipal planning,” Moscrop wrote. “Its problem is that it hates urban density, preferring single-family homes and the occasional townhouse.” This is the height of self-defeating stupidity when you’re in the midst of a housing crisis, and it’s even dumber when the federal government is offering you billions of dollars to do the things your own housing affordability task force already recommended.

This week the Ford government announced that it would include nursing home rooms as new houses when counting the number of homes built. I don't know who is Canada's worst premier. But Ford gets my vote as the dumbest. 

Image: Toronto Life

The Real Doug Ford

During the federal election, Doug Ford kept his head down and his mouth shut. But, if you really want to know what's going on inside Ford's head, Martin Regg Cohn writes that you should pay attention to what he said on his visit to Washington:

In the rarefied air of Washington this month, Ford forgot himself. Or more precisely, he allowed himself to be himself.

How else to explain his passionate homage to Donald Trump?

“I loved listening to the president’s State of the Union address the other night,” Ford gushed to a hushed Canadian American Business Council. “We hope the election is going to turn out the right way. Literally the right way.”

And he expressed his disdain for Bernie Sanders:

Ford went on to badmouth Bernie Sanders, the current front-runner in the party’s primaries, for daring to call himself a social democrat: “That’s actually scary. It is. It really is.”

Never mind that Sanders is merely an echo of the New Democratic Party that came second among Ontario voters in the election, and that now serves faithfully as Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in the legislature. Scary for Americans, which translates as shame on you Ontarians, in Ford’s book.

There is an old Canadian norm: when you visit a foreign country, you don't meddle in its politics. Occasionally that norm has been broken -- as when Lester Pearson publicly disagreed with LBJ on the Vietnam War. But Pearson was a diplomat at his core. And he knew how to express a difference of opinion diplomatically. Ford's comments on Sanders underscore the fact that Ford possesses no diplomatic talent.

Moreover, it's becoming increasingly apparent that Ford possesses no talent all all.

Image: Pinterest

Sound Familiar?

The most important take away from Doug Ford's decision to downsize Toronto's city council is what it says about Mr. Ford. Adam Radwanski writes:

With Friday’s announcement that he intends to dramatically change some of the province’s municipal elections already under way and outright cancel others, Mr. Ford demonstrated that unwritten rules for how premiers are supposed to act do not apply.

If not the what, it’s the how that should alarm Ontarians.

Every system of government has written and unwritten rules. Ford has sent a clear signal that he doesn't give a damn about the unwritten rules -- and that his government will be about settling old scores:

What was so urgent about Mr. Ford’s changes that they couldn’t wait until the next municipal votes in 2022 to be fairly implemented? The generous explanation is that he’s really eager to act on his impression from his single term on Toronto council that too many elected politicians are bad for government. A less charitable one is that he’s being vindictive toward old foes, thwarting former PC leader Patrick Brown’s plan to run for Peel regional chair and messing with John Tory, who bested Mr. Ford in Toronto’s past mayoral race.

Whatever his motives, Ford has chosen chaos before change:

That kind of chaos could grow wearying after a while. But in a political culture in which it’s increasingly possible for politicians like Mr. Ford to exploit cynicism around public institutions and other members of the political class, it could also become the new normal in a hurry − no squinting required.

 It's government by thugs -- and Ford is the Thug-in-Chief.

Sound familiar?

Image: Torontoist

A Lesson To Keep In Mind

Martin Regg Cohn has just returned from a trip to the United States. And, as Ontario heads into an election -- with Doug Ford leading the parade -- he asked for advice from fellow journalists about how to cover a populist:

I asked an old friend, New York Times White House correspondent Mark Landler, what lessons he has learned from reporting on Trump’s ascendancy. How do you cover a candidate while uncovering the contradictions?

“The only course for journalists is to keep our heads down, keep reporting, keep trying to separate policy from pronouncements and not be intimidated by either Trump’s defenders or those who attack us,” Landler told me. Public figures remain accountable, so their outlandish statements can hardly be ignored, but they can surely be parsed for context and accuracy.

I also asked an old colleague, the Toronto Star’s Washington bureau chief, Daniel Dale, for his unique perspective after first covering the Ford brothers from city hall, and then pioneering a new story structure that deconstructs Trump’s tall tales.

He cautioned against the media’s temptation to give wildly disproportionate space in mid-campaign to the loudest voices. Balanced coverage means not just fair reporting but equal time for the major players, so that those who are most controversial don’t get all the air time.

“One of the biggest failures of the media with Trump was letting him dominate the coverage … it got ratings,” Dale says. “You can’t let his tone and bluster suck up all the oxygen ... You have to be conscious of the balance.”

Cohn reminds his readers that Trump and Ford owe a lot to P.T. Barnum. There is a portrait of Barnum in the National Portrait Gallery. The inscription underneath the picture reads: "The greatest impresario of the 19th Century, P. T. Barnum was a shrewd judge of popular taste and an intuitive master of the art of publicity who tickled the public's imagination and gleefully exploited its credulity for more than 50 years."

Gleefully exploiting the public's credulity is what Donald Trump and Doug Ford are all about.

Image: Daily Mail

Not The Man

The latest poll suggests that Doug Ford will be the next premier of Ontario. Alan Freeman hopes the poll has it wrong:

The new Ontario Progressive Conservative leader and would-be premier of our largest and most powerful province, gave an interview this week to CBC Radio in Ottawa. It was frightening, not so much because of his lack of ideas or his ideological bent but his ignorance of what’s actually going on in Ontario, his lack of any policy knowledge or basic facts.

What he did demonstrate, like Donald Trump, was an ability to repeat slogans that appeal to people who feel they’re being over-taxed, over-regulated and generally abused by elites, in this case the Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne.

Like Trump, Ford is a fraud. He poses as a regular guy. He's not:

First off, it’s important to remember that Doug Ford is not everyman. He’s a wealthy businessman whose father was a Conservative politician and legislator. Yet Ford wears his apparent cluelessness like a badge of honour.

The ordinary guy is not clueless. He may be angry. He may feel that his options are limited. It's true that some of his friends are clueless. Problems arise however, when we elect clueless people. Ford says that Ontario is "a disaster." His conclusion betrays his ignorance:

Now, it’s true that hydro rates in Ontario are too high but they’re not the highest in North America. According to an annual survey by Hydro-Quebec, average rates for residential customers in Toronto in 2017 were 16.3 cents per kilowatt hour, more than double the cost in Montreal but a lot lower than the 29.67 per kilowatt paid by residents of New York City. Likewise, large-power customers paid a lot more in Ontario than Quebec but less than in Boston.

And Ontario is hardly an economic disaster. There are plenty jobs around. In fact, Ontario’s jobless rate in February was 5.5 per cent and economic growth in 2017 was an impressive 2.7 per cent.

Last year’s average unemployment rate in Ontario was the lowest since 1989 and TD Bank recently reported that one of the province’s major economic challenges is the scarcity of labour. And what does Doug Ford promise? “We’re going to start creating jobs,” he said. To be filled by whom? Does he have any clue about the true state of the province’s economy?

In fact, many of the economic problems facing the province result from that economic dynamism, growth that has been too concentrated in the Toronto region, leading to housing costs that are out of the range of middle-income families and congestion that risks strangling the economic engine of the province.

Ignorance will solve none of these problems.

And that's precisely the point. And, because Ford would bring preening ignorance to the premier's office, he's not the man for the job.

Image: torontostandard.com

No Donald Trump

For those of us who worry that Doug Ford is Donald of the North, Tom Walkom has a calming message:

Forget the comparisons to Donald Trump. Doug Ford, Ontario’s new Progressive Conservative leader, is very much a homegrown phenomenon. 

If he and his party win the June provincial election, it will be for homegrown reasons.

Walkom believes there is a common thread that winds through Ontario politics:

Ontario is usually a Red Tory province. Voters tend to elect parties, whether they call themselves PC, Liberal or New Democrat, that promise the Red Tory formula of fiscal rectitude and moderately progressive social policy.

But every now and again, when they believe matters have swung too much to one side or the other, Ontarians elect a more radical government — one that promises to purge the system and restore balance.

 Ford could be another Mike Harris or Bob Rae:

If Ford does become premier on the promise of delivering fundamental change, he will be following in the footsteps of Bob Rae and Mike Harris.

Rae’s NDP was elected in 1990 by an electorate that had grown weary of then-premier David Peterson’s governing Liberals but was not prepared to vote in the Tories.

The voters were not necessarily opposed to Liberal policies. But they did chafe at the governing party’s unbridled sense of entitlement.

In the next election, in 1995, Harris’ PCs were elected with a sweeping mandate to restructure a public sector that the voters thought was badly out of kilter.

The Harris years were marked by both radical change and conflict. In 2003, the voters decided it was time for a rest and returned the Liberals to power.

And Ford is not a white nationalist:

Unlike Trump, Ford has not fanned the embers of white nationalism and nativism. Indeed, his Ford Nation backers are marked by their racial and ethnic diversity.

Unlike Trump, Ford levels no complaints against immigrants. Quite the reverse.

Susan Delacourt writes that Ford has more in common with Stephen Harper than Donald Trump.

We shall see.

Just a brief word on Stephen Hawking. He was a man who faced seemingly insurmountable barriers and accomplished so much. He represented what is best in all of us.

Image: Huffington Post

On The Side Of The Nabobs

Tom Walkom writes that Doug Ford just might become the leader of Ontario's Progressive Conservative Party. Ford is no progressive. But he is angry. And, in conservative circles these days, you can get a lot of mileage out of anger:

So far none of the candidates has said much that would substantively differentiate them. Elliott and Ford oppose the imposition of a carbon tax as called for in the party’s election platform. Mulroney is vague but has said that if she wins she might rethink the entire platform.

The real difference is tone. Ford rages. The other two do not.

Ford’s main policy pronouncement to date is that, “It’s time to clean up this mess.”

The party hierarchy doesn't want Ford in the driver's seat. But the hierarchy does not have a good track record when it comes to choosing leaders:

The party has the distressing habit of ignoring the nabobs and making unsafe choices.

In 1990, it defied the then Red Tory old guard and chose Mike Harris. Harris tanked in the subsequent general election but recovered to win two back-to-back majority governments.

In 2004, the party made the safe choice of picking John Tory as leader. He lost the next election.

In 2009, the party chose Tim Hudak, a Harris acolyte, over the more centrist Christine Elliott. Hudak lost two elections. But the party rank and file were undeterred. In 2015, they elected as leader another controversial outsider — Patrick Brown.

Once again, Elliott, campaigning as the safe centrist, lost.

Ultimately, of course, what matters is what the voters of Ontario think. They might just be on the side of the nabobs.

Image: The Toronto Star