Doug Ford has worked hard to not show his true colours. But, in the midst of the pandemic, they're showing through. Martin Regg Cohn writes:
After two years in power, the premier who promised never to sever the people’s Greenbelt is laying the groundwork to carve it up — and serve it up to developers. That’s not listening to the people, nor protecting what is precious to them.
In mid-pandemic, under cover of COVID-19, the Tories are dividing and divvying up the Greenbelt by ministerial fiat. On Monday, Ford’s PCs used their majority muscle in the legislature to pass a sweeping new law that disembowels 36 local conversation authorities while emboldening countless local developers.
With his brazen attack on the governance of the Greenbelt, the premier has provoked a firestorm — not least among Progressive Conservatives for whom conservation is a core value. This is not about ideology but ecology.
The Bill Davis wing of the party is very unhappy:
An impassioned public appeal by former Toronto mayor David Crombie to his fellow Tories fell on deaf ears last month. Hence his dramatic public resignation as chair of the Greenbelt Council late on Saturday.
For Crombie, who once served as a PC cabinet minister in the pro-environment government of Brian Mulroney, it was a cri de coeur. And cry of betrayal.
“This is not policy and institutional reform,” he raged. “This is high-level bombing and needs to be resisted.”
When Progressive Conservative conservationists call for resistance, you know they are calling out something insidious. If not quite a Saturday Night Massacre, it is a Saturday Night Immolation.
The flames are spreading, for Crombie’s desperation manoeuvre sparked a mutinous catharsis among conservationists. Six other board members have also quit in disgust, Tories and developers among them, all making the point that the government will drain the lifeblood out of the Greenbelt if they trample on watersheds that flow into it.
The Fordians are flexing their muscles:
This week, they are also sowing division in an unrelated but equally contentious area quite apart from conservation — education:
On the same day that Ford betrayed his party’s conservationist roots, he also repaid a political IOU to the fringe social conservatives who helped him win power in 2018. Resorting to unsavoury legislative tactics, the premier forced through a grab bag of changes — buried in his fall budget bill — that not only gut the Greenbelt but also undermine higher education in this province.
Remember the bizarre saga of Canada Christian College, which the PC government wanted accredited to full university status? On Monday, the Tories voted to empower its notoriously homophobic and Islamophobic president, “Dr.” Charles McVety — he who doubts evolution — to award coveted bachelor of science and bachelor of arts degrees.
Mr. Ford can only keep up an act for a short period of time.
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