It’s time to put an end to the ‘lock-her-up’ malarkey in Ontario.
A8
The next time Ontario Premier Doug Ford is revving up a crowd and someone hollers “lock her up” in reference to former premier Kathleen Wynne (or anyone else for that matter), he needs to suggest they put a sock in it. Firmly. Large size, for big mouths. Maybe he could carry a sock for the occasion.
As an insult, it’s not original, witty or funny. It serves no purpose, other than to stain otherwise worthwhile political endeavours. And it overlooks an unfortunate aspect of conservatism that should be resisted at every opportunity.
Ford might have caught a glimpse of this on his recent western swing, when he visited Alberta’s United Conservative Party leader. Jason Kenney ran into some trouble when he was forced to disqualify a candidate for welcoming members of a crackpot anti-immigration group to a party event, and then defending them as “polite” and “cordial.” In kicking out the candidate, UCP director Janice Harrington criticized him for failing to check with higher-ups, adding that party officials “are frankly disturbed with your cavalier attitude taken to a hate group attending a United Conservative Party (UCP) event.”
But it was too late to stop Premier Rachel Notley from accusing Kenney of “dogwhistle politics” by letting extremists feel free to show up at party events. “Why are these folks showing up at these events and feeling as though they are welcomed?” she asked.
Kenney defended himself, but vulnerability to fringe groups is a problem of long standing to conservative politicians, and one they’d do well to put more effort into eradicating. One reason Kenney was successful in uniting Alberta’s two right-wing parties — the Progressive Conservatives and the Wildrose party — is that Wildrose had weakened itself by taking too casual an approach to cranks in its ranks. If Wildrose candidate Allan Hunsperger hadn’t suggested gays “will suffer the rest of eternity in the lake of fire,” or if the party had looked more interested in chastising him for it, Kenney might never have got his chance.
Ford shouldn’t really need the Alberta example to clue him in about the danger of indulging zealots. During the Ontario leadership race he was momentarily transfixed by the fiery performance of rival Tanya Granic Allen, whose fierce opposition to changes in the sex-education curriculum briefly made her a force to be reckoned with, and who won some admiring words from Ford. But once the election began and Liberals dug up a tape of Allen professing that efforts “to push radical sexualization on the young, or gay marriage,” made her want to vomit, Ford had to drop her as a candidate.
When Stephen Harper was prime minister, he put considerable effort into keeping radicals from viewing the party as home. Conservatism doesn’t need extremism to succeed, and public support declines the closer a candidate gets to the fringes. That should have been evident by the desultory results of hard-line social conservatives and anti-immigrant candidates in the bid to succeed Harper.
Far from learning a lesson, Ford is doing what he can to encourage the invective. In his zeal to probe into the darkest corners of his Liberal predecessors’ misuse of public funds, Ford has all but accused individual ministers of sneaking into the Treasury on weekends and making off with stacks of 20s.
“A lot of the Liberals got rich, really, really rich” from the Liberals’ eagerness to reward their cronies, he told a caucus meeting called to announce a special committee would be formed to investigate “Liberal waste and scandal.”
“Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals lied to all of us and we all know that if you lie on your taxes, if you lie on your mortgage, if you lie on your car loan, there are consequences. You don’t just get to walk away,” he said.
It’s painfully evident Liberals abused their position, treating public money like a bank machine able to spit out endless funds for agenda items and votebuying endeavours. None of it was a secret, however. That was what made it so infuriating: Ontario’s auditor-general and the Financial Accountability Office made clear just how brazenly Wynne’s government was manipulating numbers, running up the deficit and gulling the public with its self-serving spending habits. The Liberals were caught time and again in irresponsible practices: selling access to the premier and top cabinet members in return for “donations;” trying to use Ontario Power Generation books to hide loans taken out to subsidize power bills; and freezing out the auditor-general when she caught on to their accounting schemes.
There’s plenty of meat there to satisfy anyone still hungry for vengeance. It was a rotten government filled with time-servers oblivious to the realities of the province they claimed to serve. And they got kicked out as a result.
It’s perfectly fair to want details on the skulduggery the Liberals practised, if only so exposure might prevent a repeat. But if Ford knows of any Liberal who personally got rich by bribery, corruption, theft, fraud or any of the other illegal means he’s not-sosubtly hinting at, he should say so, name names, and let the law take its course. Otherwise he should clam up about it, and urge Ford Nation to do likewise. The numbers can speak for themselves.
DOING WHAT HE CAN TO ENCOURAGE THE INVECTIVE.