The evolution of DOUG FORD
How a bomb-thrower became a statesman.
Calm. Measured. Reassuring. Deferential and complimentary to experts, and to his partisan opponents.
These and other descriptors have been used in recent weeks to describe Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s performance during the COVID-19 pandemic, and not without reason. The premier’s daily press conferences are sober, to the point and devoid of rhetorical flourishes. They evince trust in the citizens tuning in. His government was one of the first to let its constituents see the ominous modelling behind its pandemic- response policies.
“You deserve to know what I know when you’re making decisions for yourself, your family and your community,” he said on April 2. Between 3,000 and 15,000 Ontarians might die by the end of April, we learned, and the forecasted demand for intensive care beds and ventilators was perilously close to the available supply.
But Ford offered a sense of purpose, as well, at a time when lockdown prospects seemed to stretch into infinity. “( These projections) can change, with your actions and your government’s actions,” he said. “We can slow the spread, flatten the curve.”
And in fact, the numbers ended up much lower: By the end of April in Ontario, 1,121 deaths had been reported. Hospitals are more than keeping up with demand. “Our hard work and perseverance, our patience, is paying off,” Ford said on Friday.
This is not the Premier Doug Ford of a year ago, who was frantically reversing course on multiple files; mopping up after a patronage scandal and a nearly universally unpopular budget; and running his mouth more or less at will. A perfect example: In making ancillary post- secondary student fees for things such as funding student unions and student newspapers optional, Ford’s government had a perfectly good conservative policy on its hands. Ford sabotaged it by framing it as a personal political preference: “I think we all know what kind of crazy Marxist nonsense student unions get up to.”
And this is certainly not the city councillor Doug Ford of a decade ago, when he and his brother Rob, the most improbable of mayors, turned Toronto City Hall into a world- famous R-rated circus — the Doug Ford who nearly came to blows with audience members as councillors voted to strip his brother of all but his statutory and ceremonial powers; the Doug Ford who nodded grimly through his brother’s immortal speech, after the late mayor, angry at having some of his office budget and power taken away warned: “You guys have just invaded Kuwait.”
“He’s acting like the perfect combination of folksy and statesmanlike,” observes John Filion, a veteran left- of- centre Toronto city councillor who had a front- row seat for the Ford Bros. Circus. John Parker, a centre- right councillor at the time, says this is the version of Ford he and other conservatives on council always hoped would emerge to calm his brother down. “We all knew that there was more to Doug than we were seeing,” he says.
Parker isn’t surprised, however, to see Ford doing well at the podium every day during a time of crisis — better, say, than the silver- tongued Justin Trudeau. “He has no aspirations to deliver fancy talk,” says Parker, “and he doesn’t even try.”
Displaying empathy was never a problem either, argues Filion, who wrote a book about his friendship with Rob Ford. The problem was that the empathy didn’t scale. “If there was somebody standing in front of ( Rob or Doug Ford) with a problem, they would do anything to help that person,” says Filion. “But if you said … ‘ we have 10,000 people with this problem, let’s have a policy to help them all,’ they would say, ‘ no, ( that’s) more government spending’.”
Then there’s the matter of expert opinion, with whom the Fords had a terribly fractious relationship at City Hall. Perhaps most famously, Doug tried to overrule years of planning by Waterfront Toronto for a prime piece of post- industrial real estate with a back-of-a-napkin plan involving a megamall and marina- hotel linked to downtown via monorail, with a London Eye- style Ferris wheel towering above. The Fords gleefully shredded a decade of transit planning within their first week in office. And they were apoplectic when the city’s chief medical officer of health, David Mckeown, released a report recommending lower speed limits across the city. “Why does he still have a job?” Doug asked on his and Rob’s weekly radio show.
In April, Ford brought in a COVID- 19 “troubleshooter” from the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. His name: David Mckeown.
“That’s the part I have no explanation for,” says Filion. “( Doug Ford) would not defer to experts at all. He would always be, ‘ you know, I don’t need to read this report. I don’t need to know what the experts saying. My gut tells me the right thing to do.’ ” Filion says he would have expected more of a push amid the lockdown from Ford — the “open for business” premier, avowed enemy of corporate welfare — to get people back to work.
Conservative insiders scoff at the notion that Ford is some kind of reformed madman. “As terrible as this situation is with COVID-19, I think it has allowed the public to see him as he really is,” says Christine Elliott, a longtime family friend of the Fords along with her late husband Jim Flaherty, the former Ontario and federal Tory cabinet minister. “He is a true leader. He does take these things seriously, both economically and socially, and his… press conferences are demonstrating that to the public.”
Toronto Mayor John Tory has known Doug Ford’s wrath, and vice- versa, both during the 2014 mayoral campaign they contested and in their current positions — most notably when Premier Ford chopped Toronto City Council in half in the middle of the 2018 municipal election campaign. (“( Tory is) going to take off the sheets in bed at night and find my teeth wrapped around his nuts,” Filion recalls Ford vowing to him in advance of the 2014 campaign.) But Tory isn’t surprised at Ford’s performance either.
“I think he’s ended up with more pragmatic advisers who focus more on the art of the possible,” he says, diplomatically. “I think Doug’s learned over the past little while that he can’t take advice from people who are outside of the norm, on the fringe,” says one conservative strategist. Both are referring to a team led by Dean French, Ford’s almost supernaturally unpopular first chief of staff — a friend since they worked together on Doug Ford Sr.’s successful provincial campaign in 1995. French was replaced by former Postmedia executive Jamie Wallace, and by all reports things quickly calmed down.
Tory and others credit Ford’s expertise in supply- chain management, gleaned from the family’s labels- and- tags company, as providing unusually useful insight for a head of government when it came to matters as basic as sourcing protective equipment. “I think he got into his comfort zone,” says Tory.
And other conservative insiders suggest it’s largely a matter of partisan caricatures melting away in the face of a crisis. Ford’s opponents introduced him to Ontarians outside of Toronto as, essentially, Donald Trump of the North. It was always a silly comparison. (“Trump is all about Trump. Doug Ford is about serving the customer,” Parker trenchantly observes.) But perhaps it set the bar low enough that Ford could soar over it.
Part of it may come down to a question of excessive loyalty, a quality the Fords value more than almost anything else. It would never have occurred to Ford not to back his brother as his administration and life fell apart, bottoming out with Rob’s admission, at long last, to have smoked crack cocaine. But there was no way to defend a person in that position and come off as a reasonable person. Ford clearly stuck with French long after he had planted seeds of revolt among his caucus and staff. Given normal circumstances, perhaps Ford really can be a normal politician.
“We’ve kept him out of fights,” Kory Teneycke, Ford’s campaign manager and adviser, told Maclean’s last year, when things were coming off the boil. “When you’re out there fighting with everybody, it’s hard to be popular.”
Still it’s remarkable to hear Ford compliment Trudeau, author of the hated federal carbon tax, and to read reports of a growing friendship between Ford and Chrystia Freeland, Trudeau’s pandemic czar. Ford is even playing nice, if only implicitly, with a government whose minister of emergency preparedness is Bill Blair, the former Toronto police chief who, in the Rob Ford era, became Enemy No. 1 after he criticized the mayor’s behaviour. Funny how the prospect of overseeing 15,000 deaths in the course of a month focuses the mind. Suddenly a whole lot of day- to- day political squabbles in this country look altogether ridiculous.
Indeed, it will be fascinating to see how, when and if things get “back to normal” once this nightmare ends. The economic cleanup will be an utterly enormous job, and opinions are sure to diverge as to just how it should be accomplished. Municipalities, which cannot legally run deficits, will be in a massive hole: At last report, Toronto was hemorrhaging about $65 million a week. Tory argues it will be in the provincial and federal governments’ best interests to be generous, because without the tax revenues that flow from cities, the provinces and Ottawa won’t be able to get themselves back on their feet either.
It’s a fine argument. Ford’s response might be the key to understanding whether he’s really a changed man or not.