Was Doug Ford biting his tongue?
When former Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government was decimated in the 2018 election — reduced from 55 seats to seven, pushed from power after 15 years — pundits placed the blame firmly on the leader herself.
Various blunders were cited. A cynical selloff of a provincial power utility. The disastrous Green Energy Act and its painful impact on electricity rates. An unseemly program of selling access to Wynne and her top lieutenants in return for “donations.” A trail of broken promises and Wynne’s nonchalant dismissal of one such pledge as “a stretch goal,” as if she’d never much believed in it in the first place. And the spending … wild, seemingly unlimited spending fuelled by a borrowing binge that turned the province into one the world’s biggest debtors.
Without question, all of it played a role, as did a general feeling that after 15 years the Liberals had long since run dry of energy or ideas. But hovering above those individual missteps was a larger cause: the sense of a party that had long since lost touch with the people who elected it, that was ruling from a playbook rooted in narrow party interests, that had grown so cynical it assumed voters could always be bought off with a few frothy bromides and a spending pledge or two.
When Wynne announced last week she wouldn’t seek re- election, Premier Doug Ford reacted with notable grace.
“I differentiate between politics and the person,” Ford said. “We may differ on policies, we may differ on political outlooks, but as a person, I have the utmost respect for you.”
It was conspicuously courteous, coming from a politician decried as a bully and an oaf both by Wynne’s Liberals and those of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose strategy for appealing to Ontarians in last year’s federal vote consisted largely of denigrating Ford. That was before COVID and a surge in popularity for both men. It was also more than the opposition New Democrats could manage, reacting to Ford’s kind words with jeers.
Despite the pleasant sendoff, Ford’s government inherited the legacy of the Liberals’ decade-and-a-half spending spree. When Dalton McGuinty took office in 2003 the provincial debt totalled $ 139 billion. When Wynne ended the Liberal run in 2018 Ontario owed $343 billion, an increase of 134 per cent, the most indebted in the world outside of national governments. Ford was elected to try to get a handle on the spending, and spent much of his first year trying to make a start, drawing much of the public ire the Liberals had carefully sidestepped. That’s the fate of any administration doomed to follow an administration dedicated to irresponsible spending: they squandered the money, you get the bills.
Then along came COVID-19, and blew all financial expectations to bits. That’s another fallout of mass borrowing: it handcuffs the ability of subsequent governments to deal with emergencies with the full financial resources that might otherwise have been available. Ford no longer pretends to be able to balance the budget within a single term. COVID alone will add $ 40 billion to the debt pile, based on estimates that are two months old and perhaps already out of date. Crises will do that to the best- laid plans; the damage they do to shoddy, half-baked budgeting is all the more devastating.
Coincidently enough, at $ 343 billion, Trudeau’s current borrowing tally for this year matches the provincial debt at the end of the Wynne Liberals’ reign. Canada has a bigger economy than any single province, but also has demands encompassing an entire country. And the arguments deployed by Liberals in Ottawa echo those regularly trotted out by Wynne and Mcguinty and their various finance ministers: we’ve got a great credit rating, borrowing rates are reasonable, “we can’t afford not to invest” in such crucial projects. Just as rating agencies eventually began issuing warnings about the dangerous game the province was playing, so are they sending signals to Ottawa. And Trudeau, as did Ontario, is shrugging them off as annoyances to be ignored by a government with a mission in mind.
During his 2015 campaign, Trudeau couldn’t get enough of Wynne. Even in
there’s no need to take these things personally in politics.
those halcyon days of countless Trudeau selfies, the prime minister and the premier must have set some sort of record. Not so much any more. After her demotion to the distant edges of the legislature, Wynne understandably drew far less attention, while Trudeau — after campaigning in 2019 as if he were running against Ford rather than Andrew Scheer — has discovered her successor isn’t such a bad guy after all. In September they got together to break ground at a new open pit gold mine north of Sudbury. A month later they were at it again, teaming up at an auto plant west of Toronto to announce they’d split the cost of almost $ 600 million in support for Ford Motor Co. to build electric vehicles and batteries.
Open pit mines aren’t the sort of thing to enthuse the environmental groups Trudeau courts so assiduously, but using millions of tax dollars to prop up corporate giants isn’t the stuff of Conservative ideology either. Politics and bedfellows can be just weird.
As Ford noted in his ode to Wynne: “Unlike some other people that can be just mean and nasty spirited people, vicious, vicious people … Kathleen was never that way. Always there, very kind, very polite, never took anything personal.”
Really, there’s no need to take these things personally in politics. Because eventually you leave office, and it’s the voters who are stuck with what’s left behind.