Doug Ford and the boundaries of mockery

At a news conference during last week’s budget lockup at Queen’s Park, Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford quipped that there might be some extra money to be squeezed out of the CBC budget. The would-be Ontario premier is vowing to wring billions in “efficiencies” out of the provincial government without costing a single civil servant’s job — kind of an odd goal, really, for someone who professes to be focused on “reducing the size and cost of government” — but he’s unlikely to find much of use at Mother Corp., which is of course a federal rather than provincial money pit.

I didn’t realize until this week how much people had made of this. “Don’t make him mad or he’ll cut Netflix and the BBC too!” the government comedians at “22 Minutes” chortled. “Doug Ford commits to reducing UN spending, upholding Second Amendment and granting independence to Catalonia,” the non-government comedians at The Beaverton chimed in. The Broadbent Institute’s Press Progress led its review of Ford’s lockup performance with the CBC item. “Um, does Doug Ford even know what job he’s applying for?” it asked, as a teenager might query a dim-witted parent.

Ford’s comment struck me as a joke. He may or may not have been referring to the quite astonishing number of CBC English- and French-language television, radio and print employees who had annexed a chunk of the lockup room, but I will admit to indulging broadly similar uncharitable thoughts upon arriving. Of all the things Ford said during his half-hour joint appearance with interim Tory leader Vic Fedeli — and he said so, so many things — this was hardly worth noting for any purposes at all, comedic or serious.

It will be interesting to see how Ford’s opponents try to chip away at his appeal. I’m fairly certain that lampooning his supposed ignorance of provincial and federal jurisdictions will not be effective; indeed, it’s the sort of thing that singularly failed to derail his brother’s 2010 mayoral campaign, and that tended to bolster it instead. Mocking a populist for using the wrong fork during the fish course is not likely to leave a mark. Nor is mocking a populist for getting facts wrong, as Ford did in a bizarre exchange with CBC’s Mike Crawley over the tax bill under Premier Kathleen Wynne’s budget for a hypothetical household of five of which every member has a six-figure salary. (Get your own places, for heaven’s sake!)

Ford certainly displayed moments of potential weakness, though — not least when he seemed to be running for some kind of hybrid position of premier of Ontario and mayor of the GTA. “Transit, it’s my specialty. I love transit,” he began. “You know I believe in subways .... As our city is growing up, we have to go under.”

Ford didn’t just commit to a three-stop Scarborough subway extension — twice calling it “fully funded” (it isn’t), as if a pile of cash might manifest on the lectern if he kept saying it — but to “closing the loop” between it and the Sheppard line, which is an even bigger white elephant than Scarborough is likely to be. That would be an utterly spectacular waste of money and a terrible prioritization of resources, and that should be fairly easy to explain to the majority of Ontarians who are unafflicted by Toronto Subway Madness.

Ford said he could live with surface light rail “in smaller areas of this province.” But he said “in large regions like Toronto that have six million people in the GTA, you have to build rapid underground transit — similar to the subway that was built up to Highway 7, if you build it they will come, and we’re going to do the same thing.”

He wants subways … to Oshawa? To Oakville? Even people suffering from Toronto Subway Madness would roll their eyes. And in that “if you build it they will come” rhetoric, the unaffected might well see a huckster — which he is, no matter what else he might be. He doesn’t just support subways, subways, subways in principle, either: he promises to upload them to the provincial government so everyone from Rainy River to Hawkesbury can share the bill. I can’t imagine that would play well in Rainy River or Hawkesbury.

The Tories will roll out a simple five-point platform to replace Patrick Brown’s grab-bag People’s Guarantee. That’s a good fit for this candidate — but only if he sticks relentlessly to his talking points, as he mostly did during the leadership campaign. He might want the people of Ontario to see a compassionate yet hard-nosed fiscal conservative, but the fact is he supports some objectively unsupportable ideas purely because they coincide with his preferences. In that respect he is an entirely typical Ontario politician. But that’s the opposite of the brand he’s trying to create.

LAMPOONING (FORD’S) IGNORANCE WILL NOT BE EFFECTIVE.

CHRIS YOUNG / THE CANADIAN PRESS Ontario PC Leader Doug Ford with a copy of the Ontario budget during a lock-up last week. He quipped there might be some money to be cut from the CBC budget (federal jurisdiction), something Chris Selley took as a joke but others took seriously.