National Post (National Edition)
What exactly is Doug Ford?
Tory leader is not conservative nor ideological
The first NDP ad of the 2018 Ontario election campaign invites viewers to “imagine a place” where hydro is cheap, drugs are free, and dental care is on the house — all at no cost to anyone except the “very rich” who will be “asked” to “pay a little more.”
That word — “imagine” — might be the theme of the coming election. The three major parties appear to be living in a world of the imagination, with platforms full of imaginary promises paid for with imaginary dollars. The province is sinking ever deeper in debt, notwithstanding the Liberal government’s desperate efforts to conceal it, its debt-to-gdp ratio headed for 45 per cent even after a decade or more of uninterrupted economic growth. A recession of any length or severity would blow that number skyward.
Beyond that the picture only grows darker, with the first of the baby boomers just into their 70s and the costs of health care projected to rise, relentlessly, as they grow into their dotage. And yet all three parties are merrily racking up new spending promises — daycare, pharmacare, dentacare, the works — with money they wouldn’t have even if the official budget numbers were genuine, and not, as the province’s auditor general has lately warned, a swindle and a fraud (I paraphrase). It’s an election in la-la land.
Oddly, this does not seem to be the conventional view. The advance word on the election, rather, is that Ontario is facing a choice of unprecedented starkness, a polarizing election with no one seeming to occupy the middle ground.
“It’s hard to remember a provincial campaign that’s featured two leaders so diametrically opposed to each other,” broadcaster Steve Paikin wrote recently, of the Liberals’ Kathleen Wynne and the Conservatives’ Doug Ford. “The political centre,” agrees the Globe and Mail’s Marcus Gee, “has vanished like a puddle in the sun.”
It’s true that the Liberals and the NDP are in something of a bidding war for the left-of-centre vote. If the March budget signalled a retreat from the Liberals’ not-overly-stringent devotion to fiscal restraint, the NDP platform goes further in every direction: about $4 billion a year further, in fact.
But it doesn’t follow that, merely because two parties have ranged far to the left, the third must have tacked similarly to the right — certainly not under its current leadership. Whatever else he is, Ford is not an ideological conservative. He may like to mouth some conservative-sounding buzzwords, but he would appear to have no considered philosophy of government of any kind: as the campaign is already revealing, he does not even know what it does, let alone what it should do.
Simplistic, ill-informed, bombastic he may be, but a conservative he is not — however much that may have come to be associated with conservatism in its current populist incarnation. But he doesn’t quite fit the populist mould, either, at least in its contemporary, racially and culturally divisive sense.
Where a Donald Trump might have insisted on the candidacy of Tanya Granic Allen, the social conservative firebrand who helped Ford win the Conservative leadership, Ford coolly dumped her the minute some ill-considered rhetoric from her past surfaced online. Ford’s attachment to social conservatism would seem to be as firm as his commitment, say, to allowing development in the Greenbelt lands surrounding Toronto: jettisoned, likewise, the minute it came under fire.
Indeed, it’s hard to know quite what he believes. When the Conservatives first unveiled the “People’s Guarantee,” the platform on which they had planned to run under the since-defenestrated Patrick Brown, it was widely seen as a sizeable step to the left, embracing nearly every one of the Wynne government’s signature policies, with the exception of its “cap-and-trade” market for greenhouse gas emissions permits, and the green energy programs it funds. In its place, the Brown Conservatives promised to acquiesce in a federal carbon tax, using the revenues (on the assumption the feds would hand these over) to cut personal income tax rates.
In the leadership race, Ford campaigned hard against the idea; on becoming leader, he made a show of setting aside the People’s Guarantee altogether. Yet as time wears on, he seems more and more to be running on it in its essentials, minus the carbon tax. The $5 billion in new spending on rapid transit in the Greater Toronto Area, announced with great fanfare as the campaign got under way, is straight out of the document.
So, too, is Ford’s promise to lower electricity rates by a further 12 per cent, beyond the 25 per cent cut the Wynne government cooked up with its infamous Fair Hydro Plan (broadly speaking, by borrowing the difference).
It’s a shell game — the Conservatives would simply shift some costs from electricity rates onto the tax base — but no more so than the Fair Hydro Plan itself, which Ford would leave in place.
His fiscal plan is even purer Ford: without the revenues from the carbon tax, he would need to cut $16 billion out of spending over three years. How would he do it? Oh, “efficiencies.” Not a single civil servant, he vows, would be laid off.
It’s not that it can’t be done (holding spending level for three or four years would probably do it). It’s the attitude it reveals. Government would be doing pretty much all of the same things under Ford as it would under Wynne. It would just cost a little less. It’s Wynne, circa 2017.
Neither a small-government ideologue, a la Mike Harris, nor really a populist, on Trumpian lines, Ford appears rather to be more of an old-fashioned, say-anything bunkum artist — a little more shameless than most, but ultimately operating somewhere within the usual bounds of political convention.
That is to say a politician, only more so.