PREMIER FORD TAKES REINS
Local MPPs snag cabinet portfolios
Premier Doug Ford favoured experience in naming his cabinet to run Ontario Friday, putting the majority of the provincial government’s most powerful ministries in the hands of veteran MPPs.
Longtime Tory finance critic Vic Fedeli is now the finance minister. Longtime health critic (and former leadership rival) Christine Elliott is now the health minister and deputy premier. They’re the safest picks for those jobs Ford could have made.
Ottawa’s most senior minister is longtime Nepean MPP Lisa MacLeod, who gets a newly combined Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services and responsibility for women’s issues.
The most senior rookie is Caroline Mulroney, another leadership contender, who’s Ontario’s attorney general and the minister responsible for francophone affairs (she was the only minister to take her oath in both English and French).
“All I ask is for a chance — to show you that life will be better with a government that is for all the people,” Ford said outside the legislature. He had Lieutenant- Governor Elizabeth Dowdeswell repeat his swearing-in out in public, after he and the cabinet went through it once in a more traditional indoor ceremony.
“That life will be more affordable, that we can stand united as a province. We must cross party lines. We must put aside political difference, no matter if it’s red, blue, green or orange, it doesn’t matter, because this is about the people, from every walk of life, from every part of Ontario.”
After the appeal to unity, Ford mostly repeated his stump speech: “I promised you we would get to work right away and that’s what we’re doing. We’re eliminating the cap-andtrade carbon tax, the first step to lowering gas prices. We’re initiating a full audit of the government’s spending, line item by line item. A review that will result in billions — that’s billions — of dollars in savings for Ontarians,” the premier said.
They played O Canada, and then Ford’s 30-second campaign anthem. The news release that came out with the swearing-in boasted of “Ontario’s First Ever Government for the People.”
Which was a bit weird, especially with Tory ex-premiers Mike Harris and Ernie Eves and even 88-year-old Bill Davis sitting right there in person for the ceremony. But on a day of triumph, a new government can be forgiven some triumphalism.
To keep the cabinet numbers down, Ford has done away with many of the portfolios Kathleen Wynne promoted from more subordinate status. Research, Innovation and Science is gone; so is Citizenship and Immigration. Housing, Status of Women and International Trade are merged into other portfolios.
Climate change is no longer in Environment Minister Rod Phillips’ title (though parks and conservation are).
Ottawa’s other cabinet minister is Kanata-Carleton’s Merrilee Fullerton, who got a relatively junior assignment as minister of Training, Colleges and Universities — the kind of gig a premier gives a new politician for whom he has high hopes, a trial run to see whether she can handle executive responsibility.
Not that higher education isn’t important. But unlike, say, Health, Fullerton’s portfolio tends not to produce surprises that can a poor minister can turn into government-threatening scandals.
Other new ministers from Eastern Ontario are Transportation Minister John Yakabuski of Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke (who had the misfortune to be elected first when the Tories lost power in 2003 and has spent his whole career on the opposition benches) and Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Steve Clark of Leeds- Grenville, who was elected mayor of Brockville before he’d finished puberty.
MPPs Jim Wilson and Ernie Hardeman, who’ve been in the legislature since the Harris years, both have cabinet gigs, too.
Fourteen of Ford’s 21 ministers are men. The youngest minister is 41-year-old Monte McNaughton (who gets Infrastructure, overseeing provincial construction), and only one isn’t white. That’s Raymond Cho, the longtime Ford family ally from Toronto city council who’s become the minister for seniors’ issues and accessibility.
It’s not that there aren’t young people and people from Ontario’s diverse communities in the Tory caucus — Ottawa alone sent Jeremy Roberts, Goldie Ghamari and Amanda Simard to Queen’s Park, all of them well under 40. They just aren’t in the cabinet.
The fact that an awful lot of those new young MPPs were Patrick Brown recruits might have something to do with it.
Trouble is likely coming as police investigate an allegation that a Tory candidate stole data from the company that runs the privatized Highway 407 operation and used fake identities to help secure others’ nominations.
Ford might not be able to keep any scandal attached to that from reaching his government, but he’ll have wanted to do everything he could to keep it from reaching his cabinet table.
This isn’t your grandfather’s Progressive Conservative party, the newly elected Tories have said. Maybe not. But it’s led by something much like your grandfather’s Tory cabinet. The new ministers aim to make Ontario what it was when cabinets looked like that.
“My friends, we are just getting started,” Ford told the small crowd at his second swearing-in. “We will open Ontario for business, open Ontario for investment and trade, and we will return Ontario to its rightful place as the economic engine of this great country. Together we will blaze a new trail. We will be the envy of the world.”