Ford targeted, but NDP has tunnel vision
Opposition should be holding Premier Ford to account over a range of pressing issues
To judge by the Ontario New Democrats’ performance in question period this week, the thing that matters most in the province is the composition of Toronto’s city council.
Forest fires are burning barely checked in the north. The Progressive Conservatives have torn up Ontario’s climate-change plan. Nobody knows what’s going on with social assistance and government disability supports. Everything’s waiting for a “lineby-line audit” of government spending that potential auditors have told the government they might not be able to do in the time they have.
But the NDP, feeling its oats as the official Opposition, got 32 chances to ask questions of cabinet ministers this week. New Democrat MPPs used 26 of those chances to ask the same thing again and again and again and again about Premier Doug Ford’s plan to cut the number of city councillors in Toronto from 47 to 25 and cancel elections for regional chairs in Peel, York, Niagara and Muskoka.
“The premier’s secret plot to interfere in municipal elections is the act of a bully, not a leader. He never campaigned on it. He never consulted anyone on it, and now he has no mandate whatsoever to inflict his own will on the people of Toronto, Niagara, Peel, York and Muskoka with the most antidemocratic action that this province has seen in years. When did he decide to be a bully instead of a premier?” NDP Leader Andrea Horwath asked on Monday, leading off the week.
“Why didn’t the premier tell the people about his secret plan to rip up Toronto’s wards and cancel regional elections?” she asked in her first question Tuesday.
“Why, throughout the entire election campaign, did the premier not once talk about his plan to rip up Toronto’s wards, cancel regional elections and take power away from millions of voters?” she asked Wednesday, repeating herself.
“Why is this premier making it harder for citizens to access their councillors, harder for people of Toronto to have their voices heard?” Toronto NDP MPP Peter Tabuns led off on Thursday. Horwath held a “democracy rally” on the Queen’s Park lawn.
Tuesday, the New Democrats used one question to ask why the Tories weren’t answering their questions. Wednesday, after Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod announced she’d halve a promised increase in welfare rates and prematurely end an experiment with a universal basic income, the NDP broke the pattern, devoting only three of eight questions to local elections. Thursday, all eight of their questions were about local elections again. The legislature doesn’t sit on Fridays, so that was it.
What the Tories are doing to Toronto matters. The composition of its city council wasn’t a provincial election issue at all, nor were the elections for regional-government chairs. Campaigns for the Oct. 22 vote had been running for months. Locating and staffing polls, printing ballots, programming the counting machines — it’s all but invisible if it’s done right, but doing it right takes months and months of labour. The people who do it say they don’t think they can run a proper election in the time that’s left.
This is bad governing, and it sure looks like revenge for Ford’s inability to get elected mayor of Toronto, his late brother Rob’s inability to be an effective mayor when he had the job and sabotage for unfriendly politicians running for regional chair jobs in Peel (Ford’s predecessor Patrick Brown and former Liberal MPP Bob Delaney) and York (former Liberal cabinet minister Steven Del Duca).
But also tens of thousands of hectares of the province are literally on fire thanks to drought and lightning. What resources are being brought to bear? Are they adequate? Ministers say they’re worried about climate change — do they see any connection between it and these fires?
Speaking of climate change, the government has promised a plan to replace the cap-and-trade system for emissions it’s eliminating. By when? What approaches are the environment minister considering ? What jurisdictions are good models?
The social services minister has promised “a thoughtful and responsible approach” to ending the basic-income pilot project. Participants were expecting to have significantly more income for the next three years than ordinary welfare would give them. What does “a thoughtful and responsible approach” mean in real life?
Kids go back to school in a month, school boards haven’t been told what health curriculum they should teach, and a couple of dozen boards are openly saying that if the education minister orders them to go back to 20-year-old material, they won’t. What will the government do in that case?
How’s the health minister’s review of the evidence on supervised drug-injection sites going? What form is the review taking — who specifically is doing it? Is there a deadline for completing it?
Just how useful is a quickie superficial audit of government spending going to be, anyway?
The New Democrats are right, both on principle and as a matter of political strategy, to press the Progressive Conservatives on vandalizing local elections. Around the eighth or ninth time they got the premier to repeat that nobody tells him they want more politicians, maybe it was time to make the government answer for something else.