With legislature opposition limited Trudeau and Tory answer the call

Justin Trudeau has a new job.

Canada’s prime minister is moonlighting as leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition in Ontario. The more Trudeau’s record comes under attack — once again on SNC-Lavalin — the more he targets Premier Doug Ford anew.

It’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it — because nobody’s really doing it effectively other than John Tory.

Officially, Toronto’s mayor and the prime minister met this week to make their municipal and federal governments work better together. Unofficially, they were comparing notes on their mercurial provincial partner — the elephant in the room.

Their shared challenge is to avoid being trampled underfoot by Ford. Like traditional mahouts who prodded elephants into obedience in India, Tory and Trudeau yank the premier’s chain and whisper sweet nothings in his ear.

At their City Hall photo-op, the Tory-Trudeau tag team tried to coax the lumbering premier into compliance. Now, the mayor has passed the political baton to the prime minister (though Trudeau is unlikely to dress up as a mahout, having sworn off traditional Indian garb in photo-ops).

Why is Trudeau tackling Ford so incessantly? Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

By sucking up all the oxygen in the chamber this past year, Ford has left Ontario’s official opposition leader — the NDP’s Andrea Horwath — spinning her wheels. The provincial Liberals were reduced to a Post-election rump, mired in third place.

Against that backdrop, Tory and Trudeau have the field to themselves. In fairness, it must be said that neither one of them started their respective fights with Ford.

The premier targeted the mayor by downsizing city council without warning in the middle of last year’s municipal election campaign. He followed up with unilateral and indefensible cuts to Toronto’s transit and health budgets.

Ford mounted a similarly unprovoked attack against the prime minister at their first meeting a year ago. Trudeau paid a courtesy call at Queen’s Park, only to be blindsided by inflammatory rhetoric from Ford’s Tories blaming him, absurdly, for a rise in refugee claimants to the province.

Unlike Ottawa and Quebec, Ontario under the Ford government misleadingly described claimants as “illegal border crossers.” In fact, legitimate refugees break all kinds of rules to seek sanctuary in Canada — whether with forged documents or unauthorized crossings — but if their claim has a solid foundation, international law requires governments to offer protection, not criminalization.

Ford promptly cut off co-operation with the federal government on refugee resettlement, putting ideology ahead of humanity.

Next, he slashed legal aid funding, cutting off refugee claimants from help (the backdrop to Trudeau’s announcement this week giving asylum seekers access to lawyers).

On the environment, Ford is wasting $30 million on a faltering propaganda campaign and court challenge to shoot down the federal carbon levy. Little wonder Trudeau invokes the premier’s name at every opportunity.

Rising anti-Ford sentiment is bleeding into federal Conservative support in the vital Ontario election battleground, as the prime minister couldn’t help noticing at the Raptors’ victory celebration, when the crowd cheered Trudeau before booing Ford beside him.

If it worked for the mayor — polls show him more popular than the premier — why not the prime minister? There is a difference.

Tory wasn’t running for re-election when he critiqued the premier with such success. Trudeau today is in full campaign mode, which makes his attacks self-evidently self-interested.

While Ford is weighed down by a year of blundering and bluster, Trudeau is increasingly burdened by his own baggage, as the return of SNCLavalin this week made clear. His anti-Ford rhetoric may resonate in Ontario for now, but over time it will sound increasingly repetitive.

That said, much of what Trudeau is saying on the campaign trail about Ford needs to be said by someone — if not always by the prime minister or the mayor, then by the official opposition NDP, the provincial Liberals and the Greens. Gun violence, youth despair, refugee needs and homelessness are issues that transcend political jurisdictions, petty jealousies and partisan jousting.

At some point, the prime minister and the mayor will have to get back to their day jobs. And Ontario’s opposition parties will have to break out of their bubble to make themselves heard.