Edward Keenan
Lack of a fully costed platform shouldn’t be surprising to anyone familiar with Ford’s career,
Some people seem a bit surprised that Doug Ford has not — and will not — release a fully costed platform that matches spending promises with revenue projections and shows how and when he plans to balance the budget.
After all, he did repeatedly promise he would release such a document. “We have a solid platform that is fully costed,” he said in March when he was critiquing the Liberal budget. “That’s the difference. Ours will be fully costed. Theirs isn’t fully costed.”
That was then. This is now, and he and his handlers are saying: What you see is what you get. They have made some promises. They’ve now published estimates of what those promises cost. Who needs revenue projections? Balancing? Any context on how a gas-tax cut will affect revenue?
Who wants to get hung up on pinko elitist concepts like “accounting” or “reality,” man? We’re gonna legalize buck-a-beer!
So yeah, some people have questions. At a short press conference Thursday, as transcribed and annotated by my colleagues at QP Briefing, four of the six questions from reporters were about the lack of a proper costed platform.
“I’m not breaking my promise at all,” he said in response to one. “We’ve got a dollar-figure right beside every single item. It’s very clear. We’re going to balance. We’re the only party that’s fiscally responsible. And we’re the only party that is accurate.”
Get it? The other parties may have provided details with their plans, and those details may have been inspected by outside parties and available for everyone to see, and independent observers may have weighed in on those plans and details and concluded that they will show much lower deficits than Ford’s vague plan is likely to.
But, as his rebuttal showing that they are liars-pants-on-fire and he is in fact the only accurate and honest one, he offers the strength of his frequently repeated convictions. His gut.
He offers his words, even though his definitions of certain things — “efficiencies,” “disingenuous,” “fiscally responsible,” “costed” — are eccentric and subject to frequent redefinition. This isn’t actually a surprise. It is sort of unprecedented, in recent history.
He offers his words, even though his definitions are subject to frequent redefinition
As John Michael McGrath outlined in late May at TVO, pretty much every party since at least 2003 has released a detailed balance sheet showing the costs of its promises and the projected revenues that would pay for them — in 2007, Howard Hampton’s NDP didn’t release a full platform, but did release a consolidated financial estimate of costs of their promises and new revenues to pay for them.
But that Ford does unprecedented things — especially when it comes to something such as showing your work, or providing evidence for your claims — is unsurprising. It’s one of his defining characteristics. It is something we all could have learned about Ford by watching him, and his late mayor brother Rob, operate at city hall. The details don’t matter to them. And what they consider details, many people would consider “the whole point.” For example: When Rob Ford was campaigning for mayor, with Doug as his campaign manager, allied council candidate and closest adviser, they promised a Scarborough subway extension. This would, they said clearly at the time, be an extension of the Sheppard subway, running east-west in the north of Scarborough. It would be in service by 2015. This was an explicit promise. And it was a costed promise. The cost to taxpayers, we were told again and again, would be $0. The “private sector” would pay for it, through some Ford math mojo that was vague and frequently changing.
What actually happened was that Sheppard extension was cancelled, and then a different councillor — by then an enemy of the Ford brothers — proposed a different subway extension that ran up northeast through the middle of Scarborough, on an entirely different route. Some variation of it may be finished by 2030. This cost was not $0, but something on the order of $3.5 billion. And property taxes were raised 2.5 per cent to pay for it.
The Fords embraced this entirely different subway extension plan, serving a different route, at an astoundingly high cost, and in fact claimed it was their own plan all along. They mark it as a promise kept! Doug Ford continues to claim it as evidence he and his brother delivered exactly what they said they would. The words “Scarborough” and “subway” are pretty much the only things the two proposals have in common, and Ford logic says they are the only things that mattered.
Or take again this matter of costing promises and unspecified “efficiencies” filling in the gaps. Rob Ford explicitly promised $2.8 billion in savings over four years as mayor, with no service cuts, and the bulk of it coming from “efficiencies.”
He did not deliver those savings and he did cut many service levels. Staff under him did, if you look sideways and lump a lot of things together (few of which are related to more efficiency, some of which were fee hikes on taxpayers), realize various departmental savings adding up to just over a billion dollars compared to some budget projections, though the budget as a whole went up.
Doug Ford, today, trumpets this as a “promise kept” by him and his brother. Math, schmath; logic schmogic. Doug Ford is a man of his word. Just ask him.
His platform is whatever he says it is on a given day. His plan is a series of catchphrases. His evidence is the volume of his voice and the frequency with which he repeats things. His execution will be a chaotic mess. And his measure of success will always be his own strong certainty that whatever happened must be what he always said would happen.
That’s what he and his brother did at city hall. That’s what he has done so far as leader of the Conservatives. And that’s what we should expect if he becomes premier.
If it does, no one should claim to be surprised.