Ford is a zero with women
Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
Did you just feel a carbonation in your brain, a not-unpleasant sensation that I am told many seek in auto-erotic asphyxiation? Or perhaps you have fainted.
It could happen.
On the other hand, voters could draw a line at Ford’s latest insult to them. His campaign has not offered a specific spending plan — a fully costed platform — which is basic in any election, especially for a candidate running mostly on money matters.
If voters are like shoppers, it’s like expecting them to pick up unpriced fiddleheads and cough syrup in a grocery store and trust the automated checkout to make a wild guess on the low side.
You would not shop there again, no matter how much you craved seasonal greens and liquid meds in a colour unknown to nature. In a modern world, you expect to buy with certainty, not from a tonic salesman travelling from town to town making grand claims for his paregoric. Price it, sell it.
Ford offers no hope of rationality or stability. Asked whether he will back the wa- terfront LRT for Queens Quay aaand the reviving Port Lands — the NDP and Liberals have said they will — he responded with a casual “transit will get built down there.”
No, we need a specific statement. That’s how government works, in money, jobs, dates a and certainties. Ford is inching up in the polls after a previous decline. That means voters are still buying his vaguely destructive spiel.
What does Ford’s “buck a beer” even mean? Big brewers won’t make it cheap or dis- count it, and microbrewers will laugh. I suspect it will be a gig economy thing, a precariat brewing beer at home in buckets, pouring it into rinsed-out apple cider bottles and selling it at the corner store. It will be like Uber staffed by alcoholics.
But it will get you drunk enough. And this is how Ford’s promises are translated by busy voters into some generic fuzzy benefit that might or might not happen. Because he’s Doug.
Women don’t trust The Dougster. We all knew one in high school. The CBC’s Vote Compass survey asked voters to score each leader on how trustworthy they were, from 0 to 10. Ford’s average score among women was 1.6. Fully 59 per cent of women rated him at 0.
They gave the NDP’s Andrea Horwath 5.9 and Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne a 3. Even men — the Ford gender gap is large — only gave Ford a 2.8, the survey said, while giving Horwath a 5.5.
The results on voters’ estimates of Ford’s competence were similar, with 49 per cent of women giving him 0. This is not good. Ford is basically home alone, one of what the French call “les incompétents.” Imagine him in charge of the province. What if the dude joined an all-province national trade delegation and somehow met President Trump — his hostess gift would be a Dofasco steel penholder or a buck-a-bottle beer — and Trump went squirrelly. It could happen. The Globe and Mail had just published a long scary investigation vv into financial mys- teries trailing through the years at a Toronto hospital, the city of Toronto, Queen’s Park and the Toronto District School Board. The stories are connected, the Mob is mentioned, and it reads like a tale from Alabama, not our tidy Ontario.
The Liberal government does not come off well, then or now. The rot is frightening. The institutional infestations travelled fast, including under Wynne. She had already tarnished herself with cabinet ministers like former transportation minister Steven Del Duca and his weird yearning for a $100-million GO station in his riding.
The Kirby station will be in farmland, unvisited, shades of the loneliest TTC subway stop, Bessarion. I will arise and go now, and go to Bessarion for solitary contemplation, I used to say. Now it will be Kirby.
The Liberal collapse was partly caused by Wynne’s failure to get a grip post-McGuinty, thus opening the door to populists like Ford who swear they’ll blow things up without saying what they would restore and introduce. Ford no longer mentions the $6 billion in efficiencies he boasted he’d find, but he’ll find some.
He won’t say where. Anything could happen.
And then there’s Horwath, who sounds like an actual New Democrat. I appreciate the honesty. She won’t legislate any strikers back to work. Good. If the York University strike were to be ended, it would just delay the basic problem of gig work built into university budgets. We’re all precarious now.
York will offer “provisional grades” — they are invented — so that students can fake-graduate and come back later. It’s not a good look. It degrades the reputation of York and every one of its graduates.
Precarious work has to be challenged and perhaps strikes will force the issue. Howarth’s ahead of these appalling changes to the way we work and is the best choice to help repair them.
But Ford is an unknown known. We know how he’ll operate, same as he always has, but as with Trump, we don’t know how or where he’ll do the damage. Anything can happen.