Does Ford actually know what he’s doing?
It doesn’t get much better for the premier: Doug Ford’s new leadership style has won widespread approval in the latest public opinion poll — good news for him in bad times.
But it doesn’t get much worse: Ford got an unwelcome reminder of his old leadership legacy Wednesday — just how badly he governed in earlier times.
Those Tory blue licence plates, unveiled last year on budget day — but unreadable by night — will no longer be issued for passenger vehicles. The premier quietly conceded defeat in a news release before his daily briefing, admitting what his government initially denied.
Pre-pandemic, “Plate-gate” symbolized all that was wrong with his Progressive Conservative government: style over substance, branding over governing, hubris over humility.
Looking back, after all the COVID-19 upheaval of the past two months, the eruption of Plate-gate and the disruption it represented seem like ancient history. But looking ahead, it serves as a reminder that competence counts, and that a sense of proportion is important in a premier.
Today, Ford is in the fight of his political life — not over Plate-gate but a pandemic. The premier’s new to-do list would do any of us in.
Upon taking power his agenda was disrupting, now it’s been turned upside down. Two years ago he wanted to dismantle government, now he wants to rebuild it.
Can he get it done? Does he know what he’s doing?
This week’s poll by Campaign Research shows his rating as premier has recovered from a seemingly irretrievable low of -49 per cent (69 per cent disapproval outweighing his 20 approval rating) to a suddenly unbeatable high of +59 per cent (76 per cent approval, 17 per cent disapproval). But the sudden reversal reminds us that polls are fleeting snapshots, while politics is forever changing.
The ratings reversal suggests two take-aways: first, people like the new Ford; second, they disliked the old Ford, albeit less than they disliked the alternatives in the 2018 election — which is why they kept booing him in public last year.
Nothing symbolized Ford’s intransigence and incompetence quite like his overly ambitious and gratuitous scheme to change our licence plates. Bizarrely, it occupied pride of place as a “centrepiece” of his first budget:
“Ontario’s new passenger and commercial licence plates represent what good government is all about,” the Tories boasted, while in the same breath proposing major cuts for the public health services we now so desperately need (later postponed under pressure).
When an off-duty police officer revealed that the new blue-on-blue plates couldn’t be read at night because of glare, the Tories insisted he was mistaken. Now, three months and one pandemic later, the government has seen the light.
“The premier has decided that the redesign of the new licence plate will no longer proceed,” his office announced sheepishly this week.
Licence plates shouldn’t be a big deal, but it was the Tories who made them a litmus test — emblematic of “our entire approach to government.” And it was the Tories who politicized it by insisting they had improved upon the plates issued by the previous Liberal government.
Today’s premier says he has bigger challenges to worry about, and he’s right.
Back in February, he was calling the head of 3M to complain about the licence plates they manufactured for Ontario.
Last month, he was phoning 3M, begging that it send more N95 medical masks to the province.
A year ago, Ford absurdly warned of a “carbon-tax recession” because of a 4.5-cent-alitre levy on the pump price of fuel. Today he’s facing a COVID-19 depression with the price of gas roughly half of it what it was, levy or not.
Upon taking power, Ford vowed to end hallway medicine. Today, his government has ended hospital overcrowding by fiat — suspending elective surgeries and cancer operations to make way, urgently and understandably, for a feared surge in novel coronavirus cases.
Last year he reorganized health care and cancer treatment into a new superagency. Now, frustrated by his failure to meet targets for testing COVID-19 among the most vulnerable, the premier wants to redesign the system yet again — warning this week he’ll streamline the province’s unwieldy system of 34 medical officers of health.
Ford vows to revisit longterm care, with its peculiar hybrid of profitmaking and non-profit ownership now deregulated beyond recognition. And he wants to redesign our increasingly costly hydro system (and subsidies) to somehow make it all cheaper, without saying how to sustain it.
With the ground changing under him, the premier has grasped that he needs to get his bearings again. But rethinking our entire government structure and delivery methods is ambitious for anyone at any time — far more than bungling the redesign of a licence plate and quietly abandoning it.
It’s not merely a question of limited fiscal capacity. It’s also a matter of practical limits — governing capacity, political bandwidth and policy horizons.
Does the Ford government have what it takes to take all this on, all at once? And get it done?
The polling numbers remind us of the premier’s ups and downs, but they tell us what we already knew. It is the COVID-19 curve, and the unemployment data — rising rapidly, falling slowly — that will be the enduring measure of Ford’s performance.