Daily briefings show a more civil premier
Here’s a question for Ontarians: What ever happened to question period?
Answer: Doug Ford’s daily accountability encounter has relocated — and recalibrated — until further notice.
While our MPPs still meet in the historic legislative chamber, their debates have been downgraded to twice a week during the pandemic. Monday through Friday, however, Ford walks down the corridor to the Progressive Conservative caucus room for a COVID-19 close encounter of another kind.
The setting is less ornate. The premier is less ornery.
Inside is a television camera operator and a photographer, both pooling their shots for the Queen’s Park press gallery. On this day I have slipped in to watch after taking a vow of silence, while my colleagues dial in to pose their questions remotely.
The teleprompter operator rushes in breathlessly to slot in Ford’s opening script, followed by the voice — press secretary Ivana Yelich — who keeps reporters in line. Nearby, a sign-language interpreter also watches the teleprompter feed for a sneak preview of his words.
Three noisy air conditioners are shut down on cue. It’s showtime.
The premier strolls in with a rotating entourage of cabinet ministers and health experts who dutifully — and distantly — move to their “marks” (taped to the floor) behind him. Ford delivers his script flawlessly if a little too earnestly (a teleprompter failure early on left him unflustered — he ad-libbed by levelling with his audience that he was flying solo).
Carried by thestar.com, CP24 and CPAC, Ford’s 1 p.m. sessions are closely watched for major announcements or unexpected pronouncements. It’s a safe bet these days that more people — not least nursing home residents — watch the premier’s live news conferences than tune into the official channel that carries debates in the legislature, which is still functioning but increasingly dysfunctional.
On this day, the unmasked premier fields questions about his reluctance to make masks mandatory as the pandemic persists. He vows not to get a haircut until restrictions are lifted everywhere in the province. And he defers to his medical experts when the questions get technical.
The normally cantankerous Ford is the soul of civility in these sessions, never losing his cool — unlike in the legislature, where he turns beet red and lashes out at opposition MPPs. He parries tough questions and humours reporters he once tangled with face to face.
Without a live audience in the room, Ford seeks real-time feedback from principal secretary Amin Massoudi. A longtime Ford loyalist, Massoudi stands behind the camera most days like a trusted third-base coach, making discrete hand signals — or head nods, happy faces or frowns — to reassure the premier or signal alarm if he takes a wrong turn.
Ford’s staff say he is adamant about maintaining the daily news conferences for now. Little wonder.
The broadcasts give him direct and unfiltered access to the general public — a convenient successor to the cheesy and partisan “Ontario News Now” service that fell flat. The relationship with journalists can be adversarial but not confrontational or polemical — as it is, predictably, with opposition politicians in the legislature.
Journalists and politicians, after all, perform different roles — with different performances. If the premier is on his best behaviour in these remote news conferences — with no one except his staff in his line of sight — his misconduct is at its worst in the legislature’s question period.
In the house, Ford picks and chooses which questions he deigns to answer, delegating to his cabinet ministers if he doesn’t like the topic or the tone. But when his own Progressive Conservative backbenchers get in a friendly question in the legislative rotation, Ford answers without fail and is unfailingly polite.
While it’s true that MPPs can overdo their partisan preambles to score political points, the Official Opposition is also part of our democratic tradition of accountability. Ford owes them — and all who elected them — serious answers.
The problem is that the opposition’s questions aren’t always serious. This week, like most weeks, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath read laboriously from her typed notes — after a decade in the job, she is still painfully reluctant to ad-lib a question — and her party demanded separate public inquiries on two topics on the same day.
Ford reciprocated by reading woodenly from his thick briefing binder.
It was a sad spectacle — two elected politicians talking at each other with prepared scripts instead of engaging in spontaneous debate. Only about 40 MPPs were in the legislature this week, observing social distancing while eschewing masks. The public and press galleries were empty, apart from me and my Toronto Star colleagues Robert Benzie and Steve Russell.
Even from a distance, however, the barbs and heckling were no less cutting. When a combative Ford taunted New Democrat Taras Natyshak, accusing the MPP of not doing enough to help his Windsor-area constituents in the COVID-19 crisis, their pre-pandemic grudge match boiled over.
“You’re such a piece of s--,” Natyshak hissed.
But did anyone in Ontario hear it?
If not, fear not. For the record, for posterity, in mid-pandemic, Hansard recorded it verbatim in the official transcript.
The normally cantankerous Ford is the soul of civility, never losing his cool — unlike in the legislature