Ford makes friends in the West
Premier Doug Ford’s western swing to fight carbon taxes with Alberta Conservative leader Jason Kenney is a rehearsal for next year’s federal election campaign, when they will be Andrew Scheer’s most fearsome weapons against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Ford first attacked Trudeau with Premier Scott Moe in Saskatchewan.
“All the carbon tax does is take money out of the pockets of workers, families and businesses, and instead fuel out-of-control government spending,” Ford said Thursday. “We will fight this unfair, punishing tax with every tool at our disposal. In this fight we could ask for no better partner than Premier Moe and the government of Saskatchewan.”
Unless it’s Kenney, whom he flew off to see next in Calgary. He rallied with Kenney’s United Conservative Party against New Democrat Premier Rachel Notley.
From the very beginning — from before the beginning — Kenney and Ford have had common cause against Trudeau and the federal Liberals.
Last winter, Kenney spoke at the Tory convention in Ontario where (after some embarrassing trouble with the voting tallies) Ford became party leader. He was talking to a party that was still stunned from Patrick Brown’s sudden flameout and the internal battles that followed. He bucked up the Progressive Conservatives, telling them they were the next government of Ontario and — with unusual generosity from an Alberta politician — that Canada is only prosperous if Ontario is prosperous.
“Ontario,” he said in his first minute, “has always played a special role as the older brother of Confederation. Or, as Justin Trudeau would say, ‘the gender-neutral sibling of Confederation’.”
A minute later, he said the then-governing Liberals were competing with his province’s New Democrats “to see who can be the greatest enabler of Prime Minister Dressup’s fumbling, taxraising, debt-hiking Ottawa government.”
Above all, Kenney said, he was delighted the next Progressive Conservative leader, whoever it would be, was committed “to joining with me to fight Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax.”
Seven months and one election later, Ford’s returning the favour.
Plus, now Ford doesn’t have to limit himself to complaining about Trudeau and the federal Liberals. He has a government he can use to undermine them.
When she was premier, Kathleen Wynne used some of her power against the federal Conservatives when they were on the way down in 2014 and 2015, devoting a whole section of a provincial budget to the myriad ways Stephen Harper was allegedly cheating Ontario. She also did things like volunteer Ontario money for things the feds stopped paying for, such as research on lake ecosystems in the northwest. The work done in the Experimental Lakes Area has value in itself, of course, but for just $2 million a year Wynne also bought a symbol of her government’s commitment to science in the face of federal Tory vandalism.
Now Ford can fund a court challenge (for an estimated $30 million) that will give him and his ministers and MPPs regular opportunities to talk about how they’re fighting for the people in Ontario who are struggling to get by and want cheaper gasoline and heating fuel, against Liberals who only know how to tax.
That’s just what he said Thursday with Saskatchewan’s Moe: “They believe in one thing, up in Ottawa. It’s called, ‘tax, tax, tax, spend, spend, spend’.”
(Some of Ford’s MPPs from these parts might want to have a word with him about using “Ottawa” practically as a swear word.)
The provincial Tories stopped co-operating with the federal government to help support refugee claimants here. The province has to provide some social assistance benefits and it’s doing that, but it won’t do any more than it has to. Trudeau needs to fix Canada’s border situation, Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod says, and also to cover tens of millions of dollars in housing costs borne by municipal governments.
The legislative committee the Tories have created to dig into the provincial Liberals’ accounting practices, which first met Thursday, will also be helpful. It’s full of rookie MPPs who’ll just go over and over the ground already plowed by the province’s auditor general, its financial accountability officer and last summer’s quick outside inquiry led by former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell, but it’ll keep words and phrases such as “Liberal” and “deficit” and “cooked the books” echoing around Queen’s Park and in the news for as long as Ford wants it to.
Ford gives a punchy, memorable speech, with a Trump-like gift for calling people names that stick. Taking Wynne down took one more election than the Tories would have liked, but in the end they pummelled the Liberals to the ground, reducing them to so few MPPs that, as Ford loves saying, they could fit in a minivan. Kenney’s not quite as bluntly charismatic, but he’s more cerebral and his tactical sense is superior. They’re a mighty partnership, and they’ll give Scheer a much better chance of getting elected prime minister next fall than he’d ever have on his own.