Denley on what Ford should say to his finance minister,
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has made a lot of tough decisions during the pandemic, some of them right, some of them wrong. The next decision he has to make should be easy, if unpleasant.
Finance Minister Rod Phillips has to be fired, not just for taking a Caribbean vacation while other Ontarians are locked down, but for the social media posting designed to deceive people into thinking Phillips was still in Ontario. His “Christmas Eve” fireside message on Twitter, so full of fake empathy for all those facing a virus-curtailed Christmas, is destined for the Hypocrisy Hall of Fame.
It’s too bad, because Phillips, the former chair of the board of Postmedia Network Inc., has been a strong finance minister, but he has lost the moral authority to lecture other Ontarians on the sacrifices they have to make when he is apparently not prepared to make any himself. His attempt to prevent people from knowing that he was on the beach in St. Barts suggests that Phillips knew the decision was wrong, but made it anyway.
His political credibility is shot. As long as he stays in the second most important job in the Ford government, he will offer a daily reminder that Ford is asking Ontarians to constrain their lives dramatically, but the same rules don’t apply to the Ford team.
That undermines Ford’s political image as a champion of the little guy, the one who can’t afford fancy island holidays. That image has already been damaged by Ford’s decision to lock down small retailers while letting the big box corporate giants stay open. Small-business owners are furious, and they have every right to be. It would be one thing if Ford was disadvantaging his own core supporters for sound health reasons, but he’s not. There is no compelling evidence to show that big retailers are safe and small retailers are not.
Ford won’t be able to escape all the damage caused by Phillips’s rapid conversion from a star to an asteroid hurtling at Queen’s Park, but he has to limit it. The premier said he didn’t know about Phillips’s holiday plans in advance, but he clearly knew about them sometime before they became public and failed to haul his minister back.
The premier’s initial instinct was to scold the finance minister but not fire him. That’s not going to be enough.
The case for keeping Phillips is simply too weak. He has been strong in Finance, certainly a welcome contrast to federal ministers who are spending money at a stunning pace with little concern about how effective the spending is. International travel is not illegal and the minister has reportedly been working remotely. But the fact that he went on the trip shows Phillips is politically tone deaf and the deception of using social media to pretend he was still at home calls into question his character, even for people who previously supported him.
Ford must know, surely, that many Ontarians are at the breaking point. The pandemic has been long, frustrating and damaging on many levels. While we keep hearing about “the light at the end of the tunnel,” the tunnel is still pretty long.
In that environment, every move the government makes will be carefully scrutinized and those who disagree will make themselves heard, loudly. That’s why the Christmas halt to vaccinations has caused a fairly large stir. It is unlikely to materially change things for anyone, but people want action and they want it now.
It’s fair to say that Ford, like every other political leader, is in over his head. It’s difficult to imagine who wouldn’t be. Never before has an Ontario government had to face a pandemic and an economic collapse at the same time. The duration, relentlessness and constantly changing nature of the problem would challenge any political leader in ways he or she could never have anticipated.
When the pandemic panic hit back in March, one certainly wouldn’t have bet on Doug Ford as the best man to handle the problem. He had limited political experience and his premiership had gotten off to a rocky start. And yet, Ford has mostly risen to the challenge. Some of his decisions are easy to criticize, but no one can fault him for not working hard enough or showing enough empathy.
Ford himself has set a standard for leadership that Phillips was not able to meet. While much of the criticism of Ford’s government is partisan, disappointed PCS are leading the charge against Phillips. For the future of his own government, Ford can’t afford to ignore that.