Ford clearly can't govern alone, so he should seek counsel

Under the Global News headline “Growing calls for Ontario Premier Doug Ford to resign,” we find the following folks demanding Ford's ouster: Canadian Washington Post columnist David Moscrop, and Ontario's opposition leaders, Andrea Horwath (NDP) and Steven Del Duca (Liberal). End of list.

Myriad others are angry and exasperated with Ford, and wouldn't mind seeing him go. But precisely zero real-live Progressive Conservatives seem willing to go on record in protest. It's a very Canadian state of affairs: no one is brave enough to actually stand up in public and air their grievances. That doesn't mean Ford's job is safe, but why would anyone passive-aggressively force him out now? The vaccines work. In a few months, Ontario will be riding the final downward curve to freedom. Few of us will have much time to be very angry at anyone, even politicians.

Boy, is it ever grim right now, though. Léger's biweekly poll for the Association for Canadian Studies, published last week, pegged Ontarians' satisfaction with the provincial government's anti-pandemic efforts at an alltime low of 38 per cent — down from 55 per cent two weeks earlier. That was before Friday's calamitous press conference where Ford announced he was closing playgrounds and granting police new powers to demand anyone explain what they were doing out of the house.

The walk-back for those was quick: The powers were withdrawn, the playgrounds are open. But the damage continues to pile up. Skateparks, for no good reason, are closed. A video shot Sunday shows an Ontario Provincial Police officer shoving a boy with a scooter — allegedly 12 years old; certainly wee — to the ground. Fairly or unfairly, Ford owns that appalling scene.

Golf courses, tennis and basketball courts, picnic tables — all still off limits. It's still illegal to meet a friend outside for a chat. The experts whose advice Ford always claims to be taking disavow this entirely. “Maintaining social connections and outdoor activity are important to our overall physical and mental health,” the province's “science table,” convened by Ford, wrote collectively on Tuesday.

At Queen's Park, Ford's government confirmed Wednesday it was working on legislation to grant employees paid sick days. At the very least it is worth a try: We don't want people choosing between going to work with a sore throat or putting food on the table. But it has been worth a try for 12 months. The timing is ridiculous.

One of the most frustrating things about Ontario's pandemic response has been the uniformity of political opinion, especially within government ranks. When Ontarians think of conservative pushback, they probably think most of MPP Randy Hillier, who got himself kicked out of the Tory caucus, after earning a reputation for unruliness, even before COVID-19 came around. Hillier is a man who believes “there is no pandemic and never was,” called for “shaming those who wear a mask,” and likened the government's reaction to COVID's third wave to the Third Reich.

Ontarians might think next of Roman Baber, who was turfed from the PC caucus in January for questioning lockdown measures. It would have been easier to defend him had he not absurdly suggested that “the lockdown is deadlier than COVID.”

Ford has faced far less on-the-record criticism from within his party than Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, or British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He is no better off for it, and nor are Ontarians. The question of balancing pandemic harms and lockdown harms is complex, important and to a significant extent unanswerable. But it has been dominated by those utterly certain one set of harms outweighs the other.

British Conservative MP Steve Baker has argued, reasonably, that the legislature should have the final say on lockdown measures: “Each of them has implications for people's livelihoods, welfare and health, so we must restore the ability of our democracy to make thoughtful and balanced political decisions,” he wrote in The Telegraph last month.

"We are destroying livelihoods, damaging people's mental health and welfare,” British Conservative MP Esther McVey argued in the House of Commons in March, questioning whether further lockdown measures were necessary.

Neither was excommunicated. Each voiced reasonable opinions shared by many of their constituents. Legislatures should be a forum for these diverse, reasonable views, on the record. In a society-wide crisis, at the very least, it lets off some democratic steam.

Ford has always made a show of being The Guy In Charge. The buck stops with him! It's impossible not to think he would have been far better off delegating responsibility and accountability to his various capable cabinet ministers, and consulting widely with his caucus. I struggle to imagine a frank cabinet or caucus meeting in which the idea of closing playgrounds would not have been flagged as an absolute disaster waiting to happen.

A lot of Ontarians think Ford is simply not up to the job. What seems evident is that he is not up to it on his own. Luckily, under our system of government, he's not supposed to be doing it on his own. In a once-a-century pandemic, by definition, no one knows what's exactly the right thing to do. Politically speaking, Ford has no better sounding board available to him than 71 MPPs who managed to get elected by the people of Ontario.

FRANK GUNN / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES A lot of Ontarians think Premier Doug Ford is simply not up to the job, writes columnist Chris Selley, adding that what seems evident is that he is not up to it on his own.