National Post (National Edition)
`A race for second place'
AFTER FOUR TUMULTUOUS YEARS, DOUG FORD BEGINS THE ONTARIO ELECTION RUN A CHANGED MAN
Ontarians are set to go to the polls soon, with Premier Doug Ford beginning the election period on Wednesday, and the consensus among both Progressive Conservatives and many neutrals is that it's Ford's race to win. “I view it as a race for second place,” says Shakir Chambers, a principal at Earnscliffe Strategies who worked on the PCs' 2018 campaign.
Abacus Data pollster David Coletto reported in late April that Ford's Tories appeared to be leading the Liberals, led by former cabinet minister Steven Del Duca, with 36 to 32 per cent based on voting intentions. That put the Liberals “within striking distance in the hypothetical ballot,” Coletto said. Andrea Horwath's official opposition NDP was languishing at 23 per cent.
But that's a narrower Tory lead than most recent polls have suggested, and regional voting effects make it look closer than it is. As of Friday, the seat projection from 338Canada, which provides poll-based statistical analysis, had Ford's PCs winning 72 seats, nine more than necessary for a second majority. The Signal, an election forecast site launched by the Toronto Star, has the Tories at 71 seats; its low-end projection of 55 still has Ford in minority territory.
Ontarians are just not generally inclined to change horses midstream. Only four times in provincial history — most recently in 1990 and then in 1995, the NDP interregnum between David Peterson's Liberals and Mike Harris's PCs — have voters sent a firstterm government packing.
There were times early in Ford's tenure that he seemed intent on making his government the fifth.
But as it stands, the rapid professionalization of the Premier's Office in 2019, Ford's surprisingly well-received performance during the pandemic, a lack of compelling alternatives, and Ontarians' general dislike of change seem to have placed him on solid ice.
To Ford's legions of detractors, all of the foregoing will read as blithering nonsense. If any government ever needed turfing after four years, they will tell you, it's this one — not despite the pandemic but in large part because of it. Ford waited too long to lock down, then didn't lock down hard or long or effectively enough; he failed to improve ventilation in enough public schools; he implemented vaccine passports and mask mandates too late and reluctantly, and abandoned them too early; he dug in his heels for months over introducing paid sick days, before finally relenting.
Barring a mid-campaign surge in hospitalizations or deaths, however, Conservative strategists think most Ontarians are less inclined to look backward in search of recrimination, and are instead looking forward in hope of assistance: pocketbook issues, from gas prices to the ever-more-impossible housing market, are dominating provincial and federal politics alike, and Ford's pre-election budget proposals have lots of goodies to offer on that front. An Abacus Data poll released last week found 61 per cent of Ontarians rated the premier's performance as either acceptable (25 per cent), good (26 per cent) or excellent (10 per cent).
It may be that “acceptable or better” is all Ontarians really expect from government, even in a pandemic. “If you want to critique Ontario for being exceptional during the pandemic, it's that we were the most locked-down jurisdiction in America (for) the longest time,” said one Conservative strategist. “And that happens to be what the opposition parties were asking for and wanting even more of.”
Tories who suffered through Ford's tumultuous first year as premier might be more surprised than anyone to see him where he is. Chaos had been Ford's brand at Toronto City Hall, where he served as a city councillor and an enforcer for his brother, then-mayor Rob Ford, and later ran a noholds-barred run for mayor against John Tory in 2014. At first, it seemed he had imported that brand to the legislature at Queen's Park.
Premier Ford 1.0 seemed overly preoccupied with lost battles at City Hall. In the middle of the 2018 municipal election campaign, his government chopped Toronto City Council's complement from 47 to 27, and even invoked the notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to shield it from judicial action. Eventually, the Supreme Court dismissed the city's attempt to challenge the move, and it was a defensible measure to take, but it nevertheless spoke to many of a distinct lack of proper focus in the Premier's Office.
Much worse was a spree of patronage appointments benefiting friends of Ford and, more so, his unpopular former chief of staff Dean French. One 26-year-old friend-of-the-Frenches landed a $165,000-a-year gig as a financial adviser to the Ontario government in New York City; another scored a similar position in London. Ford rescinded both appointments after Global News unearthed them. But he stuck to his unseemly nomination of family friend Ron Taverner as Ontario Provincial Police commissioner. It fell to Taverner himself to eventually withdraw.
Patronage appointments are nothing new in Canadian politics, of course. But it went completely against Ford's “for the people” brand, and invited comparisons with the vanquished Liberals.
Sanity arrived fairly quickly when French was ousted and some discipline installed. It was the pandemic, though, that finally got Ford some more-thangrudging good press. To many observers — including many erstwhile detractors — his performance at daily press conferences exuded the same sort of genuine empathy, frustration, sadness and anxiety that we were all feeling in the face of a challenge for which no government or head of government anywhere had good answers.
Some Tories point to photos of Ford delivering PPE out of the back of his pickup truck as a key image that drove home a solid basic message: “I don't have all the answers, but I have your back.” His rivals scoffed, of course: Pure theatre, they said. They scoffed even harder when Ford was conveniently caught on camera digging out stranded motorists during a January snowstorm in Toronto.
They asked: Do people really fall for this stuff?
Maybe. Maybe not. But elections are contested between flawed human beings, not platonic ideals. Neither Del Duca, who was never a particularly impressive minister, nor Horwath, who has led the NDP for 13 years and could only parlay the Liberals' epic unpopularity in 2018 into official opposition status, seems poised to grab people's attention and run with it. By the same token, neither party seems poised to collapse sufficiently and help the other defeat the Tories in key ridings. If anything, the Tories seem poised to win back some PC/NDP swing ridings.
Elections matter, as they say. The Liberal or NDP war rooms could be sitting on something explosive. You never know what idiocies might be lurking on candidates' forgotten social media accounts. There's always the chance another wave of COVID could throw things off axis. And several conservatives said they expect very low turnout across the board, including among significant elements of Ford's base.
As a Toronto municipal phenomenon, “Ford Nation,” as it was called in the Rob Ford years, contained many Liberal and NDP voters. When Doug Ford took the brand provincial, he will have attracted many libertarian-minded conservatives across the province, and many of them will be absolutely furious with him now. Ford didn't just lock down long and hard; he kicked any MPP who dared question locking down long and hard out of the party.
Andrew Brander, vice-president at Crestview Strategy and a veteran of the early chaotic days at Queen's Park, suggests the threat of low turnout is part of the reason the Tories tabled their budget on April 28, just prior to the election, knowing it was dead on arrival, rather than trying to get it passed earlier. (The government had to amend its own law demanding a budget be tabled every year by March 31.)
The message, says Brander, is: “This is our plan, but you actually have to show up (and) vote for it.” There's a lot in there that might lure back disaffected anti-lockdown Tories, and anyone else besides. And not much, it seems, to knock Ontario's fence-sitters off either to the left or to the upstart Ontario and New Blue parties on the right. It has been a most interesting four years in Ontario, and not often in a good way. But much as Liberals and New Democrats might wish otherwise, it seems that few Ontarians are putting that at Doug Ford's feet.
CHAOS HAD BEEN FORD'S BRAND AT TORONTO CITY HALL.