Governing is not a private affair
Silent as a bird’s wing, mute as tarmac, shy as a baby gerbil, Premier Doug Ford’s cabinet is doing a Greta Garbo. They want to be alone.
Of all the emerging social inadequacies of the Ford government, the shunning of the voting public by avoiding reporters is the strangest.
Garbo was always banging on about being alone, but most famously in Grand Hotel, a 1932 movie very much like Queen’s Park right now, a genre drama about a big place where people seek to be known and not known, where paths cross or deliberately don’t.
Transportation Minister John Yakabuski, in Garbo’s role, plays the Russian ballerina Grusinskaya who wishes not to be questioned about her declining career, just as Yakabuski made clear Thursday he would not agree to an interview request from Star transportation reporter Ben Spurr, a meticulous and fair-minded reporter.
Minister Garbo was announcing a new public-private GO station deal in Mimico although his statement was drowned out by a huge diesel engine right behind him, always a problem with romantic trains as a backdrop. ( Grand Hotel climaxes in a train station too, but in Berlin, not Mimico.)
When Spurr tried to introduce himself to the transportation minister/artiste on the train platform — stranger danger! — it was time for Garbo’s big line. Yakabuski told Spurr he didn’t talk “to people who insult me on the internet.”
But all Spurr could find was his comment online about Yakabuski not talking to journalists. “The minister is a powerful person, whose government controls billions of dollars of infrastructure and is proposing major changes to your transit system,” Spurr wrote. “He and his communications staff are paid by the public. I think they should answer basic questions from the public.”
That’s not an insult, that is a call for basic information in a democracy. The minister also blocks the Globe and Mail’s urban transportation reporter, Oliver Moore. Normal politicians would be thrilled to talk regularly to two reporters with specialized knowledge.
And reporters don’t insult, they simply report. Columnists do though, and that’s where I come in.
At this point Yakabuski has abandoned Garbo and is doing The Fugitive or that bit in Gravity where George Clooney detaches himself from Sandra Bullock and floats away. Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod’s staffers applauding to drown out reporters’ questions? That’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus as shameless Vice-President Selina Meyer in Veep.
In real life, Yakabuski sounds like Sarah Huckabee Sanders who blamed CNN for always having been “so negative.” CNN had been sent a pipe bomb amid President Trump labelling journalists “enemies of the people.”
Ford’s government so dislikes reporters that it sends out its own version of news on a Conservative platform called Ontario News Now, with an actor (Seneca-trained former journalist Lyndsey Vanstone) playing a TV news reporter. She cheerfully offers no context, no quotes from Opposition critics or community groups, just Ford cabinet ministers congratulating each other and taking her candyfloss questions.
This is news as Ford would like it. No minister will have to defend the tax money being spent — though Ford Nation voters actually care about that — or be asked awkward questions. Government is a private matter. Ford, slayer of elections, will do as he pleases.
This is sinister. But Yakabuski’s stance is ludicrous, a teenage-level dating strategy to pursue voters, win, and then ghost them.
One can only speculate. Is this payback for some ancient grudge he has coddled like an egg? What will my payback be for calling Yakabuski a ballerina?
Here’s another way Ford veers from the norm. To succeed in politics, it’s best to be a certain kind of person: energetic, unflappable, data-minded, thick-skinned, and above all, comfortable with people. Bill Clinton had these qualities, as did Jean Chrétien, as does Justin Trudeau. The prime minister walks into crowds, does town halls; he’ll talk to anyone.
Yakabuski, son of a longtime Renfrew MPP, is a hardwarestore owner from Barry’s Bay, the kind of Corner Gas job where you have to be a people person to run the business well. He grew up in a family of 14 children, which you’d think would make him sociable.
Instead, he has the same spiky resentment that radiates from Ford. It’s like saying to a customer, “I will not sell you that snowblower.” If that plays okay in Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke, it will not in a ministry that spent $5.3 billion in public money last year.
Ford’s “government for the people,” only 5 months old, has already blocked a path to still-unconvinced voters. One senses that ministers have a Harper-like list of what they dislike: journalists; cities, the federal government, young people, women, post-secondary education, low-paid workers, pesky government regulations, pesky government and possibly themselves for being governmental.
New governments, like new bosses, are given a certain number of yes cards, in this case because the previous Liberal government had taken on an air of seedy corruption. When the electorate gets restless, those yes cards run out. Ford and his cabinet will indeed be alone, as they so ardently wish.