Time to end the campaign
During election campaigns we’ve come to expect over-the-top partisan rhetoric and exaggerations of all kinds — some so big they really are better classified as lies. But once elected, we expect leaders to switch gears and govern, as Doug Ford likes to say, for the people.
But Ontario’s premier has never left the hustings and,by his own admission,he doesn’t want to.
“I have a rule,” Ford said this week. “As soon as I finish one campaign, I start campaigning right way, the next day.”
That’s what had him standing in front of business leaders last week, urging them to “keep fighting with me” against what he referred to as the “forces” supposedly out to thwart him.
And this week, he was out lashing the prime minister, just as he would a political opponent on the campaign trail, accusing Justin Trudeau of making promises he can’t keep and “trying to hoodwink us” with his government’s plan to fight climate change.
Who knows what enemy, corporeal or not, Ford will find to focus on next week? None of this is good for Ontario. It perpetuates a sense of crisis rather than opening space for debate on important issues. It seeks to divide people when a leader’s job is to unite them. And, as a method of governing, it’s completely unnecessary since Ford has a majority government.
Ford’s actual political opponents — the opposition New Democrats, the rump of the Ontario Liberals and the Green Party’s single determined MPP — all combined cannot stop him from doing much of anything. They simply don’t have the legislative tools to prevent his government from doing pretty much what it wants.
They can delay things a bit with legislative stunts, as the NDP did with rounds of “name that lake” that came with their bill on zebra mussels.
They can try to poke holes in Ford’s most misguided ideas in the hope that his own people will see sense and moderate his views, as seems to have been the case with Health Minister Christine Elliott’s decision to keep safe injection sites open. But they can’t stop him. As premier, Ford is clearly in a position to make decisions and move forward with his own agenda. And yet, four months after taking the reins of power, he persists with the narrative that he must still fight against sinister “forces” and other people’s ideas.
“There are forces in Ontario who had it good under the stagnant Liberal economy, who were happy seeing businesses close and freezing workers out of better jobs,” Ford told a corporate audience in Niagara-on-the-Lake on Friday.
It’s ludicrous, as campaign-style rhetoric so often is. No one can fit that description for the simple reason that Ontario’s economy wasn’t “stagnant” under the Wynne government. It was expanding. Indeed, the province’s unemployment rate is among the nation’s lowest, and stands at its lowest level in almost a generation.
Ford is also on the wrong track with his high-profile, highdecibel campaign against Trudeau’s plan to impose a carbon tax on provinces that don’t adopt climate change measures of their own. Ford isn’t opposing the federal plan because he has a better idea; he clearly doesn’t.
He says he’s fighting it because businesses can’t afford it and Trudeau is lying about his plan to rebate the tax to families. “It’s nothing more than a complete scam,” Ford said on Monday.
His evidence for that? None. And in his perpetual campaign mode he evidently doesn’t see that as a problem.
It’s high time Ford realized he wasn’t elected castigator-inchief on June 7. He was elected premier and his job is to govern Ontario for the next four years.
To do that, he should stop searching out people, policies and forces to oppose and spend his time explaining how he plans to run the province. As things stand, Ontarians know far too little about that. Ford’s government was elected on the flimsiest of platforms, with no explanation of how it proposes to find $6 billion in “efficiencies” without slashing programs or jobs, while reducing taxes and hydro bills and balancing the books.
The grab-bag of legislation and policies Ford has introduced so far has focused mainly on rolling back everything associated with the Liberal government. That included, right off the bat, ending the province’s cap-and-trade program and, most recently, junking important labour reforms designed to help the lowest-paid workers in the province.
We now know that when Ford says “I’m here to fight for the little guy,” he means business owners, not low-wage workers.
We have found little positive to say about what Ford has done so far and, given his government’s rhetoric and record so far, we doubt we’ll be more pleased with what’s to come. But Ontarians have a right to know a lot more about what this government plans to do — not just what it plans to oppose. It’s time for Ford to declare the campaign over; it’s time for him to govern.
Ford’s actual political opponents all combined cannot stop him from doing much of anything