A history lesson on the abuse of power
We entrust the exercise of state power to our premier, hoping he will treat it as a sacred trust.
Without fear or favour. Or friendship. When Doug Ford announced the handover of our all-powerful Ontario Provincial Police to his personal pal, Ron Taverner, he breached that trust. Not only by dispensing a prized patronage reward to an old crony, but by bestowing a priceless gift upon himself:
Total loyalty from the province’s top cop.
This week, we got an unwelcome reminder of how the provincial police could become beholden to the premier if Taverner is sworn in as chief. In future, Ford’s wish will be his command, because he will forever have a footnote — or hyphen — attached to his title:
“Commissioner of the OPPIOU.”
Our provincial police chief will always be indebted to Ford because, as is now widely understood, he lacked the minimum qualifications for the job.
Only when the premier’s hand-picked hiring committee dialed down the stated requirements did Taverner — who failed to make the first cut — get a second chance, with an IOU due.
The OPP has an anti-rackets squad to guard against politicking or gaming gone awry, when the fix is in. Now, we have Exhibit A for why mixing police and politics is a bad idea.
When the opposition New Democrats came upon a leaked copy of draft health-care legislation this month, the government pounced. The OPP were promptly notified.
Never mind that when they were in opposition, the Tories trafficked in leaked documents and demanded that the police stay out of it — no witch hunts against whistleblowers. The Tories often demanded that the OPP investigate the governing Liberals for malfeasance.
Back then, the OPP came under intense scrutiny, notably when police intruded close to elections and occasionally in mid-campaign. Yet their investigations were never suspected of partisanship.
Now imagine if the premier gets his way, installing Taverner despite the public outcry. If Ontario’s top cop is a crony who owes everything to Ford, police investigations will always run the risk of appearing compromised and conflicted.
That’s not fair for front-line officers, for the Crown lawyers who depend on their investigations and for the people (or politicians) being probed by the police.
The province’s integrity commissioner is looking into the affair, but he is no U.S.-style special prosecutor, merely a servant of the legislature whose findings can easily be ignored by a premier with a commanding majority.
Ford keeps dismissing the criticism from all sides of the political spectrum — not least from recent OPP brass — perhaps because this is intensely personal. His novel argument is that the top job is a patronage appointment that remains his prerogative as premier.
That is simply untrue among recent Ontario premiers. Unless Ford wants to turn back the clock to the Depression era, when another populist ruled the province by rewriting the rule book.
Lest we forget, Mitch Hepburn’s right-leaning Liberals came to power in the 1930s vowing to disrupt government while trumpeting their direct connection to “the people.” When Hepburn encountered obstacles, he knew what to do and who to deploy.
In 1937, with General Motors workers on strike in Oshawa to win an eight-hour day, Hepburn summoned the OPP into action. When Ottawa refused to deploy additional RCMP forces as backup, the premier mobilized his own muscle by recruiting 200 “special constables,” many of them exmilitary.
According to Dahn D. Higley’s definitive history of the OPP, published in 1984, “the new provincial force was being referred to as ‘Hepburn’s Hussars’ and the ‘Sons of Mitches’ by the premier’s detractors who resented or feared Hepburn’s militant posture.”
Higley’s book describes it as the premier’s “private army,” integrated into a paid OPP reserve for “times of emergency.” Labour historian Irving Abella writes that Hepburn’s Hussars were effectively paid strikebreakers.
Then as now, the premier considered the OPP to be his personal police force because its commander owed him personal loyalty. Unlike today, the attorney general of the day objected to the power play and exited cabinet.
Hepburn’s Hussars are a dark part of Ontario’s history. Do we really want them reincarnated today as Ford’s Forces, answerable to him through a direct line to the loyalist he crowned as commissioner of the OPPIOU?
Fear not, you might say, the 1930s was a different era of rising populism. But this is 2019, a historian might reply, a time of fading memories.
We forget our history, and the parallels, at our peril. The first lesson of history is that the rule of law is paramount. That means power must be exercised without fear or favour. Or friendship.