Ford’s big Ontario plan requires a pimped- up van
Ontario Premier Doug Ford is a jigsaw puzzle, one of those maddening ones with vast expanses of cloudless blue sky. You know that given time, you could fit all the bits of sky together, but time passes, it’s boring, and anyway you know what the result will be: a great big patch of blue.
My conviction that Ford is a complicated politician — and that one day I will figure out his elaborate strategy for world domination — may well be wrong. He won the Ontario election overwhelmingly, perhaps with nothing more than organizational cunning and luck. But after that, I don’t see what Ford’s plan is.
People often claim to be economic conservatives and social liberals. Why? To get along with other people, to lower the intensity. But Ford is the first Ontario politician to have come out as economically liberal and socially conservative.
He spends freely, he acts as if Etobicoke were a farm in Lanark County, and he wants a premier’s van the size of a Zamboni as a personal emblem.
Ford professed to be the Conservative who would slay the Liberal deficit/ debt dragon. It’s not happening. Yes, he’s hacking away at every accessible Liberal scheme, but the so- called “efficiencies” have been tiny, a few million here, a few million there.
He said goodbye to watchdogs like the environmental commissioner, but never said how much money it saved. Cutting Toronto council was no bargain. Health Minister Christine Elliott has just announced massive changes to the Ontario health care system without offering cost details. She claims it will reduce the duplication of services, but wouldn’t the dollar figure be fairly easy to calculate, at least at the beginning?
It does sound a bit like Stephen Harper launching the Phoenix pay system, theoretically immaculate but a disaster in practice. In this case, people won’t just lose their pay though. They might die.
Ford is still as much of a free- spender as former premier Kathleen Wynne was said to be. But when it comes to social conservatism — transmitted by personal signals to his rural base — he is all there.
He drives tractors, demands cheap rather than artisanal beer and says university students should have their “mouths washed out with soap.” In other words, he does the things that are just not done in Toronto, and he’s good at it.
The giant van would have been his crowning — or is it clowning — glory.
It looks more like a school bus — you say customized ride, I say pimped — at a cost of $ 50,696 over the purchase price. I don’t know why Ford needed a vehicle larger than what Wynne used, but he seemed to want something like an RV to carry a large entourage, a personal Das Boot.
According to court documents, it would have been either a Ford Transit or a larger Mercedes- Benz Sprinter, containing four seats plus four swivel chairs and desks, a minifridge, a 32inch TV and a leather “power reclining sofa bench” to fill up the back.
This interests me since I have long wanted a king- size bendy bed but my house is too small to accommodate it. The sofa bench is basically an electric La- Z- Boy built for two, or possibly three, depending on how intense the mini- cabinet meeting gets.
Now, Mercedes- Benz says the Sprinter passenger van seats up to 12 or even 15, though I don’t see how. The entrance step is 20 inches high, so most women would have trouble getting in. Perhaps they meant 15 children, but Ford seems to be filling the car with men, and in the case of the OPP, special men of his own choosing.
Is Ford planning to nap in his peoplecarrier? If he lies sideways on that sofa bench and presses the wrong button, it could injure him. Worse has happened with those seats.
But Ford wants this even more than he wants to kill the Ontario Human Rights Commission. It is a statement vehicle. It is Ford’s mute declaration of manly social conservatism: big, costly, gas- wasting and taking up two disabled parking spaces.
It is Ford’s Air Force One, the last piece in the puzzle. He will make it happen.
Doug Ford is still as much of a free- spender as former premier Kathleen Wynne was said to be