What a difference a month can make
A little more than a month ago, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals dropped $14,000 on a Twitter ad campaign in Ontario, warning voters in roughly two dozen of the province’s ridings not to elect another Doug Ford.
On Friday, Trudeau and Ford will be having what’s widely expected to be a cordial meeting in Ottawa to talk over what they can do together to help the province.
Officials for the prime minister were saying on Thursday evening that they were cautiously optimistic about both the tone and potential for progress at the meeting, especially on issues related to infrastructure and transit.
For his part, Ford doesn’t seem to be holding any post-campaign grudges.
“Politics is politics and I have a pretty thick skin and I understand what he was doing,” the premier said when asked about how he’ll work with a leader who cast him as an enemy for 40 days running. “When I had a conversation with him, I told him politics are done and let’s roll up our sleeves and start working together.”
What a difference a month can make.
Apparently, the time has now come for these very different political leaders to discuss what’s best “for the people,” to borrow Ford’s 2018 election slogan. Now that the federal election is over, they can “choose forward,” as Trudeau kept saying in the campaign.
All the talk of western alienation in the wake of the federal election has almost erased the memories of the running antagonism between Ford and
Trudeau during the campaign. It raised very real questions about how Ottawa and Ontario could possibly work together when the voting was all over — questions that will definitely arise when the two men meet Friday on Parliament Hill.
But note, as Ford surely has, that no one is talking about “Ontario alienation” in the aftermath of the election and the national fissures it has exposed. More than half of Trudeau’s new cabinet members are from Ontario, and the Toronto contingent is placed in some of the most senior roles: Chrystia Freeland as deputy prime minister, Bill Morneau in finance, Bill Blair at public safety.
Trudeau is reportedly going to urge Ford to cultivate deeper relationships with all of these ministers, especially Freeland, who is also going to be serving as minister of intergovernmental affairs.
Indeed, the Freeland-Ford relationship may be the one to watch in the coming months.
Trudeau and Freeland said this week that they would be handling federal-provincial relations much like they handled the Canada-U.S. file during the tense times with Donald Trump last year. That means Trudeau will be hanging back, playing silent statesman, while Freeland plunges into the negotiations and occasional tough talk from Ottawa.
Still, expect the Trudeau government to be more diplomatic overall with the Ontario premier than the Trudeau party was during the election. While Ford was mostly invisible in the campaign, and says now he’s all fine about it, he was evoked in spirit many, many times by Trudeau.
The Ontario premier may not have been on the federal ballot, but he was very useful to Trudeau, as that $14,000 Twitter ad spree demonstrated in the days leading up to the Oct. 21 vote.
Trudeau and the Liberals ended up winning 79 seats in Ontario, while Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer — the man portrayed in the ads as another Doug Ford — saw his party limited to just 36 seats. The Liberals reaped 41 per cent of the popular vote in Ontario, while Conservatives took just 33 per cent.
The anti-Ford factor may not have been limited to Ontario either. In talking to Liberal campaign strategists in recent weeks, I heard that voters outside the province were also receptive to Trudeau’s swipes against Ford and Conservative cuts. Ford’s name even came up in focus groups the Liberals conducted in Vancouver.
Now, however, the tone has changed. Ford is no longer Trudeau’s biggest problem at the first ministers’ table. Alberta’s Jason Kenney and Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe have stepped into that role.
Ford has even been putting himself forward as the national-unity guy among the premiers, convening a Dec. 2 meeting in Toronto for that purpose and setting up a new senior ministers council on federal-provincial relations on Thursday, as the Star’s Robert Benzie reported.
It’s been a while since Canada has experienced an Ottawa-Ontario alliance on the national-unity front. Trudeau’s father could count on Bill Davis for that honest-broker role during the constitutional talks in the early 1980s. Brian Mulroney worked closely with David Peterson on the Meech Lake accord and then with Bob Rae on the Charlottetown accord in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The idea of a Ford-Trudeau relationship following in that historical pattern seems like a bit of a stretch right now. But who knows? A month ago, it was hard to imagine the two leaders sitting in the same room together — and yet, there they will be on Friday.