Ford’s latest overreach

An Ontario government directive making some post-secondary student fees optional was not only bad policy, it was born of terrible partisan politics.

That was made abundantly clear by Premier Doug Ford’s declaration that student unions get up to “crazy Marxist nonsense” so “we fixed that.”

Yes, by interfering in university and college operations and undercutting the financial underpinning of everything from student unions to campus newspapers, clubs and services.

Thankfully, an Ontario court has quashed the government’s “Student Choice Initiative,” which forced institutions to let students opt out of paying many ancillary fees.

It was a massive overreach into the inner workings of postsecondary institutions and student associations, and the government doesn’t have the legal authority to require them to comply with it.

It’s a good decision and Attorney General Doug Downey should not appeal it.

The decision is also very instructive reading about just what the Ford government wrongly believes it has the power to do.

The government argued that its directive on student fees was “not justiciable” because the court has no right to review “core policy decisions” made by cabinet or interfere with the government’s “prerogative power over spending.”

Stripped of the legalese, that boils down to a troubling position that goes like this: The government can do what it wants because it sets policy and provides some funding and no one even has the right to question it.

The court, quite rightly and unanimously, slapped that argument down.

And good thing, too. This isn’t the first time, nor is it likely to be the last, that the Ford government argues it can do something objectionable simply because people voted for the Progressive Conservatives last year.

Hopefully, this ruling by the Ontario Divisional Court serves to remind the Ford government that there’s more to our democratic system than one day at the polls every four years.

The government does not have the right, for example, to ignore its own legislation, as it did in this case.

The panel of judges readily acknowledged the court does not have the authority to “assess the wisdom or effectiveness” of a provincial directive, but it certainly can rule on its legality.

“Indeed, it lies at the very heart of the court’s public law mandate,” the justices said in the ruling, released last week.

Further, the government’s position that its decisions are not subject to judicial review would “open the door for government by executive decree, a proposition repugnant to the core principles of parliamentary democracy.”

So the government’s move wasn’t legal and its attempt to defend it was an affront to our democratic system. It’s not a stretch to think that had it been the court’s job to review the substance of the directive, it wouldn’t have found much wisdom or effectiveness there either.

The Student Choice Initiative is a lot like the Ford government’s other “choice” policies.

It replaced a Liberal plan to make child care free for preschoolers with a tax credit that doesn’t come close to covering the costs of regulated child care. In that case, as in this one, the government was offering less than people need and trying to paper over that fact by pitching it as offering a great new choice.

This directive stemmed from little more than Ford’s desire to strip funding from groups he doesn’t like or value.

Thankfully, the court has made it clear that’s not a choice Ford gets to make.

The Ford government does not have the right to ignore its own legislation