Now, go do your real job

Across Greater Toronto on Monday, thousands of citizens did the neighbourly thing, shovelling a senior’s walk, helping push marooned cars from snowdrifts, giving someone a lift.

Doubtless there were jokes, laughs, thanks and cheery “no problems.” Help happily — and anonymously — given.

Only one citizen seems to have made a multimedia, self-promotional meal of it.

That, of course, was Premier Doug Ford.

And in the performative exercise, in the misplaced focus, in the sham of it all was to be found much that’s wrong about the Ford family in public life.

First was the premier’s disregard of the express instructions of police and emergency services.

They had asked people to stay off roads so emergency services could operate. They reminded drivers to avoid distractions at the wheel.

But there was the premier, like some wannabe superhero, trolling the streets of Etobicoke, conducting FaceTime interviews with a TV reporter while driving.

Doug Ford has been largely missing in action over the recent difficult weeks of the pandemic and the challenge of reopening schools.

Hospitals and emergency services are stretched almost to the point of collapse.

His former long-term care minister jumped ship in the midst of the pandemic, just months before an election.

There are many large, serious issues that it’s the premier’s job to address.

Instead, Ford — eager for applause and adulation — was out on the streets with a shovel like some small-town ward heeler.

The Fords are good at that sort of thing, as the late mayor Rob Ford showed years before his brother became premier. Retail politics is their trademark. But it’s not the job of high office. And in Doug Ford’s case it was done more for his benefit than for anyone else’s.

The video posted of Ford shovelling was critiqued on social media like a last-ditch football play and the premier seemed to demonstrate precious little experience at the task, rather like Donald Trump holding a Bible.

He shoved snow backwards between his legs, into his boots, back onto the road, clearing a patch well behind the rear tires and of no discernible use in getting the stalled car in motion.

Then there was a TikTok video posted by @eddykandic95 in which the premier is seen giving a young man a lift.

“I’m the taxi driver today and snow plow and everything else,” Ford chirped. The operative word in the sentence being “I.”

Neither man, in the enclosed space of a car’s front seats, was wearing a mask.

The Fords never played by the rules, frequently acting as if they were above the law.

The Peel Paramedic Union tweeted out a reminder to the premier that when authorities advise against being on the roads and against distracted driving, “We are talking to you @fordnation.”

If Ford wants to do their jobs, the union said, maybe it should be allowed “to run the government long enough to fix the mess he has made.”

The premier was unapologetic.

“Just making sure people are safe in their cars and anything I can do to help them,” Ford told a TV host from his car.

What the premier could have done to make people safe was stay off the roads, stay off his phone and TV, wear a mask.

Then he might have had time for doing his real job.

Police and emergency services had asked people to stay off roads so they could operate. But there was the premier, like some wannabe superhero, trolling the streets of Etobicoke, conducting Facetime interviews with a TV reporter while driving