Are the Tories hiding Ford?
In the run-up to the June 2 election, Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives are hiding something.
Oddly enough, that something is their leader and premier, Doug Ford.
While most political parties want to have their leaders out in the public and in the daily news cycle during an election campaign, the Conservative party brain trust apparently thinks its leader is best showcased as sparingly, and as secretly, as possible because every now and then Ford has a tendency to wander off course.
Every day The Canadian Press — the news agency that is the bedrock of every newsroom in Canada — issues a roundup of what party leaders are doing, and where they can be found. It’s based on information fed to CP by the four main parties — PCs, NDP, Liberals and Greens.
It tells news media, and anyone else who wants to check it, what town or city the leaders will be visiting, a short description of what they are going to be doing, and when and where you can find them.
But in this campaign, the Progressive Conservatives are being selective at best about telling voters what they are doing, and when and where they are doing it.
Take the scant and remarkably unhelpful information listed for Ford’s sole campaign event on May 7. “Sault Ste. Marie,” it reads, “Makes an announcement. 9:30 a.m.”
Nearly 75,000 people live in Sault Ste. Marie. Its urban footprint is 54 square kilometres. Without a specific address or location, a voter would be mighty hard-pressed to find out where the premier was going to be, much less what he was going to be announcing.
That same day, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath was talking to voters in Bowmanville about utility bills; Stephen Del Duca, the Liberal leader, was in Ottawa talking up his party’s platform before going to Kingston; Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner was in his Guelph riding glad-handing voters.
All of their locations were listed. If you were so inclined, you could have found out when and where they were going to be so you could take your own measure of the party leaders.
With all of the polls pointing toward a second Progressive Conservative majority, the strategy seems to be keeping Doug Ford cloistered and as far away from any uncontrolled situations — and open mics — as possible, lest he go off script.
For example, after the first debate of the campaign in North Bay a week ago Tuesday, Horwath, Del Duca and Schreiner all showed up to answer reporters’ questions. Ford? He was nowhere to be seen.
If they are going to shift the polls in their favour, Horwath and Del Duca’s best hope is to make the election about Ford and his government.
They weren’t able to effectively do that in the first debate, and the Conservatives’ strategy of keeping the premier under wraps as much as possible — in effect not letting Ford be Ford — will only make it harder in the second half of the campaign.
Cynical and calculated it may be. But if the polls are on point, and the Conservatives are headed for a second majority, they will see no reason why they should stop now.
After all, it’s hard for the would-be premiers to take on their main opponent if they don’t know where he is or what he is doing.