Ontario's Premier Doug Ford reacts at his Progressive Conservative election night party in Etobicoke.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
Doug Ford’s first foray into elected politics was not a success. His brother Rob (you may have heard of him) had just vacated his city-council seat in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke to run for mayor. Doug ran for council in his place. They both won. It was a two-for-one deal. Rob in the mayor’s office, Doug at his side.
Though he had grown up in a political family, the son of an MPP at Queen’s Park, Doug seemed lost inside the clam shell, the modernist council chamber at City Hall. He faced ridicule when he proposed a megamall, monorail and Ferris wheel for the city’s Port Lands. He alienated fellow city councillors by calling the council a “hokey-pokey, mom-and-pop shop.” In a debate over funding for libraries, he said if Margaret Atwood walked by him “I wouldn’t have a clue who she is.”
Fifteen years later Doug Ford is the most successful politician in Canada. By leading his Progressive Conservative party to a third consecutive majority government, he became the first to accomplish that feat since Leslie Frost in the 1950s.
Doug Ford's Progressive Conservatives won a third straight majority government, propelled by his visible crusade against economic uncertainty emanating from the U.S. Ford says he will work with governments at every level and of every political stripe to fight the threatened tariffs and shore up Ontario's economy.
The Canadian Press
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His win was not as impressive as he must have hoped. When the results came in on Thursday night, the PCs had taken about the same number of seats as the last two times in 2018 and 2022. Spending $189-million of his cherished taxpayers’ money on an election only to end up in the same spot must have been a little disappointing.
Still, he obtained the new mandate he called for and earned himself another four years in office. If he completes this term he will have been premier for 11 years and he says he wants to keep going long after that.
He now stands head and shoulders above any other premier. David Eby of British Columbia just barely held onto his job in a recent election. Danielle Smith of Alberta faces a possible scandal over favouritism in health care spending. François Legault of Quebec is cratering in the polls. Then there is Mr. Ford, with a fresh mandate to lead the country’s most populous province.
How did it happen? What transformed the blustering, fumbling former label-company executive into such a winner?
Simple luck is part of it. In his first run for premier, Mr. Ford faced Kathleen Wynne, the unpopular leader of a clapped-out party that had been in office for 15 years. In his next go-round in 2022, he was up against one of the most lacklustre candidates to lead a major political party in Ontario: Steven Del Duca.
This time he had his biggest stroke of luck yet. It came in the unlikely form of a large orange man in a big white house. Mr. Ford had no real reason to call a snap election in the middle of winter. He had a year and a half left in his term and a comfortable margin in the legislature. Donald Trump gave him the perfect excuse to pull the trigger. With Mr. Trump threatening to strangle Canada with tariffs, if not make it the 51st state, Mr. Ford could pose as Captain Canada. And it worked. Mr. Ford has been by far the most vocal and forceful of any Canadian leader in this existential faceoff.
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But to put it all down to good fortune would be unfair. Mr. Ford has come a long way from his days as Rob’s lieutenant. The ranty loose cannon has become a smooth operator. Out of Ford Nation, the populist movement he and his brother built, he has forged a winning coalition of frustrated business people, gridlocked motorists and overtaxed householders.
He has learned just what buttons to push. Passing a law giving the province the power to remove underused urban bike lanes was aimed at those fuming car commuters. So was a hare-brained plan to dig a tunnel under the 401 Highway to reduce congestion on the surface. Sending a $200 cheque to Ontario residents was designed to win over those who felt the pinch of recent inflation, in effect bribing them with their own money.
He has learned when to back down, too. He reversed a decision to open up parts of southern Ontario’s Greenbelt to housing development and apologized for getting it wrong, though the RCMP is still investigating the matter.
Even if he talks like a tough guy, Mr. Ford likes to be liked and is willing to spend lavishly to stay that way. The onetime fiscal hawk now runs one of the most profligate governments in Canada. He utters the word “billions” frequently and without qualm – the billions he has spent on hospitals and schools, roads and transit; the billions more he will spend to protect Ontario jobs if the tariffs go through. Unmentioned is all the money he has wasted to hold an unnecessary early election or get beer and wine in corner stores just in time for the vote.
The old Doug is still there, of course. Who but he would say that someone who breaks into a house and kills an innocent person should “go right to sparky” – in other words, the electric chair (his campaign admitted the remark at a police-chief gala this month was in bad taste)?
His blunt manner is one of the reasons for his success. It sets him apart from all the scripted, air-brushed politicians everyone has come to loathe. Mr. Trump has the same talent, if you can call it that.
But the two men part ways there. While the U.S. President has become wilder and more fanatical with time, Mr. Ford has become more cautious and controlled. He has avoided the nastiness about illegal immigrants and the craziness about vaccination that has marked the Trump era. He was a by-the-book, play-it-safe skipper during the COVID-19 pandemic.
When Mr. Ford became premier in 2019, I wrote that it was “wishful to think that power will turn Mr. Ford into a sensible moderate.” It was. Nobody who seriously proposes spending tens of billions to tunnel a highway under another highway can be called sensible.
But Mr. Ford is a more disciplined, more conventional leader than most of us expected, and vastly more successful.
Doug Ford's Progressive Conservatives won a third straight majority government in a snap election. Other leaders struck an optimistic tone in their concession speeches, with NDP Leader Marit Stiles staying on as Opposition leader, Liberals regaining official party status in the legislature and Greens holding onto their two seats.
The Canadian Press