Ontario Premier Doug Ford empties a bottle of Crown Royal whisky at a press conference in Kitchener, Ont., last month.Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press
Poor Captain Canada. He was once our nation’s hero, but the country seems less enamoured with his shtick now that his arch enemy, U.S. President Donald Trump, has retreated back to his lair to cultivate his malevolent schemes against various foes, and not simply Canada.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford began discovering his powers at the beginning of the year, when Canada was being governed by a lame-duck prime minister and a distinct absence of leadership at the federal level. With no one to counter Mr. Trump’s threats of punishing tariffs, our hero donned his uniform – a navy “Canada Is Not For Sale Hat – and bravely made idle threats about cutting off electricity to the Americans.
But things have changed. Canada now has a new prime minister, a new-ish cabinet and a process for beginning renegotiations of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Captain Canada is finally free to return to his home province, where he can refocus on issues such as the province’s atrocious housing-start figures and its continuing health care crisis.
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But alas, it’s a difficult thing for a superhero to hang up his cape, which is why Mr. Ford is now furiously pointing at his hat and waging war against an alcohol producer for closing an Ontario plant. Watch me take on these bad guys! our protagonist exclaims, as he flips a bottle of Crown Royal upside down and waits patiently, for several uncomfortable minutes, for the whisky to dribble out of the slow-flow cap. The millions of Ontarians without a family doctor can wait – less than 200 factory workers might lose their jobs!
Mr. Ford threatened action back in September when Diageo, which makes Crown Royal and other spirits, announced it would be closing its bottling facility in Amherstburg, Ont., to move operations closer to U.S. consumers. The company still maintains some production in Canada, including in Manitoba and Quebec, but the anticipated closing of this one Ontario plant is unacceptable to Captain Canada. On Monday, Mr. Ford said he will pull Crown Royal from LCBO shelves if the bottling plant indeed closes in February, and threatened to “look at Smirnoff next” – another Diageo product that is produced in Valleyfield, Que. – if the company does not reconsider. He noted that Ontario is the single-largest purchaser of Diageo products in North America and that it risks losing $765-million in contracts with the LCBO.
If Captain Canada was a different type of superhero, he could make the province more attractive for businesses by lowering taxes and cutting red tape. But this valiant Ontario defender is preoccupied primarily with slaying easy targets – speed cameras, whisky, bike lanes, and so on – instead of taking on the big, structural challenges that plague Ontario, such as chronic provincial overspending and apparent cronyism involving millions of dollars in government grants. It’s like if Superman ignored Lex Luthor’s tyrannical ambitions because he heard someone is littering in a Metropolis park.
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Mr. Ford is essentially wielding the power of the province’s archaic monopoly to threaten businesses for making business decisions. He is also creating a hostile environment for investment in the province, since proponents will have to factor the Premier’s fickle populism into its calculation of the value of maintaining operations in Ontario.
Mr. Ford is clearly trying to coast off the wave of patriotism that catapulted him to Captain Canada status earlier this year, but that wave is fading. Recent polling shows that old concerns about the cost of living, health care and housing have eclipsed worries about Mr. Trump in the minds of the majority of Canadians. It’s not February, 2025, any more and even it was, there’s a new guy in charge lobbying on behalf of Canadian interests.
Prime Minister Mark Carney was in Washington this week to rub shoulders with Mr. Trump. Though the meeting did not end with any news on the trade front, we should consider the President’s enduring personal affinity for Canada’s Prime Minister (which was evident during their public address) a measure of success. Despite Mr. Ford’s insistence that Mr. Carney should secure a deal or else “hit back hard,” there is little evidence to suggest that taking a hard-line, adversarial approach to negotiations will serve much benefit beyond placating a frustrated domestic audience.
What will serve some benefit, however, is if Ontario’s Premier refocuses on actual issues – the ones that perhaps don’t lend themselves to cheesy stunts – and hangs up his Captain Canada hat.