Doug Ford became Ontario's Premier with his first majority government in 2018.Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has been given the greatest gifts one can have in politics: time and power. With the three consecutive majority governments that his Progressive Conservatives have won, he’s had the ability to pursue radical policy changes and actually begin to see the fruits of those changes. He’s been able to conceive of, initiate and develop major infrastructure projects. And he can, if he wishes, fundamentally overhaul the way a province structures its basic funding operations, in service to greater efficiency and results.
Mr. Ford has done none of those things. He became Premier with his first majority government in 2018, and has spent the time since then fiddling around the margins: scrapping a fee or two here, reworking an existing policy there. The most substantial changes the Ford government has brought to Ontario has been to liberalize alcohol sales and consolidate power at the provincial level. But Ontario, by and large, looks the same as it did a decade ago; in fact, in many areas, from health care to its financial state, it looks much worse.
That’s not to say Mr. Ford has been sitting idle. In the past couple of weeks alone, he has bombarded Ontario with a barrage of new marginal policy ideas and announcements: plans to allow people to bring their own alcohol to public events in the spring. New regulations to permit solo drivers to use high-occupancy vehicle lanes during off-peak hours. Ambitions for a new convention centre. A push to legalize pepper-spray. Live-streamed bail hearings. Expansion of the Toronto Island airport. And free kazoos for every Ontarian with an “I” in their names. (The latter hasn’t actually been announced, but it is in the spirit of some of the others.)
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This is the politics of distraction and empty gestures, the best example of which came last week when Mr. Ford’s government filed an injunction against the Al-Quds Day rally mere hours before it was set to take place. If Mr. Ford was genuinely inclined to stop the annual demonstration, he could have done so any time since 2018, when he first promised to ensure that the rally was “no longer part of the landscape in Ontario.” Instead, he filed an 11th-hour injunction that was bound to be dismissed, just so that it would look like he was actually doing something.
The deluge of inconsequential announcements seems intended to distract from the Premier’s move to change freedom of information laws to exempt himself, his cabinet ministers and their offices from public requests. That change was announced by Queen’s Park after Mr. Ford lost a court battle to keep private the call logs of his personal cellphone, which he uses for provincial business. Mr. Ford has provided a handful of far-fetched and implausible reasons for changing Ontario’s FOI laws, including that, “We’ve got to protect ourselves against the Communist Chinese that are infiltrating our country, Canada, the U.S., everything, into our education system, into high-tech companies.”
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Indeed, everyone knows that malicious Beijing operatives are filing FOI requests, waiting six years for a response, and then using that information nefariously against the people of Ontario.
But never mind that. Mr. Ford would much prefer that we talk about how to build a floating convention centre and an underground highway while we toss back beers we brought from home to a street festival. Anything but the hard stuff: the deep, structural issues plaguing Ontario, which take time, political courage and actual concentration to tackle.
For all of the tough talk Mr. Ford has had for U.S. President Donald Trump over the past couple years, Ontario’s Premier is deploying one of Mr. Trump’s favourite tactics: flooding the zone with all sorts of news in order to confuse and distract from the things that actually matter.
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In doing so, he’s inventing new “problems,” and then presenting himself, the third-term Premier, as the ultimate fixer. But what, exactly, is the issue with Toronto’s existing convention centre? Which women’s group has been calling for legalizing pepper spray? Is the problem with our justice system that bail hearings are not live-streamed? Or is there perhaps something more meaningful the Premier can address?
Mr. Ford has utterly wasted an extraordinary mandate. He could have used the past eight years to lay the foundation for radical policy changes: to perhaps reimagine how we structure health care in Ontario, or fund education, or conceive of what it means to own a home in this province. A man who was truly “for the people” would have done that with unbridled transparency, too.
Instead, Mr. Ford is a mattress salesman waving silk pillowcases and bamboo sheets in front of your face, hoping that you won’t notice that the box spring is being held together by thumbtacks.