What’s going on with Ontario’s 26th premier these days? He’s picking fights where he doesn’t need to, as he did with the media after last week’s private-jet debacle. Then, this weekend, he had to apologize for hurling a personal insult at a Liberal MPP in the legislature (more on that later). This doesn’t reflect well on him, and he’s a leader who has, in recent years, been shown to have a finger on the pulse of the electorate. What gives?
There’s no doubt Doug Ford has had a roller-coaster of a political career. His time as a councillor at Toronto City Hall (while his brother Rob was mayor) was about as dramatically up-and-down as it gets. When he took over his brother’s mayoral re-election campaign in 2014, after Rob’s death, Ford lost to John Tory and seemed a spent force in politics.
But he resurrected his political career in March 2018, becoming Ontario PC party leader. Three months later, he won the premiership in as wild a comeback story as we’ve seen at the Ontario legislature.
Initially, Ford brought a frat house approach to governing, picking fights with critics, journalists, and special interest groups. The public quickly soured on his government. His polling numbers went into the dumpster.
Ford was well on his way to becoming a one-term premier. When I asked former Tory finance minister Janet Ecker what the premier needed to do to turn things around, she replied, “He has to demonstrate a capacity to learn.”
Wise words.
Then came a global pandemic and, rather than continue his bellicose, populism-on-steroids approach to governing, Ford did the most remarkable volte face. He realized that his “buck-a-beer” style wasn’t going to cut it when people were dying by the thousands. He listened to experts and used the media appropriately to disseminate life-saving messages. Gone were his days of being “a bull who brings his own china shop with him wherever he goes,” as Thornhill MP Melissa Lantsman once described him.
It worked. The public re-elected him in 2022 and then, 14 months ago, despite Ford’s calling an early opportunistic election, gave him a third consecutive majority government. Ford entered Ontario’s top political job almost eight years ago as perhaps the least-prepared premier ever to assume office; now he’s the province’s eighth longest-serving premier of all time. This summer, he’ll leap over three other premiers to grab fifth-place on the list.
Ford has consistently conveyed the impression of someone who doesn’t always get it right, but has an innate ability to change his mind, apologize, then move on. He did it with the Greenbelt, during COVID-19, and of course, two weekends ago with his purchase, then almost immediate sale, of an executive jet. The public seems to appreciate his willingness to admit mistakes.
But since the onset of the pandemic, Ford has almost always kept a cheery, positive demeanour. He’d have fun jousting with journalists during his regular COVID encounters and looked perfectly happy taking on Trump and playing Captain Canada.
But the past two weeks have seen somewhat of a return to the approach of his first year, and I’m trying to figure out why. He’s in first place in the polls, is getting along well with his fellow first ministers regardless of party stripe, seems to be winning the big political fights (building a spa on the Toronto waterfront, taking over Billy Bishop Airport, or getting his budget passed without losing some of its less-popular elements).
When Ford chooses to engage in verbal fisticuffs, he almost always punches up, for example, against the U.S. president or American cabinet secretaries.
So, why all the complaining last week about being the most scrutinized politician in the country? (Which he surely isn’t — to my eyes, both the prime minister and federal opposition leader have received considerably more scrutiny than Ford.) Why all the complaining about having to sell the executive jet? No one told him to buy it in the first place, and no one forced him to sell it two days later.
The worst example of Ford’s return to past behaviour happened last week, during question period, when the Liberal MPP for Toronto-St. Paul’s, Stephanie Smyth, a former journalist with CP24, deigned to ask the premier a question about his changes to the province’s freedom of information law.
“Why does this premier, who claims to be highly accountable, make it so very hard to hold him accountable?” she asked, in a pretty straight-forward, non-hyperbolic way.
“Do you know why the member is down here?” Ford asked rhetorically, referring to Queen’s Park. “It’s because CP24 didn’t want her anymore — bottom line, simple. That’s why she’s down here, and she was just a promoter for an NDP agenda when she was doing interviews.”
What a bizarre thing to say.
I’ve known Smyth for 20 years. She was plain and simply a straight-ahead journalist. It was never apparent to me that she leaned towards any party. And anyway, why would Ford accuse her of promoting an NDP agenda while in journalism, when she got elected as a Liberal?
The speaker of the assembly, Donna Skelly (another former journalist), also found the comments unseemly, and chided the premier against further “personal attacks.”
Did the premier not appreciate how bad it looks when the highest-ranking politician in the province punches down at a backbencher from the third-place party in the legislature?
Why do that?
Ford’s unscripted comments typically come across as funny and endearing. A sizeable chunk of the Ontario public seems to enjoy it when, for example, he says of a critic: “Well, the cheese clearly slipped off the cracker for that guy.”
He was recently asked about whether he feared going against possible Liberal leadership candidate Navdeep Bains. Ford responded, “You could run Mickey Mouse against me. Donald Duck. I don't care.”
Those lines land well.
Ford seems politically untouchable when he’s railing against Trump, working well with the feds or various mayors around Ontario, or looking like a guy who enjoys his job. He has not been that guy for the past two weeks. And while I’m not inside his head, I can say there often comes a time for successful politicians, if they’ve been in office for more than a couple of terms, that they get tired of the criticism and can’t figure out why everyone else doesn’t understand how hard they’re working, how good their intentions are, and why everyone doesn’t agree with them.
At some point this past weekend, Ford or an advisor had second thoughts about the advisability of his comments to Smyth. The premier apologized. Smyth’s office put out a press release, indicating the premier had offered an apology, which she appreciated and accepted. Ford did the right thing by apologizing, but of course the better approach would have been to not to say those things in the first place.
Historically, the public seems to tire of its leaders after about nine years in office. Ford will hit that mark next year. Ford has already indicated he wants to run again in hopes of achieving a fourth consecutive majority government, something no premier has done since 1914. He is often discussed as a possible national Conservative leader, in the event that Pierre Poilievre fails to unseat Mark Carney. Why risk all that? Why run the risk of being thrown out of office because you’ve suddenly lost the discipline that has kept your party in power for three straight elections?
I suspect I’m not the only one asking that question these days. Fortunately for Ford, he still has a lot of time to figure that out and get back on track. Otherwise, Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck could prove to be a bigger threat next time around than he thinks.