One of the early scandals of Doug Ford’s tenure as leader of the PC Party — before he was premier of Ontario and even before he’d won a seat in the legislature — was the revelation of Ford, on camera, pledging to a room of supporters that he’d open up the Greenbelt to developers.
Foreshadowing for his eventual attempt to do just that in 2022, yes, but something else happened that has stuck with me in all the years since. Before Ford eventually reversed himself on that earliest Greenbelt notion, after an interval of a few days, PC MPPs at Queen’s Park were made to defend the not-quite-a-policy-proposal, as their leader dragged them further and further out onto a limb.
As someone who values the Greenbelt, I was pleased to see Ford abandon the idea (both then and later) but as an observer of Queen’s Park I noted it and wondered if Progressive Conservatives saw the same thing I did: Tory MPPs following orders from the top only to have the rug pulled out from under them when it was politically expedient for the boss. Some of this is inevitable in political leadership, but after eight years in power PC MPPs have this year been put in precarious positions because of decisions made at the top of the food chain. It’s fair to ask for how long they’ll put up with it.
The recent controversy over MPPs from the government benches billing taxpayers for Toronto hotels even when, in the case of former minister Stan Cho, they live within easy commuting distance of Queen’s Park isn’t only a case of bad judgement by those individuals. (Even if we can acknowledge that bad judgement abounds in this story.) Rather, it’s worth spelling out how these MPPs got the idea that billing taxpayers like this was good and necessary in the first place.
The premier initially defended these expenses as necessary for occasions where the legislature was having nighttime sittings. In fact, Global News reported this week that the government’s own guidance to PC MPPs was that their attendance at Queen’s Park was so vital for these nighttime sittings that they should stay in hotels if needed.
The rules of the legislature have always allowed for nighttime sittings, and the justification is straightforward enough: items on the government’s agenda usually have to be debated for a certain amount of time before a vote can be called, so finding more time in the day for debate speeds up the government agenda. The daytime hours of the legislature are spoken for with other priorities like question period or members statements, so a government that wants to use up the required amount of debate time can turn to nighttime sittings as an expedient.
There’s a small problem with the government’s rationale, though. It doesn’t make much sense.
For starters, while the government obviously wants to keep control of debate in the chamber of the legislature itself, it takes surprisingly few MPPs present to keep a lid on mischief. Opposition MPPs can’t outright defeat a government bill so long as five of those present request a recorded division. Any recorded vote is deferred until the following day after question period — the part of the legislative week when it’s easiest for the government to have all their MPPs present and accounted for.
The opposition could, in theory, delay the government’s legislation somewhat by other legislative trickery, but that’s the extent of its power — which tells us what this is really about.
The use of nighttime sittings of the legislature isn’t something this government inherited from the Liberals; the Liberals had largely governed without nighttime sittings for the same reason Queen’s Park stopped sitting on Fridays: it was seen as a way to make political careers more manageable for MPPs (and their staff) with young families. Ford’s PCs largely continued that until relatively recently. The government seems to be increasingly using every means at its disposal (nighttime sittings, sprawling omnibus bills, truncated committee hearings, and more) to cram as much of its legislative agenda as possible into as few sitting days as necessary. This has the effect of minimizing the number of days the government has to face televised prosecution of question period and maximizing their freedom to be away from the legislature to cut ribbons and otherwise make spending announcements around the province.
To bring it back to MPP expenses, this is how we end up with the spectacle of confused MPPs suddenly discovering they owe the fisc thousands of dollars: the government decided to arrange its legislative affairs to rely more heavily on nighttime sittings; to ensure control of the agenda they told MPPs on house duty their presence was so vital they should book overnight stays in hotels if necessary; now those same MPPs are being publicly pilloried for doing just that.
None of this absolves these MPPs of poor judgement — notably, nobody has yet identified a New Democrat or Liberal MPP who made similar use of the legislature’s expensing rules — but it does help explain how we got here. It’s not just poor judgement on the part of these individuals but on the people leading their party.
As for where PC MPPs go next, that’s up to them. Canada’s political parties are notably supine for a parliamentary democracy, but members of the PC caucus have real power to discipline their leadership if they so choose. They’ve demonstrated their independence in the past when the stakes were relatively low — like re-electing Ted Arnott as speaker over Ford’s preference for Nina Tangri (Tangri is one of the MPPs impugned in this recent spending scandal). A dozen or so MPPs, if they organized and stuck to their guns, would represent a serious problem for the Premier’s Office even if its majority wasn’t mathematically at stake.
There are at least that many MPPs in suburban ridings around the GTA who ought to be thinking hard about their re-election chances these days. When the tide turns against the Tories, it’s those ridings that tend to flip to the other parties first. Members in those seats should be asking themselves whether their chances of holding on are improved by being obedient to the whims of leader’s office — or whether voters might better respect someone who respected themselves.