Doug Ford should still testify at POEC.
In a column here a few weeks ago, I made that case. “Leaders show up,” I said then. The Public Order Emergency Commission wants to hear from the premier and deputy premier Sylvia Jones (she was solicitor general during the February fiascoes). The POEC invited the two of them, and they declined. The POEC then summoned them, and Ford and Jones fought that in the courts.
This was, as I granted weeks ago, a fair and interesting response. It wasn’t clear whether the POEC had the legal authority to summon Ford and Jones. It was a legitimate issue that warranted consideration in the courts, and I said as much. Even attempting to guess at how the court would rule was well outside my area of expertise. But, luckily, for the purposes of my original column, it also didn’t matter. However the court ultimately ruled on whether the POEC could force Ford and Jones to testify was beside the point. Ford and Jones should willingly testify because that’s their job. It’s what leaders do. They show up.
The legal matter is now settled. On Monday, on what was already a fairly bonkers news day in Canada’s most populated province, a federal court judgeruled that Ford and Jones don’t have to testify at the POEC. It was an interesting ruling — a win for Ford, but still something of a split decision. Justice Simon Fothergill found that the POEC was acting within its mandate when it summoned Ford and Jones and also noted that they likely did indeed have information that would be of interest to the proceedings. But he also found that Ford and Jones can, indeed, as their lawyers asserted, refuse to attend, on grounds of parliamentary privilege: legislators cannot be compelled to attend to other business when the legislature is in session, as the law recognizes their duties there as paramount. (An obvious exception, though irrelevant to us here, is in the matter of criminal proceedings — privilege cannot be a shield from arrest or conviction. I include that simply in case anyone reads my last sentence and starts wondering.)
Okay! Fair enough. This is an important, worthy matter, and both sides of the issue had a fair hearing. The court considered the matter and issued a thoughtful ruling. This is a good thing, though it may not feel like it. This is what the rule of law means and how things work in a democracy. Yay, us!
Ford should still show up, though.
Seriously. This is a hill I’m prepared to camp out on for a while. Given all the other stuff happening right now in Ontario politics, it’s not likely that this matter is going to get a lot of attention. We’ve got the Greenbelt being carved up for development and a strike that’s been called off, at least for now. People have other things to worry about than a commission in Ottawa that already seems to be fading from the headlines.
That’s bad. People should care. This should still get attention. The other issues matter, too. Seriously, they do, I get it. I had to pause writing this column twice to restore order upstairs; my kids, who are not in school today as they should be, seemed set on tearing the house apart. So it’s very, very important to grant that the other stories in the news matter, too, and to admit that, for a lot of Ontarians, the other stuff probably matters more — or at least looms larger in their attention.
That’s fair. But don’t let Ford get away with this. Just because he has won the legal right to not be forced to appear at the POEC doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have a moral duty to appear.
Moral duty is a quaint term, I know. Given the current political temperature in this province, a lot of people will scoff and say Ford has no moral compass, anyway. I can’t speak to that. That’s well outside my ability to judge. What I can say is that we expect our leaders to act in ways in their public life that they don’t always honour in their private life. This issue is not about Doug Ford as a man, as a human being. It’s about Doug Ford, premier of the province of Ontario, a man who holds high executive office because he ran for it and beat out the competition in a democratic election in which the people, in their collective wisdom, chose his party to lead us.
Yes, again, it’s quaint, but it’s also all we have. We have standards for our leaders in this province or we don’t. It’s very possible that we don’t. We might be in an era where all that matters is your tribal political allegiance. Maybe you’re for what your guy is doing and against whatever the other guys are doing. I hope not, but I can’t look around at the state of things today and deny that it’s very possible that that is indeed exactly where things stand.
We have to try to not let that be the case, though. And that starts with demanding some bare minimums from our office holders, whatever your partisan preferences and voting history might be. Hell, maybe if enough of us pretend that we have standards, everyone else will be forced to pretend that they have standards, too. This might be, in a weird way, a pretty basic but accurate way of summing up what a civilization is: it’s just a group of people pretending to be something they aren’t, for the mutual benefit of all. Bleak, maybe, but if that’s all we’ve got, let’s take it.
And, so, yes, this matters, even if we’re pretending. The federal government is investigating an emergency that took place in this province; the premier of this province has been asked to assist. That’s it. It really isn’t any more complicated than that. Ford doesn’t have to show up and testify at POEC if he chooses not to. That’s his legal right — the courts have confirmed that. He should show up because it’s his moral duty as a leader, though. Even if he’s only pretending to be one. In this case, if it works, that would be enough.
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