Doug Ford’s latest cabinet shuffle changes relatively little about the team around him tasked with implementing the Progressive Conservative agenda. Stephen Lecce moves from education to the energy file, where he will nominally be in charge of shepherding the province’s energy transition toward greater electrification; in fact, the premier has handed one of his more reliable attack dogs the role he’ll use to browbeat the opposition over a carbon tax it bears no responsibility for.
In that sense, the cabinet shuffle and the early adjournment of the legislature — which now won’t sit again until October 21 — are of a piece with the government’s $225 million gamble that voters will enjoy corner-store beer more than they would have enjoyed anything else $225 million could buy: the government appears to be clearing the decks as much as possible to single-mindedly focus on a re-election bid in the spring of 2025.
That’s the Tories’ prerogative, and they’ve undoubtedly got well-compensated consultants and pollsters telling them how best to shape the events of the next 12 or so months to ensure that they preserve their majority in the legislature after the ballots are all counted.
But spare a moment to consider that everyone who ever lost an election — that is, the vast majority of people who contest them — undoubtedly had a brilliant plan for how it was going to go their way. It just turned out that reality had other plans. And the current Tory plan carries some real risks, if voters start viewing Ford’s conduct with a more jaundiced eye than they have so far.
Let’s start with the cabinet shuffle. Well, not so much the shuffle as the expansion. Ford’s cabinet is now 36 MPPs, the largest in Ontario’s history, and those of us who’ve been around a while can recall when Tory MPPs in the opposition railed against Kathleen Wynne’s cabinets for the sin of having as many as 29 MPPs. Your average voter probably doesn’t care about that specific bit of hypocrisy or about the likelihood that a cabinet of three dozen is not going to be massively more productive or innovative than previous iterations. They might not even care in isolation about the raises that MPPs get when the premier elevates them to cabinet, even if those raises are now multiplied 36 times.
They also might not care about the extended summer break that the government has just granted itself by adjourning the house early and not planning to return until almost Halloween. The government, after all, will keep working even if MPPs aren’t in the house, and most voters couldn’t tell you whether the house was sitting anyway nine days out of 10.
And, to be very clear, I’m quite certain that anyone polling Ontario voters today, in June 2024, about whether any of the above makes them angry is likely to get the statistical equivalent of blank stares. I don’t think any of that is registering right now.
That said, it doesn’t take a modern day Machiavelli in the opposition benches to start connecting the dots for voters here. And, indeed, the opposition parties have already begun attempting to do just that: Liberals and NDP MPPs alike are painting the government as out of touch and claiming it’s bestowing gifts on loyalists and insiders even as it abdicates serious work on key matters of public concern.
The thought that ought to keep the premier and his inner circle up at night is that, while voters might not be paying terribly close attention to all of this right now, that could all change if they were forced to pay close attention to politics — say, thanks to an early election call nobody wanted or asked for. If we get one, it simply wouldn’t be possible for Ford to claim anything other than the PC party’s own self-interest as motivation, and it wouldn’t be surprising if that put a spotlight on other cases where the government was alleged to have put its own self-interest first.
We don’t have to look far for a recent example of this: federally, voters were generally giving Justin Trudeau high marks in the summer of 2021. Some polls showed that as many as 40 per cent of Canadians were willing to vote Liberal if asked — enough to elect a majority in the Commons. It turned out, though, that actually calling an early election caused a lot of that goodwill to evaporate almost overnight, and the Liberals struggled in the end to eke out another minority.
Federal and provincial politics are different, and I won’t claim that history is destiny here. The next year of actual events will matter, as will countless unpredictable factors. (The funniest possible outcome, to me, would be for the PC party’s careful planning to be foiled by the early collapse of the current Liberal-NDP agreement in Ottawa and an unanticipated federal election.) But there are real risks for the Tories in what they seem to be planning — and if things go badly for them, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.
Donate