If it wasn’t for U.S. President Donald Trump, Ontario Premier Doug Ford would be in a world of political hurt.
I mean, he’s already in a world of political hurt, but it would be a lot worse if a crazy American president wasn’t around to be an asshole all the time, thus allowing Ford to throw on his Captain Canada cape. Every time Trump opens his mouth and says something stupid — which is pretty much every single one of the times — Ford gets an opportunity to play the bad cop to Mark Carney’s good cop when it comes to managing the unmanageable lunatic on the other side of the fence. Polling backs up the fact that Ontarians like it when their premier talks tough to the president.
But even with the political convenience of Trump, Ford has his problems, and polling confirms that as well.
His most recent political kick in the pants came from his attempts to purchase a corporate jet. I mean he did actually purchase it and everything, but the howls of protest that erupted from the public caught him way off guard. He scrambled to recover by selling the jet almost immediately with no dollars lost, but the damage had been done and it lingers to this day.
There are other things out there weighing him down, and by extension his party.
The so-called Greenbelt scandal didn’t do him any favours, the cronyism and access to influence and decision-makers breaking all of the rules in the book. He climbed down from that as well, but it doesn’t matter, because it stuck in the memory of voters. There’s also an on-going police investigation into the whole thing, so the issue isn’t going to go away any time soon.
Lobbying hard for the Billy Bishop / Toronto Island airport to start accepting jet traffic is one of the more later things, where, despite hesitation, disagreement, and protest, he seems hell-bent on getting these jets to land just offshore of downtown Toronto. Those downtown ridings that went Tory the last time out have taken notice of this. Before the Tories won those seats, the Liberals had them, and it’s not a stretch to suggest they won’t flop back if constituents start to tire of Ford and his strong-arm tactics.
Closing the Ontario Science Centre and re-constituting it at the waterfront wasn’t the greatest PR coup. It was to be located somewhere around what was once known as Ontario Place, that is if it doesn’t interfere with that world class spa and underground parking place that’s slated to go where Ontario Place currently is.
At least that tunnel under Highway 401 has been put on the back burner.
These are just examples of either poor behaviour, poor politics, or both.
But they pale in comparison with the way this provincial government throws money away.
That’s right. The spend-thrift Tories, masters of the art of financial management, or so they’d have you believe, have squandered hundreds of millions of dollars — billions even — in penalty payouts, penalty fees for breaking contracts, and penalty retro-active payments to their very own workers who they attempted to freeze at 1% wage increases, thereby violating their collective bargaining rights. This is the infamous Bill 124, something that’s part of the discussion in the labour dispute between CLRCS and OPSEU Local 472.
But that stuff is just the big stuff, the stuff that’s easy to notice because of the scale of the mismanagement. It’s what happens at Queen’s Park itself that tends to generate less attention.
Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty had a cabinet consisting of 23 ministers. When Kathleen Wynne took over, she had a cabinet of some 30 ministers. The Conservatives howled in protest at the largesse, targeting this “bloated” cabinet as one of the best examples of Liberal corruption, the kind of thing the Tories would stamp out if they ever won power., which they did in 2018. By contrast, today in 2026, Doug Ford has no fewer that 36 cabinet ministers, each of them pulling down a base salary of $224,000/year, roughly two Jennifer Lavallees per year worth of expense. Every one of these cabinet ministers have parliamentary secretaries, a sort of second-in-command, another member of the legislature that sits between the minister and the bureaucratic deputy ministers in influence and decision-making. As sitting MPPs, they collect their regular salaries plus an additional bump to reflect the additional responsibilities they have in becoming the parliamentary secretary to a cabinet minister.
All of these people have expense accounts, while cabinet ministers have access to a car and driver. Some of them, perhaps the more influential among them, might well have been able to fly around on Doug’s jet, but that’s been shot to hell.
Several of those same cabinet ministers have been nailed recently for staying overnight in pricey Toronto hotel rooms and expensing everything connected to that stay, although most of them lived close by to Queen’s Park, one of them, the Minister of Tourism, Culture and Gaming, living a mere 6 km from his office. Stan Cho is his name, he expensed $16,000 in hotel stays and as of yesterday, I believe, he is no longer a member of cabinet. So I guess, for a bit anyway, we’ll be down to 35 members of cabinet. And his wasn’t even the largest expense. He was just the closest to Queen’s Park.
The premier’s office alone rings up over $8 million in expenses for the year, mostly because of a bloated staff that hovers around 100 in number, although that number’s been reduced owing to public pressure and backlash
And now he’s in the middle of a horrible decision to sit on his hands and watch a strike in the developmental services industry linger into its ninth week. In the meantime, and in the background, a blank cheque has been cut to pay replacement workers $4/hour more than striking workers, put them up in hotels, feed them, and transport them to wherever they’re needed. Tack on the money for security guards, private investigators, lodging, meals and transportation.
Taken together, this little adventure by our premier has already resulted in the loss of tens of millions of dollars, but honestly that’s nothing to this crew, since they really don’t break any kind of sweat until they’ve managed to waste hundreds of millions of dollars. I don’t believe we’re quite there just yet, but we’re certainly on our way.
If this is what sound money and financial management looks like, then the province and its voters and taxpayers could stand to see a lot less of it.
I’m sorry, I don’t know what to do with Donald Trump and that cast of cartoon characters he surrounds himself with that remind me of the villains you once saw in the old Batman movies, caricatures from a different time, but the villainy remaining the same.
But I do know that Doug Ford and every one of has MPPs is susceptible to applied political pressure. They like to make themselves look and sound really tough, but they’re not. Like any bully anywhere, they fold when faced with push back.
People who have to tell you they’re so tough are generally not so tough at all.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 