The Toronto Star: Federal leaders would have little to celebrate with Doug Ford as premier

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Doug Ford was elected leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Party on the weekend. The prospect that Ford could be in charge of Canada’s largest province by July 1 is bad news for the three main federal leaders, Chantal Hébert writes. (Chris Young / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

By Chantal Hébert Star Columnist
Mon., March 12, 2018

MONTREAL—The prospect that Doug Ford could be in charge of Canada’s largest province by July 1 is bad news for the three main federal leaders.

For Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, it could mean that the federal-provincial window of opportunity to execute some of his government’s signature policy missions is inexorably closing.

Without a high degree of provincial buy-in, the rollout of Trudeau’s climate pricing policy risks being anything but smooth.

The main policy takeaway of the abbreviated Ontario leadership campaign was a reversal of the Tories’ carbon-tax friendly position.

Ford set the stage for that reversal. Among the leadership candidates, he also came across as the least amenable to the federal government’s carbon pricing agenda.

The conflicting political interests of Alberta and British Columbia’s New Democrat governments have already upset the balance Trudeau is seeking to strike between increasing Canada’s pipeline capacity and the mitigation of climate change.

His advocacy of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion could yet throw a wrench in his government’s relationship with Canada’s Indigenous peoples.

But so far, the carbon pricing debate had mostly been playing out on a Western Canada battlefield.

A Tory victory in Ontario in June would bring that battle to Central Canada just in time for the federal election.

Indeed, by the fall of 2019, Trudeau’s climate change policy could be challenged by a trifecta made up of conservative government in Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan. Under the Liberal plan, the federal government would impose its own carbon tax in provinces that refuse to adopt their own mechanism to price emissions.

At the time of the National Energy Program, Trudeau’s father successfully drove a wedge between the Tory governments of Ontario and Alberta with the former aligning itself with the federal Liberals.

Based on the keynote speech he delivered at Saturday’s Ontario leadership event, Alberta’s official opposition leader Jason Kenney — should he succeed in becoming premier next year — is not about to let history repeat itself.

And then in the federal budget released just a few weeks ago, Trudeau’s Liberals signalled their intention to make a national pharmacare program part of their re-election platform. But without the co-operation of the provinces — starting with that of Canada’s largest one — the federal plan could be dead on arrival.

For the Trudeau Liberals, the advent of a Ford government at Queen’s Park would inevitably make the governance of the federation more challenging. But those policy complications could come with an electoral silver lining.

Over the past decades, it has been the rule rather than the exception that Ontario voters put their election eggs in different federal and provincial baskets. Pierre Trudeau and Bill Davis; Brian Mulroney, David Peterson and Bob Rae; Jean Chrétien and Mike Harris; Stephen Harper and Dalton McGuinty all had parallel tenures.

For a federal opposition leader, the presence of strong premiers of the same partisan stripe in some of the major provinces has more often than not been a recipe for misery.

Just ask NDP leader Jagmeet Singh as he tries to navigate between the warring NDP governments of Alberta and B.C. over the Trans Mountain expansion.

Even in their current roles as provincial opposition leaders, Ford and Kenney stand to overshadow their mild-mannered federal counterpart Andrew Scheer.

The perception that Scheer — as prime minister — would be at the beck and call of two take-no-prisoners provincial leaders (who by then could have become premiers) would not be an asset as he tries to win back the moderate voters that deserted Stephen Harper in 2015.

With memories of the Harper decade still fresh and with an Ontario/Alberta tandem of the same right-of-centre variety in place, Singh would have a hard sell on his hands trying to convince many progressive voters to take a chance on splitting the non-Conservative vote between his NDP and Trudeau’s Liberals.

Some of the NDP’s strongest scores were achieved in elections that resulted in a federal Conservative majority government.

A word in closing: Quebec will be going to the polls just a few months after Ontario. For the first time in decades, the issue of the province’s political future is not expected to be the subliminal theme of the campaign. It is not a coincidence that for the first time in just about as many decades, none of the Quebec leaders on the ballot next fall will be in contention for becoming the most polarizing premier on the federal-provincial scene.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

 

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大戏还没开始。

 

[wpolar_bearx]

Chantal Hébert 的东西还是有看头儿 的。

 

[ccc]

Chantal Hébert 的东西还是有看头儿 的。

新闻记者中的一位大员，看问题有深度。

 

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Doug Ford, the new leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative party at Deco, his family business in Etobicoke. (Vince Talotta / Toronto Star)

By Star Editorial Board
Fri., March 16, 2018

So how might Doug Ford comport himself as premier of Ontario, should he win the provincial election in June?

As that staple of amateur psychoanalysis has it, the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. But the cliché is not precisely accurate. There are caveats.

High-frequency behaviour is more predictive than infrequent behaviour. Past behaviour is usually predictive of future conduct only over short intervals. The situations for the past and predicted behaviour should be similar. And the person in question must remain essentially unchanged.

On the face of it, the new Progressive Conservative leader’s experience as a Toronto city councillor from 2010 to 2014 is recent enough, similar enough and produced behaviours recurring enough to serve as a rough guide.

Two books on the Rob Ford years – Mayor Rob Ford: Uncontrollable, by former chief of staff Mark Towhey, and The Only Average Guy by city councillor John Filion – offer insider accounts of Doug’s temperament.

In all, they provide a study in presumption, impulsiveness, indiscipline, indiscretion, bullying and an inability to put the team first.

For all the Ford talk of business experience, “Rob and Doug had no idea how to” staff the office after Rob’s election, Towhey wrote.

It was also soon apparent that Doug wasn’t motivated solely by the opportunity to serve, but a desire to wield power at elite levels. “If you think I came down here just to be the councillor from Ward 2, you’ve got another think coming!” he reportedly yelled at Towhey and former Ford adviser Nick Kouvalis.

Doug acted as if entitled to a rank and authority he hadn’t earned, Towhey wrote, and would sit “at the head of the table, in the mayor’s seat, and hold court.”

During the transition to the Ford administration, Doug was an unreliable presence, Towhey said. He “popped in and out” of meetings, usually late. “He expected us to go back to the beginning to bring him up to speed.” He’d participate for 10 or 15 minutes, then step out to make a call. “We wouldn’t see him again until he popped into another meeting later in the day, or the week.”

Furthermore, the mayor’s staff believed Doug to be the source of leaks. “We began to guard our conversations around Doug,” Towhey wrote, and changed the topic whenever he arrived.

During the early going, Doug’s impulsiveness caused his brother numerous problems, Towhey said. “Doug was shooting from the hip and picking fights we didn’t need.”

He got into slanging matches with the likes of Margaret Atwood over public libraries and, later, the chief of police. In 2011, he dreamed up a Disneyfication scheme for the waterfront that became an instant laughingstock.

To Towhey, the new PC leader was a bully, even to his brother. “If Rob ignored Doug, Doug would pummel him with endless calls and tenacious harassment. Often Rob would cry uncle, telling us ‘I can’t handle one more call from him. Just do it’.”

As with many who demand utter loyal, Doug Ford was mistrustful of most everyone. “I only trust the person I shave in the morning,” he told Filion. “That’s it. And I nick him sometimes too.”

Doug once told Filion, in the run-up to his 2014 mayoral run against John Tory, that “you’ve never seen the vicious side of me. You watch.”

For all that, while Ford might be challenged by the quotidian details of governing, he is apt to thrive on the campaign trail, where salesmanship, partisanship and an ability to get under an opponent’s skin are virtues.

“He can deliver a message with devastating simplicity,” Filion wrote. “He’ll win you over with generous words and a megawatt smile, all the while observing your every move, ready to pounce.”

Still, Doug Ford’s track record in city government provides ammunition for his current opponents. It’s not for nothing, after all, that Premier Kathleen Wynne used the word “reckless” to describe Ford’s proposal this week to privatize cannabis sales in the province.

There’s always the possibility, of course, that the trauma of his brother’s premature death has changed Doug Ford. His comportment on the PC leadership campaign was more restrained.

But his demeanour this week during a CBC Ottawa radio interview with host Robyn Bresnahan was entirely consistent with the man Towhey and Filion described. Ford boasted. He bristled with anger. He baited and belittled the host. He balked at being asked to explain contradictions in his proposals.

Bresnahan asked how Ford could cut as much spending as he claims without cutting jobs. “Very simple. You haven’t done it. I’ve done it. That’s the difference. Next question.”

It was a burst of condescending man-splaining that may well have had many female listeners rolling their eyes.

As both the Rob Ford experience in Toronto, and current events in the United States make clear, there’s a vast difference between having the salesmanship to win an election and the competence and temperament required to govern.

Ontario voters, presumably, will be hoping to see a little more of the latter from the new PC leader.

As has been shown over and over again, when simplicity trumps experience, administrative expertise and policy mastery, chaos ensues. We have been warned.

 

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Doug Ford stands at the podium after being named as the newly elected leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives at the delayed Ontario PC Leadership announcement in Markham, Ont., on Saturday, March 10, 2018. (Chris Young/CP)

First of all, let me take a moment to congratulate the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party’s quickly formed “Oh, Yes, We Can Make This Worse Committee” on the event that capped off the party’s unanticipated leadership race. That really was one hell of a night.

At around 10:15 pm last Saturday—nearly three hours after everyone but the media had been told to go home—it was, shall we say, “let known” more than “announced” that Doug Ford had been chosen as the party’s new leader.

If I were to try and tell this tale artfully—to go for the Giller—I would tell this story novel-length from the perspective of one of the hundreds of celebratory balloons that had spent the night harnessed to the ceiling of the Markham hotel convention centre that housed the shindig, in anticipation of falling with glee and abandon down to the ballroom floor below. Those balloons were there to descend and mark the end of the party’s 44 days of resignations and recrudescence, grave accusations, ghost memberships and technical glitches that marred the leadership race.

These were coronation balloons, the pumped-up bunting that binds and heals, because there is both joy and finality in a falling balloon that few can deny, let alone contest in court. Instead, late in the evening, as ballot counting threatened to go Bleak House below them, those balloons were lowered unceremoniously to the floor via a scissor lift.

Press and party members waited and waited in the vast hall amid confusion and despair as the set around them was stripped down. By the time the CBC cut away from its coverage to the middle of a documentary on oil pipeline lobbying, I was expecting a man in a tattered bowler to come out and say, “We’re proud to announce that Mr. Godot will lead the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party into the coming election, just as soon as he arrives.”

The Ontario PCs’ “We’re out of the wilderness, we have a new leader!” moment never came. In tenor, the eventual announcement that Ford had won the contest was more “Friday afternoon document dump” than “Saturday night inauguration.” But there’s no question a new era has dawned, even if it brings with it a heap of déjà vu.

To many of us in Toronto, the effect of a now province-wide Ford is an odd one. Fords are like a language we studied in high school that we never imagined we’d need again. It’s as if I’ve landed in a new country to a most unexpected state of affairs and I’m surprised to discover how much Latin I remember.

It’s Doug Ford again, folks. There he is—the less addled, less addicted, but also less sympathetic brother of late Toronto mayor Rob Ford. There was Doug Ford on my radio this week, dripping with rage and condescension, lecturing CBC Ottawa Morning host Robyn Bresnahan that her questions weren’t worth answering because she had never inherited and run a label business.

Predictably, Ford’s “economic plan,” as he stated it, is to find close to $6-billion in “efficiencies.” Bresnahan enquired what exactly these efficiencies might be, a question that seemed to alarm the freshly minted PC leader, as if “efficiencies” were in fact small skittish creatures easily spooked by journalists asking questions about them.

How he plans to save money while cutting hospital wait times, taxes and hydro rates—which are not even close to being the highest in North America, as Ford likes to claim—is a fair question to put to this man. After all, he promises to, straight out of the gate, rip up a meticulously researched sex-ed curriculum for which teachers, experts and parents were extensively consulted, and build a whole new one. Among the other essential and completely un-alarming information given to our kids in the decidedly unsexy sex-ed curriculum are the correct names for what my granny used to refer to collectively as the “nether regions.”

I want to take this opportunity to say that my sweet gran also once referred to a bladder infection as a “cold in my whatnot,” and dear God—proper names are progress.

Throwing out carefully developed plans appears to be a hobby of Ford’s. His previous efforts in this field include an almost unilateral attempt to shred Toronto’s much lauded, painstakingly constructed waterfront redevelopment scheme that included a comprehensive flood protection plan. Ford expected to waltz in and relieve Waterfront Toronto—the government agency that controls that land—of its holdings in order to get a luxury hotel, a monorail, a 1.6-million-square-foot mall and a big ferris wheel plopped down on the lakefront in no time. Toronto needs all of that like a hole in the head.

As I listened to Doug Ford on the radio get more and more pissy, it all came back. This was Ford, the belligerent bully. This was the mind that had his younger brother stand on a brightly painted, comically large scale he had set up at City Hall so that his weight-loss efforts could be publicly scrutinized by the press. The “Cut the Waist” challenge ended in Rob Ford’s failure to lose the 50 pounds that was its stated goal, as well as a painful, though I imagine less painful than than the spectacle of that failure, twisted ankle—an injury that occurred when he fell off the scale as he dismounted it.

The stunt always seemed more like an attempt to amplify Doug’s own often public ridicule of his brother’s weight than a private concern over Rob’s health, as well as a showman’s move to distract from the entirely non-weight related battles the mayor was losing at council.

While being interviewed by the CBC, Doug of course wanted to pull out the old chestnut about running government like a business. On that subject, in the final year of his term as a one-term city councillor, Doug Ford was not in attendance for more than half the city council votes taken. During his brother’s four-year term as mayor he was absent for 30 per cent of the votes taken. One has to wonder what kind of business would keep a man like that on, let alone allow him to be promoted to regional manager.

There, on the radio, was the Doug Ford who told the father of a son with autism that he could “go to hell.” He also accused the man of participating in a “jihad” against him. The man had filed an integrity complaint against then-councillor Ford after he had said that a home designed to house five youths with autism, which was at the time housing three kids, had “ruined” a neighbourhood. “My heart goes out to kids with autism,” Ford reportedly said. “But no one told me they’d be leaving the house.”

Some cars had apparently been broken into in the neighbourhood, although no connection whatsoever between the autistic children Ford apparently wanted kept like Flowers in the Attic had been made. This is not to be confused with the time a window was broken on Ford’s SUV—one of the four cars this enemy of the elite had parked in the driveway at his home—and which he blamed on a non-specific political rival. Nor is this the incident where he accused then Toronto police chief Bill Blair of leaking information to the press as “payback,” which ended with Ford giving a formal apology to avoid a defamation suit.

I’d almost like to be able to the view this pattern of behaviour as springing from some deep-seated paranoia on Ford’s part. The alternative—that a man who could very well become Premier of Ontario has consciously decided to blunder through his political life spouting nonsense, posturing like a political pro-wrestling heel—is just too embarrassing to bear.

I love this province.

 

[A Special Day]

浏览附件744364

Doug Ford stands at the podium after being named as the newly elected leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives at the delayed Ontario PC Leadership announcement in Markham, Ont., on Saturday, March 10, 2018. (Chris Young/CP)

First of all, let me take a moment to congratulate the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party’s quickly formed “Oh, Yes, We Can Make This Worse Committee” on the event that capped off the party’s unanticipated leadership race. That really was one hell of a night.

At around 10:15 pm last Saturday—nearly three hours after everyone but the media had been told to go home—it was, shall we say, “let known” more than “announced” that Doug Ford had been chosen as the party’s new leader.

If I were to try and tell this tale artfully—to go for the Giller—I would tell this story novel-length from the perspective of one of the hundreds of celebratory balloons that had spent the night harnessed to the ceiling of the Markham hotel convention centre that housed the shindig, in anticipation of falling with glee and abandon down to the ballroom floor below. Those balloons were there to descend and mark the end of the party’s 44 days of resignations and recrudescence, grave accusations, ghost memberships and technical glitches that marred the leadership race.

These were coronation balloons, the pumped-up bunting that binds and heals, because there is both joy and finality in a falling balloon that few can deny, let alone contest in court. Instead, late in the evening, as ballot counting threatened to go Bleak House below them, those balloons were lowered unceremoniously to the floor via a scissor lift.

Press and party members waited and waited in the vast hall amid confusion and despair as the set around them was stripped down. By the time the CBC cut away from its coverage to the middle of a documentary on oil pipeline lobbying, I was expecting a man in a tattered bowler to come out and say, “We’re proud to announce that Mr. Godot will lead the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party into the coming election, just as soon as he arrives.”

The Ontario PCs’ “We’re out of the wilderness, we have a new leader!” moment never came. In tenor, the eventual announcement that Ford had won the contest was more “Friday afternoon document dump” than “Saturday night inauguration.” But there’s no question a new era has dawned, even if it brings with it a heap of déjà vu.

To many of us in Toronto, the effect of a now province-wide Ford is an odd one. Fords are like a language we studied in high school that we never imagined we’d need again. It’s as if I’ve landed in a new country to a most unexpected state of affairs and I’m surprised to discover how much Latin I remember.

It’s Doug Ford again, folks. There he is—the less addled, less addicted, but also less sympathetic brother of late Toronto mayor Rob Ford. There was Doug Ford on my radio this week, dripping with rage and condescension, lecturing CBC Ottawa Morning host Robyn Bresnahan that her questions weren’t worth answering because she had never inherited and run a label business.

Predictably, Ford’s “economic plan,” as he stated it, is to find close to $6-billion in “efficiencies.” Bresnahan enquired what exactly these efficiencies might be, a question that seemed to alarm the freshly minted PC leader, as if “efficiencies” were in fact small skittish creatures easily spooked by journalists asking questions about them.

How he plans to save money while cutting hospital wait times, taxes and hydro rates—which are not even close to being the highest in North America, as Ford likes to claim—is a fair question to put to this man. After all, he promises to, straight out of the gate, rip up a meticulously researched sex-ed curriculum for which teachers, experts and parents were extensively consulted, and build a whole new one. Among the other essential and completely un-alarming information given to our kids in the decidedly unsexy sex-ed curriculum are the correct names for what my granny used to refer to collectively as the “nether regions.”

I want to take this opportunity to say that my sweet gran also once referred to a bladder infection as a “cold in my whatnot,” and dear God—proper names are progress.

Throwing out carefully developed plans appears to be a hobby of Ford’s. His previous efforts in this field include an almost unilateral attempt to shred Toronto’s much lauded, painstakingly constructed waterfront redevelopment scheme that included a comprehensive flood protection plan. Ford expected to waltz in and relieve Waterfront Toronto—the government agency that controls that land—of its holdings in order to get a luxury hotel, a monorail, a 1.6-million-square-foot mall and a big ferris wheel plopped down on the lakefront in no time. Toronto needs all of that like a hole in the head.

As I listened to Doug Ford on the radio get more and more pissy, it all came back. This was Ford, the belligerent bully. This was the mind that had his younger brother stand on a brightly painted, comically large scale he had set up at City Hall so that his weight-loss efforts could be publicly scrutinized by the press. The “Cut the Waist” challenge ended in Rob Ford’s failure to lose the 50 pounds that was its stated goal, as well as a painful, though I imagine less painful than than the spectacle of that failure, twisted ankle—an injury that occurred when he fell off the scale as he dismounted it.

The stunt always seemed more like an attempt to amplify Doug’s own often public ridicule of his brother’s weight than a private concern over Rob’s health, as well as a showman’s move to distract from the entirely non-weight related battles the mayor was losing at council.

While being interviewed by the CBC, Doug of course wanted to pull out the old chestnut about running government like a business. On that subject, in the final year of his term as a one-term city councillor, Doug Ford was not in attendance for more than half the city council votes taken. During his brother’s four-year term as mayor he was absent for 30 per cent of the votes taken. One has to wonder what kind of business would keep a man like that on, let alone allow him to be promoted to regional manager.

There, on the radio, was the Doug Ford who told the father of a son with autism that he could “go to hell.” He also accused the man of participating in a “jihad” against him. The man had filed an integrity complaint against then-councillor Ford after he had said that a home designed to house five youths with autism, which was at the time housing three kids, had “ruined” a neighbourhood. “My heart goes out to kids with autism,” Ford reportedly said. “But no one told me they’d be leaving the house.”

Some cars had apparently been broken into in the neighbourhood, although no connection whatsoever between the autistic children Ford apparently wanted kept like Flowers in the Attic had been made. This is not to be confused with the time a window was broken on Ford’s SUV—one of the four cars this enemy of the elite had parked in the driveway at his home—and which he blamed on a non-specific political rival. Nor is this the incident where he accused then Toronto police chief Bill Blair of leaking information to the press as “payback,” which ended with Ford giving a formal apology to avoid a defamation suit.

I’d almost like to be able to the view this pattern of behaviour as springing from some deep-seated paranoia on Ford’s part. The alternative—that a man who could very well become Premier of Ontario has consciously decided to blunder through his political life spouting nonsense, posturing like a political pro-wrestling heel—is just too embarrassing to bear.

I love this province.

冷嘲热讽呀!

 

[GuardianAngel]

The author is definitely a Doug Ford hater.