This editorial was written and published by the Toronto Star on April 19, 2024.
It cannot be a good thing for a political leader when the brand on which they have traded becomes a laughingstock.
This week, parts of the Ontario government’s Whitney Block offices were briefly evacuated after a suspicious package was sent to Premier Doug Ford.
It turned out to be — in a jibe that needs little explaining — a package of powdered gravy.
Ford has been talking about ending the so-called gravy train of plums and perks for connected insiders ever since he arrived on the public consciousness.
But recent revelations about the bloated size of his office staff — not to mention such earlier moments of partisan largesse as reinstituting King’s Counsel designations for the lawyers in his circle — rather put the lie to that signature promise.
The cost of staffing the premier’s office under Ford has more than doubled to almost $7 million since he took office in 2018. As of 2023, the number of premier’s office employees on the Sunshine List — those earning more than $100,000 — had reached a whopping 48.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation called the glut of staffers growing plump on the premier’s gravy boat “unacceptable.”
Curiously, it is far from the only area in which Ford’s deeds don’t match his words or in which he fails to live up to key elements of his brand.
When the premier looks in the mirror, he likely sees someone who — as he so often says — watches every penny, who brings businesslike order to government, who is decisive, who is a toughminded, rock-ribbed conservative.
The record, however, suggests otherwise.
The Star’s Martin Regg Cohn illustrated the frequently illogical, economically unsound course of the Ford government in a recent column describing the province’s hydro subsidy as counterproductive. The provincial budget allots $7.3 billion annually to reducing the hydro bills of Ontarians, a subsidy that encourages consumption rather than conservation and allots to a vote-buying scheme money desperately needed by the critical health and education sectors.
The premier repeats this approach — politically popular if illconceived — on such initiatives as fuel tax cuts and scrapping licence plate renewals, which costs Ontario $1 billion a year in forgone revenue.
He is not, as critics from the right have noted, fiscally conservative. And he is not, as his record in office makes clear, decisive.
After the release of the Ontario budget, which posted a deeper-than-expected deficit this year of $9.8 billion and a vanishing surplus next year, it was noted by alarmed conservatives that Ford was set to become the biggest spender in modern Ontario history.
As to his seemingly endless policy reversals, just this week the Ford government took less than 48 hours to abandon proposed service cuts for the UP Express, the train that connects Union Station and Pearson International Airport with several stops in between.
While it was a quieter flip-flop than Ford has made on such matters as opening the Greenbelt for development or dissolving Peel Region or reversing the urban-boundaries expansion, it’s part of a notable trend of chaotic decision-making.
“Once again, this is a government that doesn’t think before they act,” said NDP Leader Marit Stiles.
Liberal MPP John Fraser said that “taking away transit and giving it back the next day, it just doesn’t give people confidence that this government knows what it’s doing.”
It’s difficult to argue with either of those judgments. The endless course corrections are hardly grounds for confidence in Ford and his administration. Every incident of policy reversal is an opportunity to see the merit of consultation and planning, but the provincial government never seems to do so.
It’s worth recalling that psychoanalyst Carl Jung once famously said “You are what you do, not what you say you will do.”
What Doug Ford does — from the gravy train to the UP Express train and on much, much else — speaks volumes.
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