This opinion was written by Martin Regg Cohn and was published in the Toronto Star on June 11, 2024.
If you’re wondering what keeps Doug Ford awake at night, how he spends every waking moment during the day, I can now reveal his most frantic and fantastical obsession.
No, it’s not the housing crisis, nor the health-care crisis, not even the beer boondoggle — each of which is dragging the province down. None of the above comes close.
“Axe the tax” is his mantra above all else.
Every sinew and synapse of his being is devoted to the federal carbon levy. It consumes him and he consumes it — chewing it over with unrivalled rumination and regurgitation.
“Axe the tax” is his call to arms. In the six years since Ford first ran for premier, he’s been running relentlessly on that slogan. It predates “buck-a-beer” and has outlasted everything since.
“Axe the tax” is the bumper sticker stuck on his forehead.
But will it stick? Or will it wear off — diluted by repetition, co-opted by rival Tories, overtaken by events?
After all, it is now the core theme for Ford’s federal Conservative cousin, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre, as he pre-positions for a national election campaign later next year. Can Ford compete and still get a piece of the “axe the tax” action?
Just watch him. And hear him pre-empt Poilievre.
Today — no less than in 2018 — the slogan soaks up more of Ford’s breath and bandwidth than any other issue in Ontario. Back then, he talked it up to win his first election as premier.
Now, he is banking on it to win his third term in power, sooner rather than later. Ford is toying with an early election call in 2025 — one year ahead of the fixed date mandated by law — to make the most of the country’s anti-tax animus before Poilievre bites off too much of it.
Ford’s sloganeering dominated the Ontario legislature for months before a summer break was announced last week. If you search through the transcripts of Ontario’s legislative body, you will be inundated with “job-killing carbon tax” verbiage that is a testament to the Progressive Conservative game plan.
One after another, loyal Tories are assigned to read from a prepared script, posing their planted questions for PC government ministers to hit out of Queen’s Park. The ritual is as predictable as it is pointless.
Sam Oosterhoff was the latest backbencher to rise up from his seat in the legislature and ask how the premier would put Ottawa in its place.
“What is our government doing to ensure that we are fighting this jobkilling, expensive carbon tax and putting more money back into the pockets of the hard-working people?” the MPP demanded, before claiming, improbably, that voters “are flabbergasted that queen Crombie is committed to bringing forward yet another carbon tax.”
Queen Crombie? That would be a reference to Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie, whom Ford’s Tories persist in calling “queen of the carbon tax.”
It is a peculiar appellation and allegation, for Crombie only took over the opposition Liberals late last year — several years after Ford took power and presided over the imposition of the federal carbon levy for consumers, and ordered the introduction of a provincial carbon levy for industrial users. The irony is that while Crombie cannot logically or chronologically be connected to the levy, Ford’s provenance as “king of Ontario’s carbon levy” is an inconvenient fact.
For it was Ford who cancelled Ontario’s little-known cap and trade system, conceived of by conservative economists who view it as a more efficient way for the market to put a price on pollution. By doing so, he automatically triggered the federal carbon backstop, designed to ensure that every province does its bit to keep Canada on track to meet its international obligations to restrain global warming.
In 2022, the Ontario government launched its own homegrown tax that charges big polluters $65 per tonne of carbon they emit, rising to $80 a tonne on Jan. 1 — which is, naturally, passed on to consumers (unlike the federal carbon levy, which is fully rebated to most families). But why let contradictions get in the way of campaigns?
Oosterhoff was merely the last on a long list of dozens of backbenchers reading from Ford’s script, and he did as he was told. There was no good answer for so bad a question that day, but there was an optimal outcome for Oosterhoff mere hours after he fought the good fight last Thursday.
Ford elevated the 26-year-old loyalist to cabinet as “associate minister for energy.” Henceforth, he will be one of the premier’s chief mouthpieces for his undying sixyear-old crusade. As King of the Carbon Tax, Ford now has another of the faithful in his record-breaking 36-member cabinet, ready to fight a new campaign with an old battle cry.
If they win the day next year with “axe the tax,” an updated rallying cry will naturally follow: “The levy is dead! Long live the King!”
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