Doug got done…
“Election day, was I happy this guy won? One hundred per cent I was,” Ford said. “But then the guy pulled out the knife
and f–king yanked it into us.”
What does this mean? Careful how you choose your friends? Make sure the mic is dead before you reveal yourself? Either way Doug Ford made the clearest election speech ever.
There’s nothing new about Ford’s admiration for Donald Trump, Oligarch of the Americas. He likes his style of governing. Back in 2018 when he was first elected, he ran as a folksy right-wing populist described by Todd Gordon as “a bombastic, mainstream media-hating sexist, wealthy white man who inherited his fortune (and the company he runs with his brother) from his father. He attacks the ‘elites’ – by which he does not mean the rich and powerful, but career politicians, the media and urban Toronto “liberals” who do not share his worldview.” Ford was Trump-lite.
But one hundred percent happy that Trump 2 won? The guy who lies as effortlessly as most of us take a breath? Who, a year ago, said of immigrants: “ they’re poisoning the blood of our country” and followed up with remarks like “no, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals” and the well-known disgusting claim that Haitian immigrants were eating the pets of Springfield, Ohio? Who supported the January 6, 2021 insurrection? Happy with that?!
It says a lot about Ford, but nothing surprising. Like Trump, he’s a grifter. He rose to lead the Progressive Conservatives in 2018 with the support of Christian right-wingers like Tanya Granic Allen who pushed conversion therapy; he dumped her when her views were no longer politically convenient. After intoning that “the party with the taxpayer’s money is over,” he replaced Liberals in patronage posts with Tories at higher pay.1 He pushed through Highway 413 much to the delight of developer friends of his party who owned thousands of acres of land along the route.2 Similar friends stood to rake in about $8.3 billion in profits over Greenbelt lands that Ford set out to make development-worthy. But even he saw the jig was up with an RCMP investigation coming, so he pulled the plug on the project.3
Like Trump, Ford is allergic to democracy. He’d barely closed the doors to his office when he cut Toronto City Council from 47 to 25 members and then threatened to use the “notwithstanding clause” in the Canadian Charter to maintain the order after a Superior Court justice struck it down. He invoked the clause in June 2021 to limit third party election financing and was all set to use it again when he decided to take away collective bargaining rights for members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), the lowest paid public employees in the province who’d demanded an 11 percent increase on a $39 000 per year salary. With a general strike looming, Ford thought better of it.
Calling a mid-winter Ontario election as his friend in the White House spreads chaos everywhere is just another instance of Ford putting himself and his Tories first. No one can believe the excuse that he needs a new mandate to deal with Trump tariffs, now under an uncertain reprieve. The early election was clearly in the works by the time Ford started to roll out goodies like sale of beer and wine in convenience stores. That wasn’t supposed to happen until 2026, so the urgency to “get it done” cost Ontarians $612 million.
But the $200 gift of their own money to buy votes is just about the clearest indication of Doug Ford’s real concern “for the people.” For the wealthy supporters who donate to his party, it doesn’t mean anything, but they get the money anyway. It’s groceries for some who could do with help, but it’s no solution for anything. The $3 billion it costs, along with the $189 million to pay for this election, could have gone towards the roughly 234 000 people the government estimates to be homeless across the province, but they won’t even get the $200. It could have gone to housing, to schools facing billions of dollars in repairs, to cutting hallway health. For the real conservatives out there, it could have gone to not increasing the net Ontario debt of $429 billion.
So, what was Ford even on about? It’s what grifters do. He “pulled out the knife and f–king yanked it into us.”
Notes:
- Will Paul “Riding the Gravy Train,” Against the People: How Ford Nation is Dismantling Ontario, – eds: Bryan Evans and Carlo Fanelli, Fernwood Press, January 2025.
- Ibid
- Ibid