Last Updated on: 17th August 2021, 11:29 am
What’s going on at Queen’s Park? Is Premier Doug Ford, supported by his political staff, in total control?
At the PC Leadership Convention in March, Christine Elliott won the popular vote by 3.4 per cent and also won the majority of ridings. Ford, however, won the “electoral” vote by 1.2 points. So much for the party’s “modernized” preferential ballot system.Since then it seems, every week, if not every day, a new legislative, regulatory or discretionary Ford edict emerges.
Here are just some of the most troublesome:
That’s how this Toronto Star column by Tim Armstrong begins. It then launches into a list of 17 of Ford and company’s ill-advised cuts and meddlesome acts. Acts that, I take no joy in repeatedly reminding people, have all taken place in just the six months give or take a week or two that he’s technically been in power.
And as good a catch up as this list may be for those not paying close attention day to day, it still doesn’t cover everything. Cancelling the basic income experiment for no reason? Didn’t make the cut. Nor did the fact that he’s chosen to surround himself with a whole lot of potential crooks.
I’m sure there’s more that I’m forgetting, and that’s bad. Extremely so, because we still have three and a half years of this to get through. We may have even more if not enough people wise up before then, which is no safe bet.
I’ll let Tim Armstrong take us home.
Some supporters attempt to validate the Ford approach on the basis of an existing global tendency toward less government and broader, citizen-based “populism.” But these retrogressive and in some cases legally indefensible initiatives elude justifiable political definition of any kind.
As they rapidly accumulate under the premier’s apparent sole authoritarian prerogative, they are in my view seriously endangering our democratic, social and economic system.
