Last Updated on: 4th September 2019, 05:40 pm
Everything here is true, frightening and absolutely insane. We’ve never had a premier like Doug Ford before. Here’s why
I don’t get it whatsoever, but clearly there are people in this world who like Doug Ford and think he’s doing a good job. If you do happen to be one who believes his government is on the right track, it’s tempting for me to ask what’s wrong with you and what children,nature and poor people could have possibly done to make you so angry, but for now, I won’t. What I want to ask about instead is Doug Ford the person.
I mean this in the nicest possible way, but how has one person ever looked at public facing Doug Ford and thought this right here is a man who knows what he’s doing and ought to be in charge of something important? If the sum total of his job description reads “be dishonest and generally spout platitudes and hollow garbage,” then sure, he’s on top of things. But he’s supposed to be a strong leader who inspires confidence, and I just don’t understand how he has ever managed to give anyone that impression. I guess maybe if you’re into the perception that things are getting done he’s kind of alright, but if you actually give fuck one about the what, why and how of what’s being done, it all falls apart.
Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I still have this thing about expecting people hired to do a job to be good at it. I don’t expect that he’ll get everything exactly right every single time, but I do expect an honest try, and never for one moment have I felt like I’ve gotten that from Ford. To me he’s the embodiment of the feeling I’d get if I went to the doctor and he said “I dunno, let’s ask that guy over there. He has a clipboard, he must be smart with organ stuff.”
Not everyone is a details guy, I get that. But so often it feels like Ford’s working knowledge of government starts and ends with him knowing how to find his office, and that scares me.
I was no fan of Stephen Harper. I never once voted for his party and it was rare that the two of us agreed on policy. But while I can throw around a lot of unkind words to describe him and some of the things he did, at the end of the day I can’t call him incompetent. Dude knew exactly what he was doing at all times. Ford doesn’t. Or if he does, he’s not very good at communicating it.
Neither option is any good, though. He’s either ignorant and uncaring on purpose, or he has little problem with people being those things in his name.
None of the handful of people I’ve spoken to would go on the record about their experiences.
However, last week, someone else did: Daniel Enright, who published an extraordinary Twitter thread recounting a 10-minute phone call he’d had with Ford on April 27. Enright said he’d texted the premier late at night to express his concern that a friend of his had just been laid off. To his surprise, Ford texted right back and asked if he could phone Enright. The two then had a conversation.
“So it’s midnight and I just got off the phone with Doug Ford,” Enright’s first tweet began. The premier told Enright that he was still at work, despite the lateness of the hour, and that he’d been making calls all night long.
Enright said Ford’s agenda seemed to be to convince him that no existing teachers would lose their jobs, despite the government’s decision to raise the average class size and thereby make a number of teaching positions redundant. The premier added that he was cutting spending responsibly and that the government’s first budget could have been much tougher but wasn’t.
Ford’s relations with the media have been everything from toxic (the Toronto Star) to chummy (the Toronto Sun) over the years, but he seemed to want Enright to understand that he felt like everyone was giving him a hard time these days.
“The Toronto Sun gives him shit for not cutting enough, and the Star for cutting too much,” Enright paraphrased Ford in a tweet.
Then, Enright learned what so many others have told me privately over the past many months: Ford is not a detail man. He loves interacting with the public. He loves making announcements. He loves the theatre and the cut-and-thrust of Question Period. But he is no Leslie Frost. Numerous people have told me (anonymously, of course) that he is blissfully unaware of many of the details of policy decisions made in his name. Ford’s fans don’t care that he’s unable to quote chapter and verse of his government’s policies. Other Ontarians, of course, are alarmed by the premier’s apparent lack of knowledge.
On the day of his conversation with Enright, Ford seemed unaware that his government had announced it was cutting provincial funding for a program that plants 50 million trees per year. Enright mentioned the funding cut, then tweeted, “… here’s where it gets strange … He had no idea … The Premier of Ontario told me he saw that story about the trees and called his office to find out what that was all about. He said ‘my people told me’ the best stewards of the environment are the Forestry industry, and they already have 60 million trees scheduled for planting … he had no idea it was happening. Or that people were talking about it. It was the same thing when I asked about cuts to legal aid, ‘what I was told was that there were less cases, and more lawyers taking fees.’ I asked where that # came from, he told me ‘it’s what i was told.’”
That last statement — “It’s what I was told” — is consistent with what I hear about the kind of government over which Ford presides. He is very much a big-picture leader. He leaves many of the decisions (and execution of those decisions) to his team, which is led by chief of staff Dean French.Ford told Enright that, if his friend needed a job, she should send her resume to premier@ontario.ca.
Enright concluded: “I have no idea how or who is running this province. I spoke to a man who didn’t seem to have a grasp of the facts, the effects of his cuts, or how hollow his words sound.”
