Take A Flying Leap, Doug

Last Updated on: 21st May 2026, 09:48 am

I may be the only one, but I was fully prepared to give Doug Ford a pass for buying that government jet.

Part of this is a me thing, because I hate travelling. In a perfect world, wherever I’m going should never be more than an absolute maximum of an hour and a half away from wherever I am. There are many reasons why you’ll never see me running for public office, but one of them is most definitely looking at campaign itineraries and politician schedules in general. “Wait. They’re in how many cities today? And they’re taking a bus? And they’re still expected to be nice to people? Does Trump’s cognitive test guy know about this?”

But my own travel preferences aside, it does sincerely make sense to me that if you’re regularly expected to be all over the damn place like government officials often are, that you should be able to be as flexible as possible about it. If you’re needed in both Waterloo and Ottawa on the same day, for instance, and you can make that trip in two hours rather than six, why wouldn’t you? And just as importantly, why wouldn’t we want you to?

Should Ford have made this case to the people? Of course. Explaining how things are currently done and outlining the time and cost savings you expect over time by spending what looks to be a lot of money up front would have taken more effort than “you bought me a plane, bitches! Surprise!”, but there’s no excuse for not doing it. Would he have gotten some blowback? For sure! But that’s part of being the public face of decisions. It might not have been super popular, but it might not have turned into a whole thing that’s going to dog him for years like it has now, either. He might have even gotten to keep it! And then whichever government came next could have used it too and hoped that we all forgot about how they used to call it the gravy plane to score some cheap political points instead of just being honest for once and saying “you know what, that really isn’t the dumbest idea…especially not the dumbest one this guy’s ever had.”

But even Doug’s better ideas are still pretty dumb, because it turns out that the plane they chose would have had trouble using about 90 percent of the airports in Ontario were it to be used for all the things they hastily made up to justify the purchase after the fact.

The $28.9-million private jet the Ontario government purchased — and Premier Doug Ford has now committed to sell — would only have been able to fly in and out of about 10 per cent of recognized airports in the province, according to a CBC News analysis. 
Bombardier’s technical specifications for its 650 Challenger jet show it requires a distance of 5,650 feet to take off at its maximum weight, which means it couldn’t use the vast majority of airports in Ontario at full capacity, as they have runways shorter than that, according to runway dimension data from NavCanada. (Aviation industry standard is in feet, rather than metres.)

Those limitations raise questions about how the private jet would have helped the premier travel around northern Ontario — one of his justifications for needing the jet — and how the plane would have fulfilled other government uses Ford described at Queen’s Park on Tuesday. 
“Sending firefighters up north to fight wildfires, or if we had floods, or if we had to bring people when we evacuate First Nations communities and we had to get them down and we would do that,” Ford said. 
“Right now we’re chartering planes, and when you evacuate, you want to evacuate the elder, the children. I know it’s small, but if you can take two or three trips.”
CBC News cross-referenced a list of Ontario airports recognized by the federal aviation authority with runway data from a copy of NavCanada’s Canada Flight Supplement from 2021 to determine the longest runway at airports across the province. After removing airports that have closed from the list, CBC found the province’s Challenger jet would only have been able to use 19 of Ontario’s 179 operational airports based on the distance it needs to take off at its maximum weight and the length of available runways.

Not only that, but Ford also admitted that there are places in the north where it wouldn’t have been able to land no matter what because of dirt runways. That raises even more questions, because the province already owns more than one plane that can.

So much for the benefit of the doubt. Tell me again why these guys are the smartest, most responsible choice to run the province.