Doug Ford, Ontario’s Albatross

Buddy, I’m going to kick your a** all over the parking lot. —Doug Ford

Jeep manufacturer Stellantis announced on October 14 that it is moving production to Illinois from its Brampton, Ontario, plant, leaving 3,000 workers wondering where dinner is coming from. Blond bombshell Federal Industry Minister Mélanie Joly has threatened to sue the company, which no doubt has company execs driving off the road and hiding in the bush. Not to be outdone, GM is moving its Ingersoll plant to the U.S., leaving 1,200 workers unemployed. As Spencer Gatten reports, altogether something in the vicinity of 6,000 jobs have been lost in the last week, not counting the indirect and ancillary jobs that will also disappear.  

In a paroxysm of catarrhal bluster, on October 16, the totally useless Ontario Premier Doug Ford criticized Donald Trump — “That’s the only thing that this person understands” — and called for economic retaliation against the U.S., as if Trump gives a rat’s ass for Ford’s miching mallecho. A tantrum fit from a witless politico who has done absolutely nothing to protect Ontario’s interests is sure to bring much comfort to the workers who elected him and are now unemployed. Ford claims he “won’t back down,” though this adipose buffoon has all the presence and international clout of a marshmallow at a campfire.

President of the National Citizens Coalition, Peter Coleman, sees Ford’s tenure as a masterclass not in muscular authority but in political timidity. “His cozying up to Prime Minister Mark Carney — a man whose progressive posturing seems to know no bounds — and his inflaming trade-war negotiations with tough talk has gone nowhere.” Ford really has nothing to leverage. Ontario’s major resource is vehicle manufacturing. If Trump moves aggressively on the cross-border auto industry, Ontario is back in barouche country. Chrysler and General Motors are packing up. When Ford goes, Ford goes.

And that may be happening sooner than we think. Earlier this month, Ford put his foot in his mouth again, which has just now come to Trump’s attention. As True North explains, the Ontario government launched a $75-million ad campaign featuring Reagan’s voice from his 1987 Address to the Nation on Free and Fair Trade. The ad features Reagan’s comments against protectionist policies leading to job losses and economic collapse. 

The ad was “selective” and “fraudulent.” We learn that “Reagan was justifying why he was reluctantly hitting ally Japan with trade tariffs as a ‘special case’ because some Japanese companies were ‘engaging in unfair trade practices’ contrary to a trade agreement with the U.S.” As a result of Ford’s disingenuous promo, Trump has halted all trade negotiations with Canada, declaring that Ford’s campaign was meant to interfere with an upcoming U.S. Supreme Court hearing on his administration’s tariffs. Canada will now pay the price for Ford’s blunder, and Ontario is probably finished long-term as an industrial locus.

As David Polansky comments in The Hub, Doug Ford is the real-life version of Mayor Quimby in The Simpsons. Like Quimby, Ford maintains a folksy, populist style and is subject to controversies involving political patronage. He has done nothing to combat pro-Palestinian and Hamas riots, reminiscent of Quimby’s “Oh, dear God. Can’t this town go one day without a riot?” Ford’s construction and civic management record is abysmal. He dismisses his critics as radical yahoos. “What was striking about this outburst was not just a conservative leader rejecting a moderate conservative platform, but the expression of pique at seeing people actually take a political position at all.”

Meanwhile, the hapless premier is “bafflingly silent on critical issues like crime, safety, record youth unemployment, and out of control immigration in his province.” Its housing starts are the worst in the country. Ontario, Canada’s supposed “growth engine,” now has the economic productivity of lowly Mississippi, which will soon dip to Lower Slobbovia levels. Ford is just an endlessly doltish, lumbering surrender-monkey who has tanked Ontario’s economy. The backdrop to his entire tenure is that Ontario is on track to accumulate a debt of half a trillion dollars by 2027. “With twice the debt of California, Ontario is now the world’s most indebted sub-sovereign borrower,” wrote the Financial Post in 2015. Ten Trudeau/Carney years later, the crisis is far worse. It may well be terminal.

Honest conservatives expect leaders to champion fiscal responsibility, tackle the healthcare, housing, and unemployment crises exacerbated by unchecked immigration, push for real interprovincial free trade, put an end to pro-criminal hug-a-thug policies, deliver our energy to markets and preside over a vigorous economy and a healthy future. Instead, as Coleman has said, we get a premier like Ford who seems more interested in backyard Liberal photo-ops and appeasing the progressive elite.

In the last analysis, Ontario is a once-economically powerful province mired in world-class debt, consisting of an urban electorate happily marching toward extinction while its blue-collar workers struggle to make ends meet. It is filled with thieves, grifters, and every sort of demographic riffraff, and features a political leader inoculated against the truth to such a degree that his every utterance may boost the lie-detector industry to record heights. Doug Ford is a comic-book figure trapped in a real-world context of political and economic demands he is simply incapable of understanding and dealing with productively. Doug Ford is Ontario’s answer to a foreclosing provincial mortgage and, along with his pal Carney, a collaborator at the national gates.

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