Empty Suit, Empty Calendar

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We’ve said many things here about Doug Ford over the course of his 16 years in the public eye, almost none of them positive. But there’s one aspect of his political career that we’ve woefully neglected to focus on. And that’s just how lazy a politician he is.

Sure, he appears ever present and always on the job. When he does show up, he makes a big impression. Like some sort of vengeful and vindicative deity, smiting his opponents and smashing the place up. Made your way past Toronto’s western waterfront recently, where Ontario Place used to be? Shorn and rubbled, the jagged skyline of a malignant overseer.

An absent father figure, Doug Ford. Rarely around but evidence of his neglect and abuse of power abound.

I’ve been mocking his light schedule at Queen’s Park over on BlueSky this week, pointing out his very extended long May weekend, nearly 10 days in fact, between sessions, with only 8 more sittings before the summer recess which extends for pretty much 3 months, weeks and weeks longer than a six year old gets for their school vacation. If my addition is correct, the legislature will be sitting 84 days in total this year, 7 days a month, prorated over a 12 month period. With attendance entirely optional, of course.

Now, I know, I know.

Sitting through Question Period is only one aspect of a premier’s job, largely performative, to give the opposition parties an opportunity for a shot at the spotlight and sound bites. Democracy in action! The public facing aspect of the job.

And, the fact is, the number of session days are not that far off the historical norm at Queen’s Park, give or take a few days or weeks here and there. As far as I can tell, 2017, the year before Doug Ford became premier, the legislature sat for 95 days. Nearly 3 4-day-work-weeks more.

An egregious reduction?

Depends on who you ask, I guess.

For me, though, it’s the utter Houdini disappearances in between question periods and big cheque PR announcements and high profile trade mission jaunts that speaks to an AWOL premier MIA. Do we really think that Doug Ford’s rolls up his sleeves and gets dirty doing constituent work as a sitting MPP when he’s not out party fundraising? Or even sweating through cabinet meetings, ironing out policy initiatives? Of this, I guess we’ll never know with the passage of Bill 97 last month, the Plan to Protect Ontario (from finding out just what a lazy fuck Doug Ford is, amirite?) Act.

No, no.

Doug’s phoning it in most of the time. From his Muskoka cottage. From the Etobicoke manse he inherited from his parents. From the private jet he thought Ontario taxpayers should pay for until the public outrage and resulting polls suggested that was a really bad idea.

And fine. Fine, whatever. Doug Ford’s hardly the first slouch to be elected to public office, concerned entirely about his personal comfort above that of the people who elevated him to his power position.

But it’s the fact he still has the nerve to lecture others about the need for hard work and putting their nose to the grindstone if they want to succeed in life if they want to get ahead that grates.

“I believe everyone’s more productive when they’re at work,” Doug Ford proclaimed last summer when he ordered provincial civil servants back to the office 5 days a week. “It drives me nuts when I see young, healthy people and they’ll call me saying, ‘I can’t find a job’,” Ford chanted in September. “I assure you, if you look hard enough, it… may be in fast food or something else, but you’ll find a job.”

“On Jan. 23 [2026], Ford appeared to work entirely from home, with staff travelling to Etobicoke to attend meetings,” Global news reported in April. “At 9:30 a.m. he had a daily briefing followed by three meetings with Labour Minister David Piccini and various unions. His final meeting took place at 12 p.m. and the rest of his day was marked ‘private’.”

Wow.

That’s a whole half day of work before going dark.

A tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.

If everything was going swimmingly in Ontario, the province Doug Ford has led for nearly 8 years, you might concede that the premier doesn’t need to be hands-on, every day tweaking and making adjustments. His job is to try and make sure the machine is running smoothly and then get out of the way.

But that’s hardly the case here.

Interminable wait times in emergency departments are the norm. The education system is being ransacked and butchered, local democracy kneecapped. Big public infrastructure projects over budget and delayed for years. No end in sight for the housing shortage. Youth unemployment, well, the kids just need to look harder, work harder, get their noses to the grindstone.

The only ones seeming to benefit from the Doug Ford government are its biggest donors and a select group of attendees at his daughter’s wedding.

His noted absence may be politically motivated as his popularity sags. It could well be that Ontario voters increasingly prefer the theoretical looking out for the little guy Doug Ford to the real version who seems increasingly out of his depth and in it only for his own benefit and that of the crowd that swept him into power and are continuing to prop him up.

Two things can be true at once, though.

Doug Ford could be ducking and hiding in an attempt to mitigate the damage he’s inflicted on the province since 2018 and he could just be monumentally lazy. The entitled fail son of inherited wealth who has never really had to work a day in his entire lazy life.

Toronto, the Bad Driving

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Driving. (A companion piece to a post from last September).

I recently spent a few weeks overseas, some of the time in a couple cities comparable in size to Toronto. Sydney, Australia and Singapore.

In neither place did I ever sit behind the wheel of a car, doing the actual driving. Mostly because the wheel was on the wrong side of the vehicle, and I may just be getting too old to handle that kind of cognitive dissonance. Motoring habits and clutch-pedal foot rusted into place. Continue reading →

Pipeline Dreams

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It’s just a wink and a nod, we’re being told, the MOU between Alberta and the federal government that thumbs up the process for a new oil pipeline to get Alberta bitumen flowing out through the northern B.C. coastline and to the Asian markets and beyond. If certain conditions are met. Conditions that will never be met as far as the Prime Minister is secretly concerned.

So the story goes.

The lack of free market interest in building an oil pipeline.

The opposition of affected B.C. Indigenous communities to any sort of pipeline running through their territory.

The opposition of the B.C. provincial government, sidelined as a mere observer to the plans and Memorandum Of Understanding signed on Thursday by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney.

It ain’t gonna happen, we’re assured. Trust the savvy businessman and former Governor of both the banks of Canada and England on this. He’s got our backs.

All signs to the contrary. All words publicly stated post-deal aside.

“At the core of the agreement, of course,” the PM said, “is a priority to have a pipeline to Asia.”

See?

Absolutely no intention of getting this thing built. You just have to read between the lines, parse the words properly.

This is how cynicism in politics gets bred.

Either the Prime Minister is lying to us about his priority about building the pipeline or he was lying before, in his run up to being elected, that he ever leaned green and valued the environment. He can’t have it both ways.

Unless, he thinks he can.

“A climate strategy based solely on regulations and prohibitions will not achieve our climate objectives,” the PM said, “not least because it will fail to generate the alignment of interests require for this historic undertaking.”

A 2025 climate strategy will not achieve any positive climate objectives if it includes building new oil pipelines. End stop. That’s the statement. If you give a toss about the environmental crisis currently enveloping us.

Secretly banking on a non-alignment of interests to sink a project you’re touting, publicly going all in on, is not a climate strategy. It’s a political ploy. There’s a difference. And if you are arguing that, in our political situation, you can’t have the first without the second, then you’re just buying into the cynicism that keeps voters increasingly away from the polling stations and switching off political engagement.

It is also a complete abdication of leadership.

If his advocates are to be believed, the PM’s counting on a combination of external forces to step up and stop this project dead. The market. Indigenous communities. The B.C. government. In the face of his glowing approval of a new pipeline, something or someone else needs to fight back, push back, rally the troops to the cause of defending the environment. That way, in the aftermath of this theoretical pipeline defeat, Mark Carney can throw up his hands, claim to have done his best and say the process played out as it should.

What are you gonna do?

Either that or, roiled by the economic turmoil Canada’s coping with, the world’s coping with, owing to the disorder blowing in all directions from the United States, our new PM, our canny businessman-king, has been caught absolutely flat-footed, talking a big game about new realities, a new order to things, but in practice, ill-prepared to make the necessary adjustments to deal with those changes. Instead, he’s embracing the throw-back, the tried and the true. Reimagining the country he was elected to lead as it’s been longed imagined by the unimaginative types. Nothing more than hewers of wood, drawers of water and fossil fuel addicts, fouling the air and streams for the sake of a little peace and comfort.