After a couple months of television celebrity on the American cable news outlets posing as Captain Canada, Premier Doug Ford made the jump yesterday to the big time of US print media on the pages of the gray lady herself, the New York Times.
A Wellness Company With False Claims, Global Aims and a Toronto Island, reads the headline, followed by A Times investigation shows Therme, a European firm, exaggerated its track record in securing a deal with Ontario, and government auditors found that the process had been unfair and opaque.
Ooops.
Not quite the favourable publicity our premier’s been used to lately.
But for anyone following the sordid spectacle of Therme and the shady ransacking of prime historical public assets like Ontario Place and the Ontario Science Centre by the Ford government, little of the information in the Times article was new or particularly surprising. It’s terrain that’s been covered extensively by local journalists, big and small. (Here’s John Lorinc writing in Spacing last December.)
None of it has made much of a dent on Ford’s popularity. Given the sketchy opaqueness of the deal and the money amounts involved, the megaspa and bulldozing of a beloved waterfront gathering spot (despite successive provincial governments’ neglect) woulda-shoulda sank other politicians’ careers. Especially combined with another whopping land giveaway scandal, the Greenbelt, hanging over the Ford government.
But not Doug Ford.
Somehow.
Which led me to musing about him being the luckiest fucking politician I have ever seen in my entire life. His whole career on the public stage is due to circumstances well beyond his control. Unfit for office at almost every level, yet here the man stands, easily the most successful politician in the country since the demise of the Big Blue Machine in Ontario in the mid-1980s.
Let me count out the ways:
1) Without the popularity of his outsider city councillor little brother, Rob, and his unlikely mayoral run in Toronto in 2010, Doug Ford would still be a fail-son business owner, running the business his daddy built. Despite his best efforts, Doug shares none of his brother’s ‘looking out for the little guy’ instincts that endeared Rob to Toronto voters. Doug is merely a machine-driven replicant of his late brother.
2) Doug Ford owes much of his ascension to the leadership of the Progressive Conservative party to the unlikeable, kind of icky persona of the man who held that position before him, Patrick Brown. That, combined with his more centrist leanings politically, made for easy-pickings by Ford and his coterie.
3) His first election as premier was largely a result of the rotten rump the Liberal government had become after 15 years in office. It didn’t hurt his cause that the premier at the time, Kathleen Wynee, the first openly gay person in that position, faced orchestrated social media attacks on an almost daily basis from well-funded, 3rd-party, ‘grassroots’ groups.
The one plus in Doug Ford’s column was his ability to stay relentlessly on message, not a trait he displayed much as a city councillor.
4) Covid. A second positive attribute he showed here was to keep the fringe voices, the anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, both within his caucus and without, at arm’s length, appearing rational and level-headed by comparison. The premier cozied up to the federal government and happily accepted the billions of healthcare dollars it handed over to help contend with the pandemic. He simply didn’t get in his own way, and in the campaign of 2022, Ontario voters didn’t seem inclined to change horses in mid-crisis.
5) The re-election of Donald Trump. Despite being caught on mic all thumbs-up with the Trump victory, the talks of tariffs and annexation soon transformed Doug into Captain Canada, defender of the realm and defiant in the orange face of treachery. He parlayed this into an early election call and won a third majority government by, again, staying unrelentingly on message, declaring little more than Trump! Trump! Trump! Tariffs! Tariffs! Tariffs! Canada is Not For Sale!
It also helped his cause that the Liberal party remained in semi-disarray, pleased with regaining official party status and the NDP showed no greater ambition than holding onto its 25 seats.
Now, there had been talk and whispers about going to the polls early even before the US election, the idea being for the Ford government to try and outrun the possible fallout of the scandals brewing in their midst, the aforementioned Greenbelt business that is currently still in the hands of the RCMP and this one, the Therme deal, now splashed on the pages of the New York Times. The proverbial first shoe dropping. Get ahead of it. Way, way out ahead of it before the shit hit the fans.
How much the anatomy of a scandal in the pages of the New York Times would’ve hurt Doug Ford’s chances if he’d waited until the next scheduled election in June 2026 is impossible to calculate. As voters, our memories haven’t really proven to be that strong. Maybe he’s got other plans, other career opportunities in mind. But we do know that even teflon wears out and isn’t as effective once it gets too many scratches on it. Luck eventually runs out even for the luckiest of us. That’s simply the nature of luck.