Will the crack-smoking Mayor’s brother win the leadership of Ontario?
Doug Ford, Rob Ford’s older brother, just won the leadership of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Party. That’s interesting for a few reasons, not least of which being that Doug Ford is about as progressive as a 1970s V8 Mustang. So can he lead his party to victory after 15 years in the wilderness?
Sadly, there’s a strong possibility that this could occur. It’s a bit of a crap shoot, with an emphasis on crap.
The centrist Liberal Party has been in power for 15 years. It’s done great work including eliminating coal generation, dealing with the loss of manufacturing jobs that’s systemic in North America, improving electrical generation, trying to deal with nuclear debt, modernizing educational curriculums, putting in place a carbon cap-and-trade aligned with California and Quebec, and reducing Ontario’s CO2 emissions.
But like any part in power for an extended period of time, it’s had its scandals and some of them are stinky and sticky. Electricity price increases are a cross-province hot button, the Liberals weren’t able to fix the decades of mismanagement in the area and now they’ve added to the mismanagement by kicking the debt down the road again. And citizens on the far left are disappointed as always by a party they hoped would be radical but turned out to be sensible and centrist managers of the economy.
Ford barely won the leadership, but the way he did it is important. He actually received fewer votes than Elliot and won fewer ridings. But Ford Nation came through in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). He won a very large percentage of Conservative Party members’ votes in Etobicoke and Scarborough, large population areas of the 905 area code suburbs, effectively recreating Trump’s Electoral College win in 2016 and duplicating Ford’s mayoral race results of 2014. The Liberals are typically stronger in the very populous GTA and weaker outside of the GTA, with Conservatives the converse. Ford’s strength in the GTA is important.
But Elliot did better in the less populous ex-GTA areas, and it’s unclear how Ford’s GTA-centric knowledge and general lack of policy insights will play there. Ford’s history is blemished and easy to attack between his well-documented drug-dealing days, his history of often outrageous and baseless defense of his crack-smoking, drunk, out-of-control brother during his Mayorship and his history of apparently bullying and misogyny. He’s going to be an uneasy choice for social conservatives, although the US evangelical support for Trump makes it clear that they are often consequentialists at best. Women in particular are not going to be strongly in favor of Ford.
Wynne’s Liberals are deeply — and unfairly, in my opinion — unpopular right now. Ford has negatives as strong as his positives, and polls prior to the leadership convention made it clear that the Conservatives had the worst chance of beating the Liberals if he were in control. It’s unclear if his narrow win as leader with only signed-up Conservatives voting will translate into broader support. His brother Rob, as deeply flawed as he was, did have an engaging populist, charm that engaged his base. Ford is still riding his dead-brother’s untucked, stained shirt tails.
Ford is not a xenophobic populist who throws bones to white supremacists as Trump is. That’s one relief. But he is a populist who doesn’t understand most of the important files for provincial government and makes popular but absurd statements. He’s continuing to make noises about cutting the price on carbon without any reference to how he’ll prevent the federal government from imposing a price on it, or even how he would manage to unwind Ontario’s interprovincial and international agreements around it. He is asserting that he’ll deal with the price of electricity, but he’s clueless on this file coming and going. He’ll ride populist anger on it, but won’t be doing anything sensible about it.
Ford just being a candidate is bad for Ontario. Ford’s candidacy isn’t good for Canada either. His candidacy isn’t even good for the Conservatives who voted for him.
But that doesn’t mean he won’t win. Ford could very well be the next Premier of Ontario. Elliot would have been much more likely to be elected, but the Conservatives have rejected her in favor of losing, flawed, mediocre white men three times now. It’s a bit of a referendum on the Conservative base’s misogyny, which doesn’t fly well with most of the rest of the citizens of Ontario.
My fingers are crossed that sanity will prevail. But I’m not holding my breath.
