Ford asks voters to imagine the horror of someone else being in charge

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The central problem with the Ontario election campaign is still the fundamental lack of disagreement between the candidates — on what our priorities should be (health care, housing, education, gridlock) and on how to fix them (government spending, and lots of it). Monday night’s leaders’ debate evinced this problem in spades.

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The Tories, Liberals, New Democrats and Greens are all promising you access to primary medical care within four or five years. They’re all promising to ramp up housing starts. They’re all concerned about law and order. They’re all concerned about the affordability of everyday life, about poverty and soaring food bank usage. They all want to spend great gobs of money fixing the problems.

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The main difference is that Doug Ford has been premier for seven years and should rightly have to answer for those problems. Monday evening was likely the opposition leaders’ last best shot to drive home the flaws in Ford’s record. Ford’s strategy was total lack of repentance.

Are your kids’ classes at school too big? Can you not get access to the special-education supports they need? Is the school in question falling apart physically? These are the sorts of questions two-term premiers need to be very careful in answering, because statistics and dollar figures don’t tend to calm down aggrieved people.

“I know the three of you aren’t very good with numbers,” Ford sneered at his opponents on the state of K-12 education, “but the fact is no one’s ever invested more in education than we have.”

“Parents with kids in our schools right now, they know that’s not true,” NDP Leader Marit Stiles countered.

And that’s when Ford retreated to his island of safety: “The foundation of education is built on our economy,” he said. And who are you going to trust with the economy? The implication: Ford and his Progressive Conservatives, duh — or at least, certainly not the Liberals’ Bonnie Crombie, the NDP’s Stiles or the Greens’ Mike Schreiner.

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Each leader assures us that, as premier, they will ensure every Ontarian has access to proper primary care within four or five years, through some combination of training and recruiting more doctors and nurses, and redesigning primary care around family-health teams as opposed to individual GPs.

Ford boasted of appointing former federal health minister Dr. Jane Philpott to lead a “primary care action team,” and the plan in question has received positive notices. As the former patient of a misery guts sole-practitioner GP, and the current patient of a family-health team (including a GP) let me assure any skeptics that they are 100 per cent what we should be doing. And again, no party really disagrees.

But Philpott was only appointed in October, and the plan was only released on the eve of the election call. It’s more than fair to suggest much more could and should have been done already.

Again, Ford’s approach was the same: Boast of his record and encourage us to imagine the carnage should anyone else be in charge.

“There’s no government in the history of this country that’s invested more (in health care),” said Ford.

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Again, that’s a risky thing to tell Ontarians, most of whom can rattle off any number of health-care nightmares related to themselves and loved ones. But essentially, Ford warned, it could be worse.

“The foundation of our health care is a strong economy, and each of (my opponents) fail on our economy,” he said.

Ford ought to be particularly vulnerable on housing starts, where Ontario is batting well under the national average, and in theory Crombie — whose well-received plan involves taking a hatchet to development charges — ought to be in a good position, despite a well-earned NIMBY reputation from her time as mayor of Mississauga.

Ford noted that contradiction, again boasted of his government’s investments, and again predicted doom under a different government. “None of this can happen under (my opponents’) watches because the economy would go down quicker than the Canadian bobsled downhill.”

And Ford deployed the same basic tactic defending what may well be the most indefensible idea currently blotting his copybook: The self-evidently insane notion — if price is any object, which it is! — of digging a tunnel under Highway 401 to provide some unspecified number of new lanes across the entire width of Toronto. It would be “the largest tunnel in the world,” Ford boasted, essentially casting any opposition to the idea as lunacy.

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“You believe in bike lanes and riding bikes and planting trees, I get it,” Ford said to his three opponents. “But the problem is, you won’t be able to afford the trees because the economy will go down the tubes with all three of you.” (Trees really aren’t that expensive.)

Ford’s overall pitch essentially boils down to “can you imagine if any of these three other people were in charge?”

“I don’t believe in taxing people and I will never take money outta your pockets,” Ford vowed — a strange thing for a two-term premier to say, because Ford’s government most certainly does tax people, and it would be in quite a pickle if it didn’t, and also because the personal and business tax cuts Ford promised in 2018 have not materialized.

But Ford didn’t get where he is with modesty or deference, of course. And it’s not as though Ontario was well governed beforehand.

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com

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