Canada Catchup: Ford's Short Term Gamble
On A Premier In Some Trouble(?)
I'm not usually one to offer up free advice to Doug Ford, but hey, it's Saturday, I'm being charitable; criticizing the federal Liberals for vaccine problems has a shelf life, and it isn't the solution to your ills, Doug.
This week has seen Ford launch a stunning attack on the federal government for failures in vaccine procurement, claiming (seemingly falsely?) that the federal government has not delivered the amounts of vaccines it promised in the timeline it was promised, and therefore that delays in the vaccination program aren't the fault of Ford, no, but Ottawa. The problem is, it's not going to solve his problems, and a new Federal Vote Intention poll from Abacus Data tells us why.
I will agree with Coletto here that the Ontario number is the story - if the federal Liberals are up 16% in Ontario, then it's game over, pack it up, majority secured. And this is Doug Ford's problem with attacking the Liberals - if the are in the mid 40s, then there are a substantial amount of Ford 2018-Trudeau 2021 voters out there, meaning that attacking Trudeau isn't a good idea - because the people who think Trudeau is doing a good job right now aren't just a bunch of weak kneed bleeding hearts, but many of the same voters who put Doug Ford into office. Seems like a bad mistake to antagonize the guy who's cruising to his reelection while you're having to impose a third "lockdown", although how it's a lockdown if non-essential businesses are still open escapes me.
Ford is just trying to win the press conference, win the next 5 minutes, every time he does anything. He isn't doing any sort of long term thinking, and it shows, because the lesson of the last year politically is that voters don't blame governments for the adverse effects of COVID. Maybe they should, but American voters didn't look at their death toll and rally towards Joe Biden, British voters only really rebelled against Boris Johnson when Dominic Cummings went on his long lockdown drive to test his eyesight and when the English University entrance exams Fiasco happened, neither of which were exactly about the failure of lockdown - and now that their vaccine program has been a success, Boris is looking at political peace again.
Voters think that COVID was a hard thing to expect a government to be ready to deal with, and so it isn't reasonable to expect them to handle a once in a century pandemic perfectly, or even necessarily well. They are grading this on a curve, clearly, and whether or not this is smart or stupid is kind of beyond the point. Trudeau is not going to lose the next election for a variety of reasons, but it is massively telling that every criticism of the government's handling of this pandemic mostly falls apart in time. "We spent too much!" yell the Conservatives, as if A) anyone cares about government debt levels when we won't even hit 50% Debt-To-GDP and B) people like not being broke as shit. "You didn't spend enough on the things we've wanted for 25 years," yells the NDP, to which most everyone else just rolls their eyes. Trudeau hasn't been perfect, and I think at best he is aloof and idiotic or, more likely, actively corrupt, given SNC and WE and his proximity to at least attempts at corruption. It's a problem, and I've previously called for Trudeau to resign. That he won't doesn't mean that he shouldn't, and I'm not voting Liberal despite thinking they did as well as could be reasonably expected. But I know I'm not in the majority on that.
If Doug Ford wants to win, the best thing he can do is lower the temperature with Ottawa, because the Liberals will be there when he goes to the polls next year, and his reelection may come down to whether or not the Feds take an active interest in his losing, or stay out of the way, as they did in New Brunswick and BC. If Chrystia Freeland launches a stinging rebuke of Ford in an interview in the provincial campaign, that answer - and the difference between that and a polite non-answer - could make a difference to hundreds of thousands of Ford-Trudeau swing voters. So why is he antagonizing the Liberals over a problem whose shelf life is about to run out?
The answer to this question, of course, is that Ford isn't smart, or good at this. All of his "Hell Of A Guy" credit that the press - and, Conservative water carrier/supposed independent pollster Darrell Bricker - gave him at the beginning of this pandemic is slowly bleeding out as he's making new announcements about hospitals in Conservative seats during a pandemic and firing doctors who disagree with him. Ford's net favourables in Ontario, again per Abacus? +3, 39%-36% positive/negative. This isn't someone with the magic touch, everyone, this is someone slowly but surely losing touch with an electorate wary of (what I guess I have to call) Lockdown 3. Everyone's sick of this shit, the plots are repeating, and the new characters don't feel fleshed out. And yet, here everyone is.
Picking a fight with the Feds that the Feds can easily knock back won't get shots into arms any faster, and will probably incentivize the Liberals in Ottawa to offer a bigger helping hand to Steven Del Duca over the next 15 months, while not doing anything to make Erin O'Toole a contender for control of 24 Sussex Drive (or, I guess, Rideau Cottage, in fairness). It's intellectually dishonest, short termist, and politically idiotic. If Ford wants to make his life easier, he'll focus on sorting out his province's spiking COVID problem, but if all he wants to do is pick a fight with the guys up the 401, he'll do so at the risk of his own reelection.