Ford, Del Duca, And A Question Of Leadership

On The Convoy

One of the first pieces I ever wrote for this site was on Justin Thomas, a professional golfer I am quite a fan of, and his use of a homophobic slur during a January 2021 golf tournament, and the hot mic that picked it up. In that piece, written drunk off my ass at 8PM while watching football, I meditated on whether I would be as eager to look for some upside, some forgiveness, to look at the bigger picture, if it were a golfer I didn’t like as much, and I probably wouldn’t have. I like JT, so I want him to be a good guy, or at least, I want to not hate him. I looked for a path to get back to my fandom, because it’s what I wanted.

That experience is on my mind as I look at the reaction to Doug Ford finally doing something about the dual crises in his province, the Ambassador Bridge blockade and the clusterfuck in my home city, because for some reason the commentariat is trying to convince us all that Ford showing up 10 days late was somehow an act of leadership?

Now, if the bar is Jason Kenney and Pierre Poilievre, great, it’s leadership, I guess, technically. The problem is that’s not the fucking bar, and Ford sat on his ass for two weeks before finally doing something. Now, let’s be kind to Ford, and say that that first weekend needed to be allowed to happen – that Monday was January 31st. It’s now the 11th, and he just got around to doing something about it. And this is supposed to be leadership?

It's been clear since that first weekend that Jim Watson was an incompetent buffoon (actually, it’s been clear since 2011, but I digress) and that the Ottawa Police, either through cowardice, incompetence, or a combination of the two, would not be able to end this. And now, Ford has gotten here, and a whole lot of people seem to be of the “Let's forget the fact that you're coming a little late to the party and embrace the fact that you showed up at all” philosophy, which worked a whole lot better when it was a quip on the West Wing than as a way to judge governments.

And, because it’s an election year, all of this is about the election, and people either influencing the way the narrative will be spun or trying to pray that the public will see things the way they want it to be seen. Everything that has happened is about the election, and we know it – if the convoy was fucking with Etobicoke or Mississauga or Scarborough, places with swathes of Conservative MPPs – do you think Ford would have been fucking snowmobiling last weekend, a week into an occupation? No? Of course not, and you’d be right.

So many journalists are so terrified of being seen as biased that they’re pretending that there is something that Justin Trudeau should have done, and there wasn’t – plainly, there was nothing he could have said to end this nightmare, because hatred of him is essentially the only thing keeping the disparate forces of this convoy-turned-occupation. This is the most basic rule of humanity – the right person to communicate a message isn’t the person you’re livid with. This, by the way, is understandable to everyone who has ever been in any form of relationship – parental, fraternal, matrimonial, or even just with colleagues – and yet for some reason, there’s still this fetish that Trudeau should have done something.

For those with a more detailed complaint against the Prime Minister – that he didn’t invoke the Emergencies Act and sent in the military – I have slightly more sympathy, but even here, are you really arguing that the Prime Minister sending in the Army for what should be police work is a good thing? Sending in the military to deal with civilian operations is one of the hallmarks of a failed state, and to have to do so would be a horrendous statement about the state of the country we’re in. Not that the status quo has been good, but the image of Justin being trigger happy to send in the army – making the Trudeau family 2/2 for invocations of military use to put down domestic groups – is a very bad state of affairs, and everyone pretending it isn’t is deluding themselves. At the end of the day, Doug Ford took 10 days too long, and now we’re here.

Will it matter? This is an elections blog, not a policy one, so let’s not pretend you’re here for anything other than me making reckless predictions about the state of the race in Ontario. As of right now, we have no data on how the polls may or may not have moved in Ontario, and therefore my forecast is the same as it was the last time I updated it. Subjectively, I think this is a short term problem for Ford, but if you think this will be hurting him on election day, you’re me 5.5 years ago thinking Donald Trump’s litany of scandals rendered him unelectable. I was wrong then, and you’re wrong now.

The Ontario Liberals have botched the politics of all this, if I’m being completely honest – their attacks are pitched on moralizations, not practicalities. This is bad for the government because it is a sign that their errors of the last four years are continuously repeating, but there’s no attempt at a cohesive, coherent narrative from them. “Doug Ford needs to open the border and get the convoy to go home” is a headline designed to win the next newscycle, but it’s not going to move the election. “Ford was late on boosters, late on health measures, late to act on climate, and will be late to every other crisis in the next four years” at least has the benefit of being a coherent narrative about the future. It’s a harder message to get across, but it’s also one that has the chance to last.

Harper beat Dion and Ignatieff because they picked an overriding narrative and everything that happened got funneled through that narrative. Dion was a tax-raising socialist and Ignatieff was an elitist American who came back because Harvard bored him, and a relentless message war made people believe their taxes would go up and Iggy was woefully out of touch. Ford has given the Ontario Liberals a version of the same message, but instead of taking advantage, they’re playing to win the Star front page every day. If they keep doing it, they’ll let Ford off the hook and back into majority government.