Ford, Delusions, And 2022

On How To Beat An Incumbent In A Pandemic

“Meet me on the road/Meet me where I said/Blame it all upon/A rush of blood to the head”

One of the people I’ve always respected most in Canadian politics is Paul Wells, and meeting him for one morning for coffee when I was in university is one of the highlights of those years, so when he confidently tweeted (back when he used Twitter) that there was no chance Doug Ford could win the 2018 Ontario PC membership, I remember being shocked that someone I respected so much could have his head up his ass so much.

I remember Wells certainty being the only thing keeping me from being confident when I said Ford would win, but at the end of the day Wells ended up walking back the take and Ford ended up winning the party membership, and then the election. Kathleen Wynne spent the first weeks of the Ford leadership describing him as a unique threat to Ontario, and a lot of people didn’t want to believe he could win the election, and especially not get a majority. My final projection had the PCs barely above the majority line, not particularly close to the 76 seats they got, but the errors were mostly because the polls understated the final lead, which is the hazard we all risk when we make predictions.

Throughout that campaign, so many people were aghast at the notion Ford could actually win, because to them his unseriousness and unfitness for the job was clear as day. I always thought he could win, even if I had the PCs under a majority for most of the campaign, and the night he won I was definitely sad, but I wasn’t surprised. And ever since that fateful June night now close to four years ago, there has been a section of the liberal/progressive wing of Ontario waiting for the moment when the rest of the province will come to understand what they have known the entire time. And I’m here to tell you, this week won’t be it.

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A Rush Of Blood To The Head, the song which leads this piece, comes to mind whenever I think of the Ford Government, and specifically the reaction of those who are waiting for everyone to realize the error of their ways in electing it. People really want the election of Doug Ford to have been the fault of, well, a rush of blood to the head – a fever dream that doesn’t actually represent the will of the public or of the electorate. And it’s not, as much as all of us liberal and progressive people want to think.

This delusion – and that’s what this is, to be clear – is a hope against hope that this is all a mirage, that this is all a mistake, that there’s nothing more coming down the line or no bigger structural problem to solve, and of course there is, but nobody wants to solve it. The hope is that the left in some form wins the next election and then we go back to normal, without ever having to deal with the idea that conservatives in this province thought Doug Ford was better prepared to serve than Christine Elliott, or that 40% of the province then voted for this buffoon. Unfortunately, there will be no moment of collective realization.

It wasn’t when Ford shut down the playgrounds and then backed down, it wasn’t when his government banned golf for months despite the fact that the evidence of outdoor transmission of this virus is functionally non-existent, and it won’t be the latest fiasco with schools and the reimposition of lockdown. Many people will be struggling with this news, and rightly so, but the decision being damaging to many isn’t the same as it being a political problem for the government.

I am not qualified for a conversation on the merits of lockdown or of the school closures, because unlike many of the people who cosplay epidemiologists on Twitter, I’m not a fucking doctor nor do I care enough to become one, but the evidence can be found for whatever argument you want to make. Some doctors think the transmission risks are outweighed by the educational benefits and the mental benefits of students, and others think that schools being open would be gasoline on the fire that is Omicron right now. Nobody knows the right answer, and most people’s response is going to be some version of “this is a really hard call”, because it was. There were and are obviously things that can be done to make schools safer, but safer is not the same as safe, and I’m not persuaded there’s any way to make it safe with the level of transmission in Ontario right now.

The main problem for those hoping this is the political deathknell of a government that deserves to lose in June is that the chances people remember this failure by election day is low, and if the Government finds a way, by hook or by crook, to get kids in school, asses in seats at Leafs playoff games and Jays games at the Dome, and businesses are back on solid footing by the time the campaign starts, then nobody will base their vote on the events of early January. The people who will be screaming bloody murder were never voting for him or the PCs again, and the voters the Liberals and NDP need will not react well to an argument that things were chaotic for a bit if they’re calm then.

The feeling in Ontario – of liberals and progressives being very very mad, and hoping that this would be the moment of truth – reminded me a lot of the US election, when I would be bombarded by tweets and DMs asking me if x or y would be the end of the Trump chances. I would always say that these small things weren’t going to change the race, and that if people weren’t already turned off from voting for Trump that the latest revelations wouldn’t change it – a rare thing I got right in a campaign that was generally disastrous for my predictions.

At the end of the day, what will win over 2014 Wynne-2018 Ford voters is not just hoping that Ford’s self-evident uselessness will now become apparent, but a coherent argument on what a post-COVID Ontario looks like, and not just praying for an easy solution where one doesn’t exist. We may all want to blame it all upon a rush of blood to the head, but that’s not what us this government, and being delusional about that is the single thing that makes his reelection most likely. Meet the voters who voted for him where they are now, and find out how to get them from where they are to where we want them to be, and give up on the fanciful notion that this was all because of a rush of blood to the head.