Ford, Ontario, And Winning Without Your Best Stuff

On The Lesson From Heritage

On Sunday, one of my favourite things in the world happened – Jordan Spieth won a golf tournament. That said, the way he did it this time was unlike how he had ever done it before – and it was a shocking victory not for what he did, but what he didn’t do.

Spieth’s usual path to victory is mediocre play with his driver, great iron play, and to make a bunch of putts. On Sunday, Spieth capped a four day display of piss poor putting, and won in large part because his driver was immaculate – 4th best in the field.

To say that Spieth won without his best stuff would be the understatement of the decade – he easily could have won by 3 if he didn’t get fucked by a bad lie on 9 on Sunday and he didn’t miss a tap in on Saturday’s 18th hole. But he won, and at the end of the day, winning and losing isn’t about some objective declaration of good performance or bad ones. It’s about beating the people you’re against, and for good or for ill, Jordan made two decently long birdie putts on his back nine and Cantlay and Lowry couldn’t make shit to save their lives. And that’s the thing I keep coming back to – he won without his best stuff.

And I can’t stop thinking about how many Ontario progressives need to take a fucking hint from it.

…

Is Steven Del Duca a perfect politician and has he been perfect so far since the campaign season really started this year? No, and I don’t think anyone would ever pretend otherwise. Whether any of the Liberals reading this would ever admit it publicly, they’ve been rudderless at times on COVID, from flirting with a three dose vax passport to showing up all together unmasked within 6 weeks, and that maskless event is being used by many idiots and selfish assholes to bludgeon Del Duca in the name of purity over practicality, and this column is aimed squarely, directly, at you.

If you are such a self-indulgent, selfish asshole that you won’t vote for the Liberals because of that campaign event, you deserve four more years of Doug Ford, and you will have his re-election (if it comes) on your conscience forever. Doug Ford is worth defeating at all costs, even if he is replaced by an imperfect Premier. And refusing to accept this very basic fact is self-indulgence of the worst kind, unworthy of the kind of crisis that four more years of Ford would constitute.

One of the things I’ve thought a lot about since the Canadian election ended, actually, is the concept of rebuilding after a crisis. The last third of the book I started writing in that campaign – still unpublished – deals with two brothers, Carson and Ian, and the crisis of their falling out, and the question of whether anything can bring them back, and I think about both that story in the terms it sits, but also why me, as an author, chose to go there, chose to rebuild that relationship, and I know why.

Rebuilding is often a choice between two suboptimal outcomes – in this case, forgive someone for horrific and hateful things said, or losing forever your brother. Neither is good – to forgive is to risk that someone who has hurt you so deeply in the past won’t do it again, and to lose a brother forever would be understandably horrible – and yet, the choice had to be made.

Whatever you think of Del Duca – and lord knows that opinions vary – he is substantially better than Doug Ford for a variety of reasons, namely that he won’t go to such lengths to fuck all of this up. Ford’s instincts on COVID have always been horrible, from reopening too early to locking down too late, to being incomprehensible at all times in between. Ford made the fans at the Canadian Men’s National Team game in Hamilton – where they beat the US – sit in the freezing cold without any food or drinks because of policies on outdoor masking that had already been announced to be changing two days later. Literally, two days later. Above everything, he’s an idiot, and that’s the gravest sin he can commit.

If you clapped for healthcare workers in the first days of the pandemic, use their plight to make you feel better, and then claim that there is no difference between Ford and Del Duca – which so many fucking do, including in my mentions with frightening frequency – maybe the fact that Del Duca is committed to repealing Bill 124, which the Nurses’ Union has been begging for for years now should make you realize that your claim to care so much about healthcare workers is just self-indulgence on an industrial scale.

Is Del Duca perfect? No, of course not. But is a man promising to raise the minimum wage nearly $2, reinstate sick pay for all workers, protect gig workers, and offer up to $2750 in rebates for parents of kids in child care really the same as Doug Fucking Ford? Really? Is that a position you can really, truly, earnestly hold?

If it is, and you read this site, please stop, because you are a cancer to this province and this country. We don’t need to get worked up about whether Del Duca is perfect enough, just as we don’t have to litigate whether Spieth “deserved” to win the Heritage last night. It doesn’t matter whether Jordan’s bad luck and brain farts more than made up for the dodged bullets after he got into the clubhouse, because he won, and he won without his best stuff. Now it’s time for the Ontario left to make the same calculation – stop caring that Del Duca isn’t perfect, and focus on the battle in front of us. Otherwise, this province will burn as Ford fucks us.

And if that happens, there will be blood on the hands of everyone who didn’t vote to stop it.