Ford's Staple Of Corruption

On Staples, Walmart, And Left Complacency

There is no case that Doug Ford deserves to win the next election.

This isn’t a partisan or ideological thing, to be clear - Stephen Harper did deserve to win the 2011 election (and I can hear an argument for 2008), Gordon Brown deserved to lose the 2010 UK election. Even if I wouldn’t have voted for Harper in 2011, it certainly made complete sense why he won and it’s frankly hard to argue either of the alternatives really would have been better. (As much affection as I have for Jack Layton, a Cabinet that would have included Niki Ashton doesn’t exactly scream stability and competence.)

With Ford, I don’t even really get the case for him, because his list of positive accomplishments is bereft of basically anything. He hasn’t accomplished, well, anything of what he promised when he ran. Hallway medicine is still rampant, wait times are higher, the housing crisis is worse, everything is underfunded … it’s a shitshow. Is he responsible for all of that? No, but a lot of it, yes. What’s the positive case for his re-election? In 2022 it was the opposition were too shit. That’s not an answer.

That said, there’s a tendency to go too far with thinking his comically open corruption is going to doom him. It’s a crutch from some on the left that the Ford government obviously deserves to lose, and therefore that somehow that obvious (to them) point will somehow end up in the result. And as someone who had more than my fair share of egg on my face for believing that my sense of what should have happened in 2022 would be shared broadly, it feels like it’s worth pointing something out.

The PCs are not on a road to lose the next election at this point.

…

Let’s start with the fact that Ford is polling at 39 in the most recent Abacus and 36 in the immediately-post Crombie win Mainstreet, numbers that, while down from 2022, are fairly robust for a government at roughly midterm. Throughout 2019, Ford was straight up in second to the (then-leaderless, yes) Liberals with regularity, a fate that couldn’t even happen at the peak of the Greenbelt scandal in 2023. The NDP, while seemingly having turned something of a corner by starting to articulate a vision for themselves with the New Year’s Marit Stiles op-ed, have a real seriousness gap to overcome with voters unsure whether she and her party are competent enough to govern. Bonnie Crombie has … issues on her left flank, let’s say.

Ford has a robust majority and more seats to go and win next time. One of the underrated factors of the 2022 election was some NDP success in their working class firewall. Obviously the loss of Timmins was a disaster, but holding Oshawa, 3 Niagaras, and most of Northern Ontario is pretty good. I’m not at all sure that’s gonna hold, given the underlying (ie, Global) changes in seats like that (you could perhaps call it a Realignment, of sorts).

Yes, he’s probably losing at least a few Mississaugas without even blinking to Crombie, but the left needs to win 20 seats. Say that the Mississauga seats that Bonnie tips over to the Liberals are counteracted by those few right-trending seats. Do the two left parties have a coherent strategy to flip 20 seats in the rest of the GTA, the outer parts of the city of Toronto, and then Ottawa? They can win them, certainly, but there’s not a super coherent strategy or plan.

We have heard about these sweetheart Service Ontario deals with Staples and now Walmart and we’re going to continue to get truly insane revelations about the brazenness of the corruption. The thing about every Ford scandal or fuckup is it is comical in its extremity. The lockdown announcement that had cops locking playgrounds, the Stag and Doe having developers with government business giving the family cash, the Greenbelt land swaps literally being made to specifically benefit specific buyers who clearly had advance warning (as their terrible, high interest loans show). From what we know, this is as blatant and this clear cut in both its corruption and its comic status. It also doesn’t guarantee the sum of jack and shit.

What the left needs to do is both incredibly easy to say from the cheap seats but hard to do in reality; they need to take control of the agenda instead of playing whack-a-mole on Ford. I’m actually less critical of Crombie for this – frankly, the long Liberal leadership race and the fact that it ended in December means it’s not really fair to expect her to come out swinging yet. Giving her grace to get her footing and assemble a team is fine. Stiles and the NDP, however, need to start leading, not just reacting.

There was a post from Stiles today about how Doug Ford is underfunding hospitals. Is he? Of course. Will anyone care about that if that’s all you have to say? No. Where’s the ambitious plan for filling in the gap? Where’s the solutions to any of this? It’s easy to say that ServiceOntario should be public and we shouldn’t be paying for Staples’ renos to host these. That’s easy. What’s harder is how you’re gonna pay for the likely billions we need to fill in the current capacity gaps for schools and hospitals, let alone building new ones.

We’ve got a post-secondary crisis in this province that is threatening every part of the system from elite Universities to obscure colleges that is also worsening our housing crisis. We have a Premier more focused on booze and beer than on students and the sick. We have a Premier who is more focused on his friends in high places than Ontarians who need a leg up. Everything that my ideological compatriots say about the guy is true. The problem was, it was all true last time and he gained seats. He doesn’t deserve to be anywhere near power; deserve has nothing to do with whether he will win again.

There is a metric fuckton of work to be done to put the anti-Ford opposition in a position to eliminate his majority in 2026. Can he be beat? Sure. But he won’t be beat by another comically on the nose corruption scandal.