Ontario Deserves Better Than Ford’s Decline

On A Province Declining Unnecessarily

(At this point you know who Nathaniel Arfin is - a brilliant mind, a dedicated organizer, a co-founder of the New Leaf Liberals, and a close friend. I’m happy to run this piece, as Ontario’s House returns today.)

We can’t let ourselves be numb to it.

Doug Ford’s been Premier of Ontario for 7 years. For 7 years, Doug Ford has told us how much he stands up for us. But after 7 years, we have less opportunity, prosperity feels farther away than ever, and it’s hard to be hopeful. His cabinet finds new ways to be corrupt, seemingly treating the task of finding new and inventive ways to help their friends more important than their real jobs. His MPPs rarely appear in public, unless they’re taking Leafs tickets from companies they control grants to or are peddling Premier’s Office talking points. And all the while, real problems are getting worse.

The Conservatives love a stunt, but pouring out more Crown won’t keep Stellantis workers in their jobs. They love an announcement, but schools are still crumbling and class sizes are still too high. It’s still basically impossible to get a job as a young person in Ontario right now, but thank God Kory Teneycke’s clients are making a killing from the Skills Development Fund. Friday’s news that a company that had received Skills Development Fund cash was behind the Health atHome disaster of 2024 is the latest sign of the revolving door between favoured companies, but we know it. That companies are even allowed to hire the firm of the guy who wins Ford his majorities is astonishing, but at least in Doug’s Ontario the rules are clear - Anything For Friends.

It’s incredibly sad, but it’s important not to let the cynicism win. The honest truth is that Ontario is incredibly badly run, but it is a place of incredible people trying their best and being failed by their government. Teachers are trying to teach their students in conditions they shouldn’t have to accept, nurses and doctors are working too many hours but still helping patients, businesses are surviving through sheer grit and determination, and workers are doing their best to make sure there’s food on the table, the mortgage or rent gets paid, and their kids don’t realize how tight money is. But our successes are in spite of Ford, when our government should be helping.

We have such potential in this province - natural resources that can be the basis of both prosperity for all and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, great cities up and down the province with sights to see and places to go, a diverse mix of industries and an even more diverse group of people. We have tech hubs that rival the best of Silicon Valley, an auto sector that’s been an economic powerhouse for generations, some of the most stable and respected banking and finance sectors anywhere in the world, and two top flight civil services that serve Canadians and Ontarians respectively well. We have so much in Ontario, but we need a government that will get out of the way and let us build.

It’s time for Ontario to become a place that can be the envy of the world we’re always told it is. Our politics often feel like a cruel joke, a government too incompetent and malignant to do anything good and an opposition that, while occasionally well-intentioned, is so thoroughly overmatched as to be irrelevant. But now we have a chance to actually change that, if we don’t let the cynicism win. We need to give voters something worth investing in, because if we give in to the cynical idea that things can’t get better and Ford is inevitable, then we can’t get mad when the voters join us in that cynicism.

The Liberals have an opportunity here, and one they need to take advantage of. We need a leader who views those challenges as an opportunity, our untapped potential as a gift to exploit and not a distraction from whatever platitudes they need to deliver in a day. We need to let the public meet the Liberals in a place of optimism, where we’re talking less about the problems we all know and are focused and excited about solutions.

The reason I got involved with the New Leaf Liberals is because I know in my heart that Ontario can be better than it is. It’s where I’m raising my two kids, where I’ve lived and loved and made mistakes and learned lessons, and where some of the greatest moments in my life have been. It’s a place that deserves better than this. It’s a place that can’t be allowed to settle for less.

At the end of the day, politics is about people - helping people, serving people, and making our lives better in any way we can. When our politics becomes about the intricacies of specific scandals and how much work Kory Teneycke actually does for the lobbying clients of his firm, it misses what matters, which is that the government is failing at its core jobs of serving Ontarians’ best interests.

Ontarians have real concerns about real issues, and there are solutions the province could enact tomorrow to make lives easier. They could cut development charges for new housing so that it’s cheaper to build the homes we need, they could hire more judges to clear up our backlog of trials and inmates so that guilty people stop walking free from delays, and they could support workers losing in this tariff war instead of pouring perfectly good whiskey on the ground to make some point. But they’d rather the stunt, because then it’s about Doug and not the people.

We can’t let him get away with that.

If we let the cynicism of Ford win, then the PC government will continue to win. But we can and must show Ontarians a new path forward, one that centres the people and not the elites. We can blaze a path that puts more young people in jobs and more teachers in classrooms above making sure Cabinet Ministers get to watch Mitch Marner choke. We can do all of these things, because Ontario deserves so much better than this government.

Soon, it’ll have a government it deserves.