It is disappointing. I’m not a Ford fan but voted Conservative for the first time in utter disgust of the Liberals (as an aside, they unfortunately did not waste their mandate, they just did all the wrong things but that’s another discussion..).
I wonder if part of the problem is that Ford/his government never looked longer out than the next election and “politics of distraction” became their go-to approach. Now, three elections in, looking back, there’s really nothing to show for it except a few good scandals involving his developers friends. If you think about it, that’s what is going to stand out.
Godzilla52 on
I feel like Ford missed his calling as either a campaign organizer or a diplomat. Guy definitely knows how to campaign, make deals, seize political initiative and keep his base energized (even distracting them from his government’s multiple controversies/blunders and has also been able to rebound from various polling slumps etc.) but as an administer he constantly prioritizes personal self-interest over the long term wellbeing of his province. (or arguably even his party after his departure)
He’s a bit of paradox to me because I genuinely don’t think he’s a good premier, but I simultaneously admire his political gamesmanship and ability to stay afloat etc. He’s the most electorally successfully OPC leader since Davis, but his administrative legacy is probably as shallow as premiers that have been in office less than 5x as long as he has etc.
ForeignExpression on
It’s a lot worse that wasted a mandate, we are in this mess precisely because of Doug Ford’s decisions over 8 years to prioritize nicky-nacky distraction policies centered on booze and cars and entirely forgetting human beings and the wellbeing of the people while making back room deals and changing the laws constantly in his favour and stamping out democracy and trampling our rights and misspeanding our money and running huge deficits and screwing everybody over and stealing tax payers money and getting fatter and fatter.
calimehtar on
He did well for a few reasons: he’s a great communicator, and his faults for the first two terms fell into a political blind spot: he didn’t make visible, painful cuts to spending and so got a pass from the political center, and due to being a conservative avoided being held to account for deficits by the Sun.
There are plenty of things he *should* have done with his mandate but he ran mostly on his personality and without a platform to speak of, so I guess we got what we deserved.
It was clear from the beginning for people from Toronto who knew Ford that he was corrupt and in this also seems to have shielded him from criticism: Yeah he’s corrupt, and?
Full disclosure: I’ve never voted for him but honestly, having lived during the Harris era, I expected worse and was pleasantly surprised.
CrowdScene on
His mandate to do what? I don’t even recall the PCPO releasing a comprehensive platform in any of his elections, instead offering meme worthy sound bytes that are likely to trend on social media (how’s that 401 tunnel coming along, Doug?) without saying anything about long term goals, so what do voters think they were voting for Ford to do?
PineBNorth85 on
He’s wasted his entire tenure. Not one thing has improved since 2018. Just been managed decline, poorly managed decline at that.
easyjimi1974 on
I would respectfully disagree. The issue isn’t whether the mandate was wasted – the real issue is what was a Ford administration really capable of doing even with a strong mandate? And if you have seen these guys up close, which by virtue of my work I have, you would know that therein lies the problem.
trombasteve on
I think Doug Ford is, at least in a career sense, one of the most spectacular examples of success entirely through luck that I’ve ever seen.
To get to his current position (multi-term premier) he needed all these things that were completely out of his hands to fall into his lap.
1. Be born into a multi-millionaire family which was also politically well-connected. Without this, he’d probably be a janitor. The guy didn’t even finish high school on the first try.
2. Have the astronomically improbable good luck of his brother’s rise to political fame. Prior to that, no one knew who he was, and while Rob was still still in the picture, Doug was clearly the angrier and less likeable side kick. After Rob’s passing, Doug inherited the Ford Nation that his brother had built, but that I don’t think Doug himself would ever have been able to create on his own.
3. He ran against Wynne at a moment when the Liberal party was in a historic collapse, and he was pretty much guaranteed to win by a landslide. If he’d, say, run against Wynne the first time she ran, he would have gotten steamrolled. Same thing with McGuinty.
4. After a first term that was marred by a series of ugly scandals and missteps (remember him getting booed at the Raptor’s championship rally, then canceling the Canada Day party to avoid having it happen again?), COVID came along. He got credit for the things where he just did what the experts said, and largely escaped lasting blame for all the other times where he tried to take the lead, and inevitably royally screwed everything up based on the fact that no one political figure really knew what to do either. When the next election came along, despite his many serious failings, the public was tired of uncertainty and disruption and enough people just wanted stability to keep him in power.
5. He was basically able to play the same “we’re under threat – don’t rock the boat” card that worked for him with COVID again in calling an early election to “deal with Trump” (even though that wasn’t at all his job).
If, at any point, he had been forced to make a case for himself based purely on his own merit, and hadn’t lucked into an advantageous situation that was easy to exploit, I don’t think he’d have had much chance. He needed generational wealth, the chance to pass his poor performance as the leader of his family business off as private expertise, the unlikely popularity of his brother happening in the first place, then passing to him, the total annihilation of the Liberal Party of Ontario, COVID, and Trump all going his way.
Without that, he’s a high school dropout who isn’t particularly well spoken, likeable, or otherwise notable. I’ll give him, or his handlers, credit for having a reasonably good read on what things the people who like him care about and what they don’t, but without all the advantages he was handed, his career would be just as unspectacular as his merits.
No-Section-1092 on
Here’s a little story to sum up my biggest frustration with Doug Ford.
As everybody knows, by far the biggest crisis in Ontario, for well over a decade, has been housing. And even though I don’t like the man and never voted for him, I saw some silver linings with him on the housing file. Here’s a guy who is clearly pro-development (to the point of probable corruption), talks a big game about cutting red tape, and is obviously willing to use his power to bully municipalities into reform whether they want it or not. Furthermore, due to his campaigning talents, he could probably bulldoze through some necessary reforms without losing political capital, under the rhetorical cover of sticking it to the city hall elites. In other words, he was the perfect candidate to do some real good work on housing policy.
Then he was given the perfect opportunity. In 2024, the feds offered provinces free money in exchange for some no-brainer, province-wide zoning reform: legalize fourplexes everywhere, allow higher densities around transit and postsecondary schools, and commit to fast-track the federal multiplex catalogue designs. Some of these ideas were already proposed in a 2022 report that his government commissioned. It was a slam dunk win-win that would have costed him nothing.
And this is the problem with Doug Ford. The same people-pleasing instincts that make him a good politician make him a terrible statesman. Because in order to actually solve problems, sometimes you need to actually listen to experts and make hard choices, even if they will upset your own base of selfish rubes.
As a result, Ford has wasted all of his time and political capital on outlandish projects, counterproductive policies, personal vendettas and vice signalling. This is government by PR, making policy decisions solely based on what plays best to the loudest Oakley’s car selfie on your township’s Facebook page.
ptwonline on
One of the big problems with Ford is that at heart he’s a retail-level politician, and that does not seem to have changed much despite his years as Premier. He’s far more suited to be looking at things at a more municipal level than he is at a provincial or heaven forbid a national leadership level.
I don’t agree with him on a lot of policy things but he’s definitely a “get something done” kind of guy. But the higher up you go the more you need a strategic vision and less just addressing some immediate things in front of you. Most of the time he acts more like he’s Mayor of Toronto than Premier of Ontario.
10 Comments
It is disappointing. I’m not a Ford fan but voted Conservative for the first time in utter disgust of the Liberals (as an aside, they unfortunately did not waste their mandate, they just did all the wrong things but that’s another discussion..).
I wonder if part of the problem is that Ford/his government never looked longer out than the next election and “politics of distraction” became their go-to approach. Now, three elections in, looking back, there’s really nothing to show for it except a few good scandals involving his developers friends. If you think about it, that’s what is going to stand out.
I feel like Ford missed his calling as either a campaign organizer or a diplomat. Guy definitely knows how to campaign, make deals, seize political initiative and keep his base energized (even distracting them from his government’s multiple controversies/blunders and has also been able to rebound from various polling slumps etc.) but as an administer he constantly prioritizes personal self-interest over the long term wellbeing of his province. (or arguably even his party after his departure)
He’s a bit of paradox to me because I genuinely don’t think he’s a good premier, but I simultaneously admire his political gamesmanship and ability to stay afloat etc. He’s the most electorally successfully OPC leader since Davis, but his administrative legacy is probably as shallow as premiers that have been in office less than 5x as long as he has etc.
It’s a lot worse that wasted a mandate, we are in this mess precisely because of Doug Ford’s decisions over 8 years to prioritize nicky-nacky distraction policies centered on booze and cars and entirely forgetting human beings and the wellbeing of the people while making back room deals and changing the laws constantly in his favour and stamping out democracy and trampling our rights and misspeanding our money and running huge deficits and screwing everybody over and stealing tax payers money and getting fatter and fatter.
He did well for a few reasons: he’s a great communicator, and his faults for the first two terms fell into a political blind spot: he didn’t make visible, painful cuts to spending and so got a pass from the political center, and due to being a conservative avoided being held to account for deficits by the Sun.
There are plenty of things he *should* have done with his mandate but he ran mostly on his personality and without a platform to speak of, so I guess we got what we deserved.
It was clear from the beginning for people from Toronto who knew Ford that he was corrupt and in this also seems to have shielded him from criticism: Yeah he’s corrupt, and?
Full disclosure: I’ve never voted for him but honestly, having lived during the Harris era, I expected worse and was pleasantly surprised.
His mandate to do what? I don’t even recall the PCPO releasing a comprehensive platform in any of his elections, instead offering meme worthy sound bytes that are likely to trend on social media (how’s that 401 tunnel coming along, Doug?) without saying anything about long term goals, so what do voters think they were voting for Ford to do?
He’s wasted his entire tenure. Not one thing has improved since 2018. Just been managed decline, poorly managed decline at that.
I would respectfully disagree. The issue isn’t whether the mandate was wasted – the real issue is what was a Ford administration really capable of doing even with a strong mandate? And if you have seen these guys up close, which by virtue of my work I have, you would know that therein lies the problem.
I think Doug Ford is, at least in a career sense, one of the most spectacular examples of success entirely through luck that I’ve ever seen.
To get to his current position (multi-term premier) he needed all these things that were completely out of his hands to fall into his lap.
1. Be born into a multi-millionaire family which was also politically well-connected. Without this, he’d probably be a janitor. The guy didn’t even finish high school on the first try.
2. Have the astronomically improbable good luck of his brother’s rise to political fame. Prior to that, no one knew who he was, and while Rob was still still in the picture, Doug was clearly the angrier and less likeable side kick. After Rob’s passing, Doug inherited the Ford Nation that his brother had built, but that I don’t think Doug himself would ever have been able to create on his own.
3. He ran against Wynne at a moment when the Liberal party was in a historic collapse, and he was pretty much guaranteed to win by a landslide. If he’d, say, run against Wynne the first time she ran, he would have gotten steamrolled. Same thing with McGuinty.
4. After a first term that was marred by a series of ugly scandals and missteps (remember him getting booed at the Raptor’s championship rally, then canceling the Canada Day party to avoid having it happen again?), COVID came along. He got credit for the things where he just did what the experts said, and largely escaped lasting blame for all the other times where he tried to take the lead, and inevitably royally screwed everything up based on the fact that no one political figure really knew what to do either. When the next election came along, despite his many serious failings, the public was tired of uncertainty and disruption and enough people just wanted stability to keep him in power.
5. He was basically able to play the same “we’re under threat – don’t rock the boat” card that worked for him with COVID again in calling an early election to “deal with Trump” (even though that wasn’t at all his job).
If, at any point, he had been forced to make a case for himself based purely on his own merit, and hadn’t lucked into an advantageous situation that was easy to exploit, I don’t think he’d have had much chance. He needed generational wealth, the chance to pass his poor performance as the leader of his family business off as private expertise, the unlikely popularity of his brother happening in the first place, then passing to him, the total annihilation of the Liberal Party of Ontario, COVID, and Trump all going his way.
Without that, he’s a high school dropout who isn’t particularly well spoken, likeable, or otherwise notable. I’ll give him, or his handlers, credit for having a reasonably good read on what things the people who like him care about and what they don’t, but without all the advantages he was handed, his career would be just as unspectacular as his merits.
Here’s a little story to sum up my biggest frustration with Doug Ford.
As everybody knows, by far the biggest crisis in Ontario, for well over a decade, has been housing. And even though I don’t like the man and never voted for him, I saw some silver linings with him on the housing file. Here’s a guy who is clearly pro-development (to the point of probable corruption), talks a big game about cutting red tape, and is obviously willing to use his power to bully municipalities into reform whether they want it or not. Furthermore, due to his campaigning talents, he could probably bulldoze through some necessary reforms without losing political capital, under the rhetorical cover of sticking it to the city hall elites. In other words, he was the perfect candidate to do some real good work on housing policy.
Then he was given the perfect opportunity. In 2024, the feds offered provinces free money in exchange for some no-brainer, province-wide zoning reform: legalize fourplexes everywhere, allow higher densities around transit and postsecondary schools, and commit to fast-track the federal multiplex catalogue designs. Some of these ideas were already proposed in a 2022 report that his government commissioned. It was a slam dunk win-win that would have costed him nothing.
So what did Ford do? [He refused the money](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ford-fourplexes-infrastructure-funding-1.7162251), siding with suburban NIMBYs instead.
And this is the problem with Doug Ford. The same people-pleasing instincts that make him a good politician make him a terrible statesman. Because in order to actually solve problems, sometimes you need to actually listen to experts and make hard choices, even if they will upset your own base of selfish rubes.
As a result, Ford has wasted all of his time and political capital on outlandish projects, counterproductive policies, personal vendettas and vice signalling. This is government by PR, making policy decisions solely based on what plays best to the loudest Oakley’s car selfie on your township’s Facebook page.
One of the big problems with Ford is that at heart he’s a retail-level politician, and that does not seem to have changed much despite his years as Premier. He’s far more suited to be looking at things at a more municipal level than he is at a provincial or heaven forbid a national leadership level.
I don’t agree with him on a lot of policy things but he’s definitely a “get something done” kind of guy. But the higher up you go the more you need a strategic vision and less just addressing some immediate things in front of you. Most of the time he acts more like he’s Mayor of Toronto than Premier of Ontario.