Doug Ford's Long Game

Doug Ford is playing a long game. He has, in the past, openly supported Donald Trump and, as with so many, discovered that the Leopards Eating Faces Party will eventually come for your face too. For him, though, there is opportunity to become a leopard.

Ford has been positioning himself as a kind of Captain Canada in the fight Trump has picked with us over the 10 months of his second reign. Ford has been using his populist style and messaging to fight back against our increasingly dangerous, authoritarian neighbour. His recent ad campaign in the United States was hard-hitting, effective at irritating Trump, and making Canadians feel like we’re fighting back against the endless stupidity.

Even Manitoba NDP premier Wab Kinew came out to support the ad campaign.

None of this changes who Doug Ford is and what he actually represents.

At the same time as he is brandishing his media budget to use Ronald Reagan’s words against Donald Trump, he is continuing to use Republican ideas against his own people. His latest hare-brained scheme, Ontario Bill 60, specifically bans the introduction of bicycle lanes by municipalities:

Prohibition re reduction of lanes

195.3 (1) Except as permitted by the regulations, a municipality shall not, by by-law or otherwise, reduce or permit a reduction in the number of marked lanes available for travel by motor vehicles on a highway or a portion of a highway under the municipality’s jurisdiction and control for any of the following purposes:

1. A bicycle lane.

2. Any other prescribed purpose.

Ford has waged a war on municipal independence since he first took office, famously cutting the Toronto city council in half in the middle of a municipal election. The Supreme Court eventually agreed that he had the legal right to do so in a split 5-4 decision, but an action that is technically legal if interpreted with the right contortions does not make it a legitimate or moral act.

His attempted firesale of the Ontario greenbelt to Conservative-aligned developers and its associated scandal and investigations is something that must not be forgotten when considering Doug Ford’s actions today.

The weird attack on bicycle lanes is in line with his shutting down of Ontario’s cap-and-trade system and his cancellation of green energy projects, all at a cost of billions to the province’s treasury. Like Trump, who this week gave away 1.56 million acres of protected lands in Alaska to the oil and gas industry, Ford is a climate change denier.

Ford is a ruthless populist who idolised Donald Trump’s popularity and style when he came to power during Trump’s first term. He has governed for his friends and supporters while pretending to have an interest in his population, all the while undermining our collective future.

While Ford might have a point in using Ronald Reagan’s words to stick it to Donald Trump, there is more to this story. Trump is not helping Ford as an ideological partner the way Ford had hoped. He is frankly not sufficiently important to Trump to care about. He is a mere provincial leader, barely on Trump’s radar. If Trump sees Canada as a US state, Ford can be no more than a county manager to him. For a man of Ford’s ego, this is hard to handle.

Ford’s provincial Progressive Conservative party has not been closely aligned with Pierre Poilievre’s federal Conservatives. By portraying himself as Captain Canada, Doug Ford is also seeking to undermine the leadership of Mark Carney in a way that cannot easily be publicly challenged.

When extremely popular US General Douglas MacArthur undermined President Harry Truman’s foreign policy agenda in his attempt to expand the Korean war to attack China, Truman was forced to fire him at great political risk to himself. In Canada’s confederated structure, Ford, the MacArthur of the equation, can act with impunity, tying the hands of other premiers, the Prime Minister, and the country as a whole.

It is not the role of any provincial leader to guide Canada’s foreign policy and, were a Liberal premier to be acting the way Doug Ford has been under a Conservative federal government, there would be hell to pay. But, today, we pretend it is normal.

There is a long game involved. In establishing himself with a national profile as ‘Captain Canada’ and undermining the authority of the current Prime Minister and the leadership of the current Conservative leader, it seems likely that Doug Ford wants to be the next Conservative Prime Minister of Canada.

He may talk a good game today, but in that role it is hard to imagine that Doug Ford would not see opportunity in cozying up to a Trump (or, by then, Vance) dictatorship to consolidate his own power around their shared anti-progress and anti-democratic positions.

When the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party comes for Canada, Ford wants to be a leopard.