Doug Ford enters his Nero phase
Are the wheels finally coming off for Ontario's decadent PC regime?
Since he entered provincial politics in 2018, Ontario premier Doug Ford has consistently maintained a level of discipline that always eluded his late brother Rob. For what it’s worth, I mean this as an observation rather than a compliment and there are plenty of caveats to be issued — in part because the bar there isn’t particularly high. Ford has often been a wildly impulsive politician, prone to teasing the most hair-brained schemes imaginable in public and strong-arming his way through perceived obstacles without a second thought. Yet, under his leadership, the Progressive Conservatives have managed to stay in power for eight years in spite of themselves.
It’s somewhat perplexing in light of everything that’s transpired, from the many instances of breathtaking dishonesty and rank corruption like the Greenbelt scandal (which saw Ford’s government effectively conspire with a small group of handpicked developers to inflate the value of protected public land it planned to sell off) and contemptible negligence (thousands of deaths in for-profit long term care homes during the pandemic) to the many far more ordinary things going badly in Canada’s largest province (the cost of living remains completely out of control, Ontario is short tens of thousands of nurses, and the list goes on).
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