Doug Ford is dumbing down Ontario

There’s fierce competition in the unofficial race for Canada’s most dangerous premier, with Alberta’s Danielle Smith deliberately destabilizing her province’s health-care system and Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe literally breaking the law so he can thumb his considerable nose at the carbon tax. But with the most recent demonstration of his own unique brand of politics, Ontario’s Doug Ford just snuck back into the lead.

At an announcement for a new medical school at York University, Ford suggested that he wanted to get rid of all the province’s international post-secondary students. It does not appear to have occurred to Ford that those students currently make up 18 per cent of the student body at Ontario’s colleges and universities or that they’ve helped keep these institutions afloat after Ford’s government cut tuition by 10 per cent in 2019 and kept it frozen there ever since. “I’m not being mean, but I’m taking care of our students, our kids first,” he said. “I want 100 per cent of Ontario students going to these universities.”

This is the sort of narrow-minded parochialism you might expect from Quebec’s government, not Ontario’s. But then, even describing Ford’s remarks as parochial gives them credit they don’t deserve since it presumes he’s at least thought about the issues at play for more than a few seconds. As The Canadian Press reported, “Ford then lamented the fact that some kids and parents have said some Ontario students study abroad and then do not return home after they meet someone.”

That’s right: Ford is willing to risk bankrupting his province’s post-secondary institutions because sometimes people leave Ontario to study and don’t return. And while Ford will walk this back in due course, it’s just the latest demonstration of his monumental intellectual shortcomings that are turning the province he governs into a second-rate echo of its former self.

Nowhere is that more apparent than on the housing front, where Ford’s enthusiasm for building housing quickly evaporated after it became clear he couldn’t use it to enrich developers and other friends and donors. First, he made it clear he wasn’t about to allow municipalities to build fourplexes as a right, in part because he doesn’t even seem to understand what a fourplex is. “You go in the little communities and start putting up four-storey, six-storey, eight-storey buildings right deep into the communities, there's going to be a lot of shouting and screaming. That's a massive mistake.”

An even bigger mistake would be turning down the federal government’s new offer of billions of dollars for housing simply because you don’t want to meet their conditions, but that’s exactly what Ford sounds like he'll do. Ford has tried to defend this indefensible decision on the basis that he won’t tell local governments what to do, but as David Moscrop pointed out in a piece for TVO, his government has done just that in issuing almost 10 times as many MZOs (minister’s zoning orders) since 2019 as the previous Liberal government did during its 15 years in power.

“The government has no problem meddling in municipal planning,” Moscrop wrote. “Its problem is that it hates urban density, preferring single-family homes and the occasional townhouse.” This is the height of self-defeating stupidity when you’re in the midst of a housing crisis, and it’s even dumber when the federal government is offering you billions of dollars to do the things your own housing affordability task force already recommended.

There’s also his latest budget, which should sink any remaining notion that he’s leading a fiscally conservative government. Instead, it will spend more as a percentage of provincial GDP than any other in Ontario’s history, including Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals and Bob Rae’s NDP. And what do Ontarians have to show for it? A failing health-care system, public transit infrastructure that can’t keep pace with economic and population growth and an education system in crisis.

But, hey, at least they had that cheap beer. Speaking of which, Ford’s response to the growing affordability challenges facing people in his province was to write a letter to the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) requesting that it stop charging for paper bags. If he was trying to add insult to people’s financial injuries, he couldn’t have done much better than this.

So why, given this litany of failures, does it seem like Ford gets a free pass on so much of it? Maybe it’s all the folksy baking videos and staged citizen interventions that were designed to create an image of an approachable and down-to-earth politician. Maybe it’s his conspicuous lack of intellectual sophistication and the way in which it makes him seem less threatening than, say, a Jason Kenney. And maybe it’s his willingness to apologize for some of the decisions he makes, whether it’s the aborted Greenbelt grift or unpopular COVID-19 measures.

Even so, his formidable Teflon coating seems to be wearing a bit thin. Ford’s personal approval rating is stuck in the low-30s, while the prospect of a Pierre Poilievre government in Ottawa could help the progressive vote in Ontario coalesce more efficiently around Bonnie Crombie’s Liberals. Ontario’s long-standing habit of electing different parties at the federal and provincial levels could spell the end of Ford’s run as premier come the 2026 provincial election.