Ontario premier Doug Ford seems to have a new motto. It is “If it is worth doing, it is worth overdoing.” The June 2 election is looming and Ford has good reason to be worried. He has made few friends (other than developers) over the past four years and he likes being called premier. And he can hardly trust the fact that he has no opposition to save him from having his fat ass punted down University Avenue on June 2.
His chances of re-election are so dismal as to get him cancelling the cost of renewing Ontario vehicle licence plates this year. And if you have already paid for that renewal sticker, he will have the province send you a cheque. How he is going to replace that money going into the transportation ministry, we have no idea. And neither does the premier.
But then, he has no idea how much damage he has done to education and health services of Ontario. While he has had to promise millions in increases to support hospitals and school boards, his government has spent little of the money. The disgraceful treatment of nurses alone in the throes of a pandemic is an indication of how cheap and mean he can be. Why anyone in healthcare or teaching would vote for his government in June would be a puzzle.
And yet he will campaign on the money he has saved throughout the pandemic. His act that was passed by his government to have a budget prepared each year by the end of March has once more been swept aside. This year, his only excuse is that he wants voters to hear his pre-election budget closer to election day. It only means that the budget will be a farce. It will neither be believable nor likely to ever be implemented.
The only political possibility for the Ford government on June 2 is that there is no cohesive or organized opposition to his government. The new democrats have the same do-nothing, whiny leader for the past ten years and the liberals have no visible leadership in the legislature. The best that could happen is that the three major parties could each end up with a third of the seats in the legislature. The only benefit to that would be that there would be a liberal-NDP coalition to make sure Doug Ford is out of the premier’s office.
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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry
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