Alexander Brown: The worst there is, the worst there was, the worst there ever will be
No longer infallible in the polls, Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford solidifies himself as a cautionary tale for those on the right who would place power before (any) principles.
Hope springs when vanguards of Canada’s failed status quo prove they’re not eternal.
After eight years of disappointment—five of which included a boarded-up Sir John A. Macdonald on the front lawn of the legislature—Ontario’s three-term majority ‘Progressive Conservative’ premier has finally been faced with a reckoning of sorts: his purchase of a ‘gravy plane’ and his fight to protect his cellphone records from the public have proven, so far, to be a bridge too far.
Those two wrongs (and the gravy plane is at least semi-defensible given the premier’s travel schedule) are no worse than the last twenty, but they do point to a dynamic that Ford and his inner circle haven’t had to face during Ontario’s near-decade of managed decline: an opposition with a faint pulse, and the end of a stunt-fuelled ‘Protect Ontario’ honeymoon that has produced seemingly few results.
According to some pollsters, Ford is now in a statistical tie with the leaderless Ontario Liberals, who have been aided by the presence of Eric Lombardi, a thoughtful Build Canada and Hub contributor, who has been a vocal critic of Ontario’s backslide into the “sick man of Canada”, and who codes as a Liberal or a moderate Conservative depending on the topic. For Ford—who has deliberately bear-hugged two consecutive Liberal prime ministers, and who has played a key role in the unfortunate (and ongoing) Machiavellian infighting between consultant camps from Queen’s Park and those friendlier to the Office of the Leader of the Opposition (OLO)—the ‘Diet Carney’ act was only going to work for so long. Even in Canada, apathy has its limits, and premiers tend to wear failures on the ground before their prime ministers, and Ontario premiers in general tend to suffer if one’s mimetic desire also holds power in Ontario.
The federal Liberals under Mark Carney may differ from Ford in perceived temperament, but when it comes to saying and doing whatever it takes to win, staffing up a barrier of yes men and a “circular economy” of conflicts meant to insulate the leader from criticism, the two stand alone, without equal.
It should be of little surprise that ‘Carney-lite’ would eventually start to suffer that problem of incumbency before the genuine article, and it’s not as if that tenure was going well to begin with.
Everything in Ontario has gotten materially worse.
The province’s unemployment rate has increased for the fourth straight year. Record-low family housing starts are setting off alarm bells. Ontario’s housing market is expected to get worse for both buyers and sellers for the foreseeable future, as sellers hold as prices dip from artificial highs, and buyers and renters are choked off by a limited supply of anything beyond a glut of dog-crate condos, with limited to no condo starts scheduled for the years ahead.
“The one thing for sure is that it’s going to get worse in Ontario. There is no possibility of better,” Ron Butler, the Ontario-based mortgage broker and popular, pugilistic political commentator, told CTV News Toronto. “Thinking otherwise, it’s entirely based on hopium.”
Almost all of this was exacerbated by the province’s worst-in-the-West participation in a mass immigration moonshot during the Covid years that rapidly transformed Ontario’s towns, led to the rise and fall of a notorious ‘diploma mill’ industry that sought both willing participants and wilful dupes looking for a shortcut to PR, in which Premier Ford and his government participated.
Building the fake schools was bad. Looking the other way as millions of temporary labourers flooded the marketplace, radically transforming formerly diverse but cohesive suburbs, upending the launching-pad prospects, rent costs, and general morale of a generation of working Ontarians, was worse. Keeping up this act in 2026 is downright unforgivable.
Confronted by unruly and entitled temporary residents demanding extensions to their permits last week, Ford knelt before the braying mob, saying, “I wish I could snap my fingers and say okay, you can stay.”