I saw a lot of progressively minded people online after last Thursday’s election results saying that we have to work with Doug Ford and Progressive Conservatives to achieve our community needs be they transit, social housing, or other.
There’s just one problem with that though: I have absolutely no idea where Ford stands on a myriad of issues.
I know he wants to fire the “$6 Million Man”, AKA: the CEO of Hydro One, but I’m not sure Ford even knows his real name. (It’s Mayo Schmidt.) I know he wants to cut gas prices, which seems short sighted for a lot of different reasons, and is going to immediately drain provincial coffers of over $1 billion in revenue.
I know he thinks he’s going to reduce the budget by finding “efficiencies” and has claimed repeatedly over the last four years to have saved the City of Toronto $1.1 billion by doing the same, except that this notion is widely debunked.
Speaking of his council record, Ford’s most well-known contributions were a waterfront revitalization plan featuring every bad idea Springfield had in “Marge Vs the Monorail”, and backing his brother’s “Subways, Subways, Subways” initiative.
That last plan, if you’ll recall, saw the late Mayor Rob Ford cancel a fully costed and budgeted Scarborough LRT project and instead raised taxes to pay for a four-stop subway that, five years later, has still not begun construction. Ford is also on the record as saying that there are places in Toronto that don’t yet have a subway, so why should a downtown relief line take priority.
Spoken like someone that’s never stood in Bloor station at rush hour.
It’s also worth noting that Ford’s one piece of political action before becoming PC leader was teaming up with a disgruntled restaurateur to flip the bird at passing street cars along King Street in Toronto to protest the pilot program to ban cars along congested sections of the boulevard.
This is all a long winded way of saying that if we want to put something on Ford’s radar, we have be the ones to put it there. And that means that the municipal election has to be the cataclysmic clash of ideas we wanted the provincial election to be.
Say what you want about the People’s Guarantee, but it was a well organized, well thought out plan on the part of the PCs under Patrick Brown.
We know what happened next though. When the dust cleared, Ford was the leader because of points or something. He was able to appeal to social conservatives that wanted to make whether or not a 6-year-old can identify a penis by name an election issue. And then we had to talk about unserious people like Tanya Granic Allen and Andrew Lawton, all the while the PCs entered election day without a costed platform.
But this may not be the demerit it sounds like.
There’s an opportunity here to make clear that people don’t just care about how much the government spends, but about how wisely it spends. Firing Mr. Schmidt is easy, but all it does is put about 50 cents back in everyone’s pocket. It’s hard to change the world on 50 cents. But $6 million might make a dent in something like regional transit. While there was a lot of talk in the campaign about two-way, all-day GO trains, a lot of the hold up there is who owns the tracks, as opposed to a will to make it happen.
In the meantime though, why can’t we get an express GO bus to Toronto? Or Kitchener? Or Hamilton and Niagara Region? Why can’t people in those cities get a bus here?
What concerns me about Ford is that he’s not a nuisance guy. He’s not a details guy. Look to cutting gas prices, which is a populist slam dunk, but those gas taxes fund a lot of transit. And not for nothing, but the higher the gas prices, the more people use transit to save money. Like it or not, cheap gas creates more congestion, and nobody wants that.
Or at least that’s what they say.
So in the months to come, let’s get very specific. We have a new government provincially, but we may need to hold their hand to make sure they understand local needs. I don’t think it’s enough this time to say, “We need regional transit.” We need a plan on how to get it.
The success of *some* politicians in the last few years has been on the basis of the simplicity of their argument; something like “Make America Great Again!” We all want easy answers, but the shadow of easiness is its shortsightedness.
Longterm solutions require planning and consideration, it means thinking about all the possibilities, which means considering multiple options. Doug Ford won on a simple idea: he’s not Kathleen Wynne. Taking the province in a new direction will require a bit of trip planning, but that’s a process we should all have a say in.
We don’t want to spend the next four years as backseat drivers.
