‘Charismatic’ Doug Ford is close to his third majority government

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Eventually, voters get sick of politicians.

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For Ontario Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford, though, “eventually” is taking an unusually long time.

“He has a natural instinct that really serves him. He knows how to speak to people,” said Geneviève Tellier, professor of political science at the University of Ottawa. “He doesn’t have to listen to the comms team, he knows what to do, and it serves him well.”

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He has needed this instinct. Time grinds political popularity hard. Events dull the enthusiasm of even the most ardent supporters, while encouraging even the weakest opponents. Awkward details accumulate. Impatience sets in and change comes in due course.

But sometimes, an event comes along that is so disorienting it creates an exception to the rule that no Ontario premier wins three majorities in a row, not even Bill Davis, who won four elections but just two majorities, a decade apart (the Seventies), or Dalton McGuinty, who won two majorities followed by a minority, followed by obliteration.

For a longer majority streak, you have to look to historical anomalies like Ernest Manning and his Social Credit Party of Alberta, which over seven elections usually took all but a few seats.

For long-serving leaders, then, looming catastrophe can look like opportunity. Ford’s erstwhile federal ally, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, made a similar gamble in 2021, calling a pandemic election amid a major crisis with his opposition unprepared on the back foot.

It returned status quo, and was regarded as a failure to regain majority. If Ford achieves status quo, however, he will have set himself quite apart.

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“It would make Doug Ford one of the most successful politicians in Canadian history, period,” said Tamara Small, professor of political science at the University of Guelph.

His opposition is certainly on the backfoot and in disarray, and has entered the strategic voting phase, with NDP votes bleeding to the Liberals in hopes of averting a split left and another PC majority in Queen’s Park.

“Ford is campaigning against Trump,” said Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, professor and graduate chair in political studies at Queen’s University. “This whole looming trade war with U.S. has been handed to Ford on a platter,” she said, and the fact that the actual tariff threat has been kicked just beyond the election “is such a gift to him.”

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Doug Ford is the son of the late former MPP Doug Ford Sr., who made the family fortune in grocery labels, and the older brother of the late former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. Doug Ford and his wife Karla have four grown daughters, Krista, Kara, Kayla and Kyla.

Goodyear-Grant contrasts Ford’s conservatism with American Trumpist conservatism as very different movements. Ford’s is more like old-fashioned neoliberalism, promoted by a dynast who presents to great popular effect as a roughneck.

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“To me it’s like George W. Bush. Like, why do you have a Texas accent? You’re from New England,” she said.

“What it means to be on the right in Ontario is a much smaller narrower thing (than in the West) and I think Doug Ford is excellent at finding that balance,” Small said. “He wants a relatively smaller government but he doesn’t want a small government.”

What this means in this crisis election, Small said, is that Ford is “playing out Ontario politics,” re-establishing the Progressive Conservatives as Ontario’s “natural governing party.”

It is getting harder for politicians to get people to trust them. Voters are suspicious, often for good reasons. So one of Ford’s strengths is “the capacity to reach out to people in a very open, honest way and invite them to trust him,” said Cristine de Clercy, an expert in the study of political leadership and the inaugural Jarislowsky Chair in Trust and Political Leadership at Trent University.

She sees Ford as being in a race to the finish line to lock in his present popularity, to distract opponents and voters with “shiny things in the window” and “implausible” ideas like digging a tunnel under Toronto’s main highway, which dominate the headline cycle and get Ford one day closer to victory.

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“However they do it, it doesn’t need to be pretty,” de Clercy said. “Unhappy teachers, lack of doctors, universities in crisis, the actual tough problems aren’t really the focus of the Ford campaign.”

Ford’s strategy, then, has been to sometimes say provocative things that sound outrageous to progressive ears, but which arguably put him on the side of popular opinion against an established legal and constitutional order.

Like “ol’ Sparky” for instance, which is what he called the electric chair he wants to bring back to deliver capital punishment, or his public musings about how he’d like to put Paul Bernardo in general population for a brief spell of murderous violence, which in fact is not uncommon in Ontario jails.

But that’s easy stuff. That’s grabbing a day’s headlines for free. Ford doesn’t control either parole board decisions or criminal code changes. He can fantasize righteous vengeance against murderers with no down side. On things that he actually does control, his approach has been more measured.

“I don’t see him as a social conservative,” said Goodyear-Grant. He added parental consent to sex ed but the curriculum was more or less the same, she said. “He hasn’t gone down the gender ideology rabbit hole.”

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He stepped into it briefly, with a speech that provocatively suggested teachers and school boards would “indoctrinate” children. But it came with political cover from other premiers pushing the same issue, he did not seem to do much about it, and the speech was read by many as an effort to change the channel from the escalating scandal about protected land being bought up for development.

So if progressive voters have a dastardly impression of him — and they do — it tends to be more for old-fashioned crony capitalist conservatism than for reactionary attitudes in the modern culture war.

Early in his premiership, for example, Ford gave loyalists and friends cushy jobs representing Ontario’s business in Chicago, New York, and London, and even running the Ontario Provincial Police, then rescinded them all as it grew into a scandal.

The Greenbelt scandal fits firmly in that tradition, with Ford scrapping the plan as a “mistake.”

“Walkback has been one of the themes of Doug Ford’s time as premier of Ontario,” Goodyear-Grant said, citing COVID restrictions as another example

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The curious thing, she said, is no other politician would have been given this kind of leeway to make mistakes and still take a third majority.

But Ford has a capacity to roll with his own mistakes before they cause him too much reputational damage.

“In fact sometimes it might play into this image of relatability. ‘I made mistakes.’ It grounds them,” said Goodyear-Grant. “He’s not unapologetic, but he’s bold. ‘Yeah that didn’t work, I’m here now to change course.’ Okay.”

There is a “begrudging respect” among people disinclined to vote for him, Small said. “People really dislike politicians that don’t feel genuine. I think Trudeau suffers from this.”

It’s not just what Goodyear-Grant described as a “slipperiness” that makes scandal slide off his back when it would stick to lesser politicians. It’s also that sometimes he impresses even those who vote against him. He gets more popular in a crisis.

Brian Mulroney had this, and Jean Chrétien, Small said. And sometimes an issue will come along, such as COVID and now Trump, where “there’s lots of people who are like ‘Wow, man’s talking sense.’”

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“He’s kind of an old fashioned charismatic politician,” Small said. And this election “does have the feel of an emergency.”

Ford is running against Trump, and polls suggest he will win his prize of a majority. He “has made a very calculated decision to go to the polls early because it will benefit him strategically,” Small said. “It is as normal now as it is ever going to be in the next few years.”

Ford called the election to wrap himself in the flag, to crown himself with the besloganned ball cap of Captain Canada, to run against a chaos politician of the populist right, a foreign existential threat. Goodyear-Grant said the “Canada Is Not For Sale” cap was a good fit. “The Greenbelt might be, and the Science Centre,” she joked. But not Canada, and not Ontario.

This ballot question is not what the other parties expected or planned for. It’s evidently not what Ford himself expected either, as evidenced by video of his off the cuff comment about being pleased Trump won the presidency, but “then the guy pulled out the knife and f–king yanked it into us.”

It is, however, a way for yesterday’s leader to suddenly seem like the man of the moment, and maybe break a parliamentary record in the process.

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