Ontario Premier Doug Ford listens as Ontario’s minister of housing Steve Clark speaks during a news conference in Mississauga, on Aug. 11.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
No one should be even a little bit surprised that a government led by Doug Ford played fast and loose when it removed protected land from Ontario’s Greenbelt. His behaviour in this case is perfectly on brand.
From the moment that he jumped into politics in 2010, taking a place on Toronto city council as right-hand man to his brother the mayor, it was clear that this was not a guy who played by the rules.
The Ford brothers vowed to change the culture at city hall. No more perks for coddled councillors. No more cozy inside deals. No more waste and overspending. They would “stop the gravy train.”
Yet they soon showed they had little time for the safeguards designed to prevent the kind of misconduct they deplored. Well before the crack scandal sidelined Rob Ford, he was caught up in various court cases and investigations into dubious conduct of his own.
He used mayor’s office staffers to help coach his football team, asked lobbyists to contribute to his personal football charity and called in leading public servants to ask them to fix the road outside his family’s business. Doug Ford, meanwhile, helped two clients of the Ford family label business in their efforts to lobby city officials. The city’s integrity commissioner said that was an “improper use of influence” and violated council’s code of conduct. Mr. Ford lashed back, calling the commissioner a “toothless tiger” with “zero authority.”
Much of the same pattern emerged when he became premier in 2018. He cut the size of Toronto’s council in half in the middle of an election campaign and complained when a judge dared to stand in his way. “He’s the judge, I’m the Premier,” he said, as if that gave him the right to ignore anything the courts might say. He has such contempt for judicial oversight that he has used or threatened to use the Constitution’s notorious notwithstanding clause three times since taking office.
He could not imagine why everyone was so upset when a personal friend was named to head the Ontario Provincial Police, an agency that might be called on to investigate his own government. Nor could he see any problem with having developers come to a $150-a-head stag and doe at his family home to raise money for his daughter’s wedding.
The Greenbelt mess is a prime illustration of his disdain for rules and process. Mr. Ford said explicitly during that last election campaign that he would not, under any circumstances, remove land from the Greenbelt, the two-million-acre buffer around the Greater Toronto and Hamilton region. “The people have spoken – we won’t touch the Greenbelt,” he insisted.
He changed tack after winning a second term in office, arguing that the housing crisis made it vital to free up land for development – a staggering flip-flop for someone whose favourite slogan is “promises made, promises kept.”
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Even more troubling than the change of course was the way he went about it. As Auditor-General Bonnie Lysyk explains in her damning report on the issue, Mr. Ford’s government rushed the decision about which lands to take out of the Greenbelt, short-circuiting all the usual checks meant to ensure the transfer was on the up and up. Worse, it was guided by the lobbying of well-off developers who suggested which lands should be transferred – and stood to gain a large fortune in the bargain. As she put it, “The process was biased in favour of certain developers and landowners who had timely access to the housing minister’s chief of staff.”
Mr. Ford has tried to defuse the resulting uproar by saying that, yes, sure, there were a few problems with the process and, ya, okay, he will accept most of Ms. Lysyk’s recommendations about how to make things work better in future. But he insists he was right to do what he did. Ontarians need housing and he is going to make sure they get it. The ends justify the means.
To his way of thinking, he has a direct mandate from the people and he won’t let petty objections from pointy-headed bureaucrats or unelected judges stand in his way. It is the creed of the populist and it is not hard to see where it can lead.
As a good conservative like Mr. Ford should know, we live in a system of limited, constitutional government. Under that system, even the most popular leader must operate within certain guardrails. That is why we have auditors, lobbyist registrars, integrity commissioners and judges.
They exist to make sure that leaders don’t abuse their power, violating rights, breaking laws and squandering public money. As Ms. Lysyk put it: “To maintain public trust and confidence, government and its ministries need to show that they are transparent in decision-making, and that they act fairly in the interests of all Ontarians. Not only do the people of Ontario care about what is done, they equally care about how things are done.”
Mr. Ford, quite clearly, does not. It is his greatest flaw and always has been.