Bluster puts Ford at risk on housing, health files

Doug Ford dislikes taking questions from MPPs, which is why he rarely gives answers.

Undeterred, NDP Leader Marit Stiles rises every day in question period to do precisely that — question the premier. It’s part of her job description, at the helm of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, to hold Ford’s Progressive Conservative government to account.

Most politicians in power make a pretense of rising to respond. They likely won’t give a straight answer — after all, it’s not called Answer Period — yet they rarely sit it out.

Ford, however, rarely stands up. He’d rather sit than fight — fobbing off barbed questions on one of his unlucky front-bench ministers to defend him or fend for themselves.

One year after winning reelection, the premier has rewritten the unwritten tradition of question period. He feigns disinterest and rarely deigns to answer, handing it off to one of his fast-talking underlings to slow-walk a response.

It doesn’t speak well for our legislature. Or bode well for democracy.

This week, Ford finally stood up. And spoke out.

On the final day of the legislative session, before MPPs headed off on their summer break, the premier broke his de facto vow of silence. Heads snapped as the premier bobbed up and down, alternately glowering and parrying as Stiles lambasted his record on the Greenbelt and climate change, health care and long-term care.

“When will he change course?” the NDP leader asked plaintively, addressing the speaker.

Ford answered the questions on his transgressions with digressions:

“Let’s look at our accomplishments,” Ford began, before giving as good (and bad) as he got.

The premier boasted about Ontario’s “record” unemployment and foreign investment under his stewardship, and his own investments in health care: “There’s no government in the entire country that has invested more.”

Gathering steam, Ford pulled two pretend facts out of thin air, as he often does: “Let’s just go back 15 years ago, when the NDP and Liberals were running this province. They chased 300,000 jobs out of the province.”

(Factual footnotes: The NDP briefly propped up the governing Liberals in a minority legislature from 2011-14, but weren’t “running” the province before, during or after; nobody “chased” 300,000 jobs out of the province — that’s the number of manufacturing jobs lost during a recessionary downturn, but employment soon recovered to record high levels.)

Never mind the hyperbolic rhetoric or false figures. Better that our leaders hector and heckle one another than not talk to each other at all.

But how to explain Ford’s sudden change of heart — or tactics — after being so silent and sullen for so long in the legislature? Is this a belated counterattack and comeback, or merely long-overdue damage control?

Five years after first winning power as a populist premier, Ford isn’t quite so popular these days. An Angus Reid poll this week ranked him near the bottom of the country’s premiers, with an approval rating of 33 per cent — well below his long-serving counterparts in Saskatchewan (57 per cent) and Quebec (48 per cent).

Ford has taken a beating in the media, accused by the opposition of gutting the Greenbelt while harvesting donations from developers. It’s not just their pummeling but his own promises that preoccupy the premier’s office.

Ford has vowed to solve the housing shortage and resolve the health-care challenges facing the province. And the clock is ticking.

Whatever one thinks of the conventional opposition narrative as it gains traction — that the Progressive Conservatives have utterly corrupt motives on the Greenbelt and health care — there is another, less dramatic explanation for the government’s hasty and thus risky agenda: It simply needs to build more houses as soon as possible, and it needs to build out health care as fast as it can.

Ford still believes he has a better story to tell — “getting it done,” as he repeated endlessly in the last election (while keeping his hidden agenda hidden). Now, his lofty rhetoric has been reconfigured into carving out exceptions to the Greenbelt while expanding the existing framework for privately-run (but publicly-funded) clinics for cataract and knee surgery.

That PC agenda — hidden previously, revealed belatedly — turns out to be a tall order.

There are tight deadlines that must be met by developers in order to free up plots of land on the Greenbelt designated for rapid construction. If the builders can’t “get it done,” Ford’s ambitious plans come undone.

There’s no government in the entire country that has invested more.

PREMIER DOUG FORD BEFORE CITING ‘FACTS’

Equally, there are big bets being made on private clinics that must comply with existing medical regulations before they are approved for our publiclyfunded OHIP system. If they don’t qualify for that high standard of care, accessible to all, those pledges will be another blemish on the premier’s record.

Ford’s promises on housing and health-care delivery are not just contentious but ambitious. If he cannot deliver — if he can’t get it done — he will have a lot of political damage to undo.

And many more questions to answer — or leave unanswered — in question period when the legislature returns next fall.