How Doug Ford And the Con Premiers Failed Canada

He was standing in his late mother's garden. He looked terrible, wasted even. He wanted to convince people that after three days in self-isolation he was OK, and in full control of the situation.

But instead he gave the opposite impression. He looked like a man who was losing it, and like so many other Cons doesn't know what he's doing.

First the picture froze, then they lost the audio, then they went to black. For poor dumb Doug, who doesn't know even how to operate a computer, it must have seemed like a nightmare.

And it was, for all of us. Never has incompetence seemed so dangerous.

But as if that wasn't bad enough, then he started to blubber.

Premier Ford chokes back tears as he speaks about the hardships people are enduring through #covid19. Then the screen froze. I have never seen him this emotional before. #onpoli pic.twitter.com/75M23uwo8B

— Cynthia Mulligan (@CityCynthia) April 22, 2021

Unfortunately what made him blubber and say sorry over and over again was the thought that his lockdowns or mockdowns might have hurt his business buddies.

And the thought that his once sky high polls might never recover.

And none of those blubbery apologies, as far as I could determine, were for all those people who have died because he refused to grant them paid sick leave.

So those crocodile tears count for nothing.

And when the time comes, this hog is going down.

But of course it's not just Ford who has failed his people, all the Con premiers have, and none of them will save us.

According to a recent Environics Research poll, when asked who they trust more to make the right decisions in handling the pandemic, Canadians in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Manitoba were most likely to say the federal government. On the flip side, they were also the four places where residents were least likely to prefer their own provincial governments, with only 18 per cent of Albertans and 20 per cent of Ontarians trusting their premiers.

In fact the biggest lesson of this pandemic is that no decent Canadians can ever trust the Cons again.

By constantly trying to balance the needs of the economy against the imperatives of a dangerous virus, and by catering to their political base rather than trying to lead it, premiers like Ford and Kenney have managed to both frustrate and infuriate their populations. And while they may eventually pay a high political price for their incompetence, the people who voted them into power in the first place ought to reflect on their role in this.

First and foremost, we need to stop electing people who don’t believe in government, and who insist on running them like personal fiefdoms when entrusted with their administration. We saw what the rise of know-nothing, pro-business populism did to Great Britain and the United States, and we may have comforted ourselves here in Canada with the belief that we were better than that. We aren’t.

It has been a painful lesson, but it seems that some Cons are finally getting it.

The good news here is that even some conservatives seem to appreciate that their movement’s ongoing flirtation with anti-intellectual populism is leading them down a dangerous road. As former Stephen Harper adviser Sean Speer wrote in a recent piece, the Liberal government’s new budget is “a powerful (and perhaps sobering) sign that progressives are winning the battle of ideas.”

We are winning the battle of ideas, we have the leader we need.

He beat back the ugly Cons and the smelly toxic Trudeau haters...

He showed them that decency matters.

And soon he's going to bury them...