Is Doug Ford just a progressive in slow motion?
National Post, 17 October 2024
Besides beer and high-cost infrastructure, the premier doesn't seem to stand for much
Premier Doug Ford expected the Thanksgiving weekend to occasion delight from Ontarians now freshly able to buy beer at the corner store. One Ontarian took the occasion to query the premier on a range of what struck him as more serious issues — something of a frontal challenge to Ford, who apparently regards no issue as more serious than beer sales.
Jordan Peterson, in the course of an update in these pages about his travails with the Ontario College of Psychologists, took a thousand-word detour: “I’ve also got something to say to Doug Ford.”=
Peterson confesses his general esteem for Ontario’s premier, but then wants to know: What matters to Ford? Peterson fired off a range of questions at the premier, from indoctrination in education to transgender surgeries for minors to climate change. Behind the particulars though was a more general theme: What does Ford believe?
Six years into his premiership that is not clear — aside from beer sales, which are his public policy passion. Beer is the arrow in his quiver, the wind in his sails, the fire in his belly, the deepest desire of his heart. It’s passing strange for a man who doesn’t drink himself, and downright odd as the super-duper top priority for the premier of Canada’s largest province.
Ford believes in beer. He began with the “buck-a-beer” pledge in his 2018 election campaign, promising to lower the minimum price of beer to $1 from $1.25. This year he agreed to pay up to $225 million to the Beer Store monopoly — a pittance, to be sure, compared with his electric vehicle battery subsidies — to advance by only 18 months beer sales in convenience stores. The Beer Store is owned by an international consortium of billionaire beer behemoths in the United States, Belgium and Japan. Beer sales down the street comes by way of sending millions overseas. It may well be that Ford will not be satisfied until buying beer at the corner store is mandatory.
But besides beer, what does Ford stand for? Peterson asks various questions to which, despite dining with Ford and visiting his home, Peterson does not know the answers.
“Sir: you are definitely better than the alternatives, but you are still acting like a progressive, in slow motion,” writes Peterson. “That is exactly what the Conservatives did in the (United Kingdom), and look at the truly unhappy and dire state of that country now.”
It’s possible that Ford is acting like a progressive because he simply isn’t a conservative. So little evidence is there for Ford’s conservativism that occasionally master backroom operatives are called upon for reassurance. Ken Boessenkool was game to offer an apologia in the spring, arguing that in just the right light, squinting at just the right angle, Ford can appear to be conservative.
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