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.
More convincing is our own clear-eyed Chris Selley. After Ford committed his government to spend, without cost estimates or feasibility studies, what may well be more than a hundred billion dollars on the planet’s largest underground highway — as much as 70 kilometres under Highway 401 — Selley wondered aloud how this could possibly be coming from a conservative premier.
“What is the point of a nominally conservative party if it’s the party of back-of-a-napkin gajillion-dollar megaprojects that are only even theoretically supportable if we have a lot of faith in government … which we don’t, nowadays, and rightly so?”
It’s possible to argue that conservative purity doesn’t matter as much as wise and competent governance. But wisdom and competence are not hallmarks even of the precious beer agenda. Ontarians still do not have the freedom of Albertans or Quebecers in alcohol sales, and the Ontario government is still protecting the Beer Store’s government-granted preferential status. The Ford obsession with beer sales, was, in Selley’s words, “done in the worst way possible.”
It’s all, as the Brits would say, small beer. Troubles are not lacking in Ontario, but vast energy is poured out on trifles. Peterson’s public questioning of Ford’s conservatism echoes what conservatives in Ontario — and across Canada — have been asking for years. What does Ford believe, and what are the foundational principles of his government? Does he intend to govern as a conservative, and simply is not very good at it? Or is he not even trying? Perhaps he is not “acting like a progressive in slow motion” — as Peterson fears — but is actually a progressive in slow motion.
Except on beer, where it is full speed ahead.
National Post