ANALYSIS: What’s going on with Doug Ford?

What’s going on with Ontario’s 26th premier these days? He’s picking fights where he doesn’t need to, as he did with the media after last week’s private-jet debacle. Then, this weekend, he had to apologize for hurling a personal insult at a Liberal MPP in the legislature (more on that later). This doesn’t reflect well on him, and he’s a leader who has, in recent years, been shown to have a finger on the pulse of the electorate. What gives?

There’s no doubt Doug Ford has had a roller-coaster of a political career. His time as a councillor at Toronto City Hall (while his brother Rob was mayor) was about as dramatically up-and-down as it gets. When he took over his brother’s mayoral re-election campaign in 2014, after Rob’s death, Ford lost to John Tory and seemed a spent force in politics.

But he resurrected his political career in March 2018, becoming Ontario PC party leader. Three months later, he won the premiership in as wild a comeback story as we’ve seen at the Ontario legislature.

Initially, Ford brought a frat house approach to governing, picking fights with critics, journalists, and special interest groups. The public quickly soured on his government. His polling numbers went into the dumpster.

Ford was well on his way to becoming a one-term premier. When I asked former Tory finance minister Janet Ecker what the premier needed to do to turn things around, she replied, “He has to demonstrate a capacity to learn.”

Wise words.

Then came a global pandemic and, rather than continue his bellicose, populism-on-steroids approach to governing, Ford did the most remarkable volte face. He realized that his “buck-a-beer” style wasn’t going to cut it when people were dying by the thousands. He listened to experts and used the media appropriately to disseminate life-saving messages. Gone were his days of being […] This is an excerpt. Read the full article at TVO.org.