Maybe Doug Ford Was a Bad Choice for the Ontario Conservatives After All

So, look. Maybe Doug Ford was a bad choice for leader.

We all understand that the Ontario PCs didn’t have a great pre-game season. It’s never good when you have to call an emergency leadership because your guy was engulfed in an alleged sex crimes scandal right before an election. Most parties probably wouldn’t come back from that at all, honestly.

But outside of the leader’s office, the PC machine was tuned and primed and ready to go. It still had enough momentum to propel somebody—anybody!—into the premier’s office. Kathleen Wynne is comically unpopular and the Liberal government is almost old enough to vote against itself. Ford Nation is a big place and Doug is an extremely powerful asshole. So I understand how it happened. If Donald Trump could win the US election, most Tories assumed that so could any reasonably well-recognized shouting man against a widely loathed woman.

The only thing Ford had to do was not fuck anything up.

It was a tall order. He flirted with the idea of ripping up the Greenbelt for suburban sprawl and is currently embroiled in a couple garden-variety corruption scandals. Even with the aid of literally fake news reporters, Ford could still not escape being cornered by tabloid muckrakers with lowbrow ‘gotcha’ questions like “how does a bill become law,” or “can you explain any of the things you just said?” Worst of all, people realized they could also vote NDP instead of the Liberals.

It turns out Andrea Horwath’s years in relative obscurity paid off in an election where the other party leaders are reviled by 30 to 50 percent of the province. The NDP might have flubbed $1.4 billion in costing their election platform, but that is more than can be said for the Doug Ford Mystery Box. (The Liberals are running on the 2018 Budget but who cares.)

Less than two weeks out from the election, and the NDP look like they have a real chance at winning.

Two weeks is an eternity in a campaign. The very prospect of an NDP win could itself generate a right-wing comeback, because ghost stories about Premier Bob Rae are a canonical part of Ontario popular history. Also, the NDP is perfectly capable of ruining things on their own. Like, what is this Puritanical brain disease Ontario has about alcohol in corner stores?

It is mind-blowing, and the NDP is mulling making it worse. God help us if the people who believe climate change is fake due to The Bible win because their party was the only one allowing beer and smokes in a one stop shop.

It’s way too early to call this as a Tory death spiral. Ford’s base remains solid, concentrated in and around the seat-rich 905, and extremely motivated. Whatever lurid stories about Ford’s greasy brand of politics come out in the last days of the campaign might sink him, but part of the Ford Brothers’ unholy charm is that neither of them ever gave a single fuck. They’ve also got plenty of time to scramble for dirt on their new challengers, though in 2018 the bar for “disqualifying social media content” seems higher than ever. And it’s always possible that the horses pulling Ford 2018—the poisoned media ecosystem, the alienating distance of government, the raging politics of resentment—are too long gone from the barn to ever seal inside again.

Or maybe they’re not, and the NDP will turn all these expectations on their head. Meanwhile, Jagmeet Singh looks out a window and quietly mourns his move to Ottawa.

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.

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