Why choosing a party is like choosing a weather website

Jeff Green | Feb 13, 2025

On a Tuesday, the Weather Network may forecast a chance of freezing drizzle on Saturday morning, and Environment Canada may call for a mix of sun and clouds and only a 10% chance of snow.

You could alter your weekend plans to go up to Ottawa on Saturday morning because you think the one or the other is a better service, but the best option is to wait until Thursday and check again. By Friday night the gap between what the two services are calling for will have narrowed, and come Saturday morning, it could be raining, snowing, or neither.

The only certainty is that there will be weather on Saturday and that weather will have an impact on your plans for the day.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is like a fancy weather service when it comes to US tariff policies. He not only claims to know what is coming, he says he, and only he, can do something about it.

He asked Ontarians to decide whether they want him to be sitting across the table from the President of the United States, negotiating a trade deal, or imagine Bonnie Crombie or Marit Stiles, the leaders of the Liberal Party and the NDP, in that same position.

Aside from the not so hidden sexism in the image, Ford is trying to paint in our minds about how politics works, we all know there is no table, and no negotiation going on now, or ever.

The Ontario government can use its information gathering apparatus to try and determine when, and what the United States will be doing with tariffs, which are like a winter storm to the Ontario economy, but it cannot control the weather.

The opposition leaders may have less at their disposal to predict what is going to happen, but the fact is, like the weather coming on Saturday, or any other day, it will not matter which forecaster we have consulted on Tuesday.

Similarly, who we elect on February 27 will have no impact on US trade policy.

Reacting to the storm to come, to extend the analogy, is kind of the same. Ontario, in particular, has invested heavily, for decades, in our trade relationship with the US. It has made us a rich province, but it has made us vulnerable to the storm that is coming now. We are like a municipality that sold all its snow ploughs because we haven't had snow for 20 years. It takes a long time to order and take delivery of new snow ploughs, when a storm is blowing in tomorrow. 

Doug Ford's electoral strategy, which is almost a year old now, has been to get re-elected before the next storm hits, whether that storm is the Federal Conservatives in power, a scandal, when the RCMP investigation into the suspicious greenbelt land deals is completed, or something else.

That's why we have an election in February, that's why we are getting $200 in the mail this month. That's why we can buy beer in our local grocery and convenience stores, and at OnRoute stores along the 401, which is a bit of a strange one.

The last time an Ontario government tried this was in the summer of 1990, and it did not work. Justin Trudeau tried in 2021 and it did not work for him.

So far, it does not appear that Doug Ford will pay a price for his bare-faced opportunism, and the election is two weeks away.

I should just point out two things. In 2022, the provincial government in Quebec sent out $500 cheques in March and Premier Legault was re-elected, with a historic majority, in October.

We are getting $200, and instead of in advance we are getting them at the same time as early voting is starting. It lacks subtlety, and $300.

Second. It will help the City of Ottawa to have the cost of transit uploaded to the province. Both Doug Ford and Bonnie Crombie say they will do it, because the costs are crippling to the City of Ottawa.

Taxpayers in Central Frontenac should be forgiven for not being as worried about the poor City of Ottawa ratepayers who pay $1168  for every $100,000 in assessment, while Central Frontenac ratepayers pay $1387 for every $100,000 in assessment, for a lot less service. 

If Ontario uploaded responsibility for Road 38, the numbers would change. But we have not seen any provincial leader expressing sympathy for our beleaguered council, much less the over-taxed, under-served, ratepayers.