Throughout the course of the pandemic, a particular headline keeps rearing its head about how much people have been giving Ontario premier Doug Ford a passing grade when it comes to the handling of the crisis.  One of the most egregious examples was on Boxing Day, when The Canadian Press put out a story headlined "Ontario's Ford adds empathy to populist image, takes on 'Premier Dad' role during pandemic."  Erm, no.  Ford's empathy has been for business owners and not for the hundreds of people who have died unnecessarily on his watch thanks to his inaction, and "Premier Dad" was Dalton McGuinty's particular moniker because he was famous for his patronizing way of telling Ontarians that he was doing things for their own good.

I will grant that if there is a term that could be applied to Ford, it would be avuncular, and I think "Uncle Doug" is the better moniker, because he's not doing things for Ontarians' own good witness the exponential growth of COVID, and the mounting deaths that were wholly preventable if he had actually bothered to do his job.  He is both the crazy right-wing uncle, who thinks the world of Donald Trump, but in his handling of the pandemic, he would fool people into thinking he was taking action by calling anti-maskers "yahoos," and pleading with people to follow the rules that he rarely could be bothered to follow himself, or which he was quick to undermine at every turn in order to pander to the business community.

Going into the pandemic, Ford had formed a government after a vacant campaign devoid of actual policy or even a platform, focused entirely on stoking populist anger against Kathleen Wynne by way of shitposting homophobic and misogynistic tropes.  Was Wynne's government perfect?  No, but it could charitably be considered mildly incompetent and banal, but moving in a reasonable direction.  Ford then spent the next year laying waste to programs while lying about the true state of the province's finances (assisted by the "It's 1995 and will always be 1995" pundit crowd, who were clutching their pearls at the province's deficit when it was at a time where the government was essentially leveraging free money into higher-return long-term programs).  He screwed over the families of autistic children (and continues to do so by not spending promised funds to help them), and he started a war with the province's teachers for ideological reasons.  And the incompetence?  Look no further than how badly they completely ballsed-up their planned rebrand of the province's license plates.

And then the pandemic hit.  While normally combative with the federal government, Ford toned down his rhetoric, and many a story were printed about how he formed an unlikely friendship with deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland, who was the minister for intergovernmental affairs at the time.  But because he didn't go full-Trump, everyone started to give Ford a pass in spite of his delays for meaningful action and other general ineffectualness, while the nation's media kept the attention on Justin Trudeau and demanding he take action in areas of provincial jurisdiction, and that he should invoke the Emergencies Act in spite of the fact that the provinces were not in favour of doing so an action that would have guaranteed a constitutional crisis on top of the pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis.

And Ford kept delaying action.  He sat on billions of dollars of federal cash and didn't invest in improving testing capacity or contact tracing, he didn't spend funds on making schools safer, he didn't build his promised "iron ring" around long-term care facilities, where thousands have died and in fact, pushed through changes to the province's class-action lawsuit rules so that these homes would be protected from families who wanted to sue them for the negligence that led to those deaths.  He decided that they could live with a little COVID so long as it meant that businesses could open up, and to absolutely nobody's surprise, that little bit of COVID grew exponentially until we once again found ourselves in a situation that necessitated a lockdown.

But did Ford actually do his job there?  Of course not.  Looking at how proper lockdowns worked in places like Australia or even in the Atlantic provinces in this country he disparaged that successful model and implemented a mockdown of half-measures that came in too late to do anything, because he ignored the advice of public health officials and set his thresholds way too high to be useful and then forced said public health officials to mouth his ineffective policies as though they were based on their advice.  And when the numbers kept growing after his first round of mockdowns, he imposed a province-wide mockdown, but while insisting that he "wouldn't hesitate," he hesitated again and didn't start it until Boxing Day.  Incredibly, he both pretended that he was helpless about setting that date as though he didn't set it himself, and signalling to people that it was okay to "cheat" for Christmas gatherings.  Oh, and throughout this, he was blaming the federal government for not fully closing the borders when less than one percent of spread was traced to international travel.

There has been nothing actually empathetic about Ford's actions, or even his performative pleas for people to follow the rules.  When he declares that he's "looking out for the little guy," he means the business owner and the landlord which is why he won't tackle the hundreds of cases that have been traced to workplace spread.  Several Walkerton tragedies are now happening on a daily basis, and none of it is registering on his conscience.  He has abused his powers in the legislature to reward his friends but so long as nobody will actually do the work of holding him to account for his failures, rather than keeping their focus on Justin Trudeau, Ford seems determined to skate past the ongoing mishandling of this crisis.  We shouldn't let him get away with it.

Photo Credit: CBC News