Doug Ford has rarely had a bad word to say about Mark Carney.
The Ontario premier has called the prime minister a “smart, shrewd businessman” and a “very sharp guy.”
He’s said he’s an “honest man” who “just wants the best for his country,” and, after Carney stayed overnight at the Ford cottage last summer, the premier practically gushed about how this fancy Bay Street guy with all of his important degrees never mentioned any of it.
“(He’s) the most humble person you’d ever want to meet,” Ford said.
But the next late-night chat in front of a Muskoka fireplace could be decidedly more awkward after Carney effectively shelved one of Ford’s signature policy ideas, the expansion of Toronto’s island airport.
Federal Minister of Transport Steven MacKinnon put out a statement on Friday night saying that Ottawa would not pursue the planned $5-billion expansion of Billy Bishop Airport “at this stage,” citing significant public opposition that was revealed during a consultation process.
While Ford’s transportation minister, Prabmeet Sarkaria, has since said the province views this as a temporary setback, there is no disputing that Carney has taken an issue on which the premier has expended major political capital — seizing the airport and surrounding lands so that he could push through the expansion over municipal opposition — and made all of that pointless.
What will Ford say about his friend the next time he is asked? And will his response include anywhere near as much praise?
While Carney and Ford might seem like odd allies given the premier’s general disdain for provincial Liberals past and present, the two were co-operative almost as soon as Carney took office. After they met in an Etobicoke diner that seemed hand-picked to appeal to Ford’s everyman persona, the premier said he and Carney shared many of the same political views.
They also had a mutual problem in the trade threats coming from Donald Trump in the United States, and no premier was more eager than Ford to rattle sabres in the direction of Washington, so they both ended up saying a lot of the same things about the importance of investing at home while also finding new markets elsewhere.
The two also had a mutual rival that was more unexpected: Pierre Poilievre and the federal Conservatives. The Cold War between the federal and provincial Conservatives was out in the open by the time that Ford won re-election early last year and Carney did the same a couple of months later, but the enmity between the two blue parties has only continued.
As a series of floor-crossings early this year brought the potential for a Carney majority into focus, Ford cheered it on. As federal Conservatives were accusing the Liberals of seizing power “undemocratically” and disenfranchising Canadian voters, Ford said he welcomed the “certainty” that a majority government would bring, ahead of a series of byelections that ultimately confirmed that majority.
The premier, meanwhile, has rarely missed a chance to trumpet a “Team Canada” approach to dealing with Trump’s trade threats and he went so far as to champion a new oil pipeline from Alberta to Ontario. That project, though nowhere close to happening, bolstered the argument that Canada’s most populous province sees Alberta, with its new separatist streak, as a key member of Confederation.
Against all that, it wouldn’t be surprising if Ford felt a little betrayed by the Billy Bishop decision. Carney met Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s demand for a planned pipeline through British Columbia, and he conceded to B.C. Premier David Eby’s demand that such a pipeline not be routed to the northern coast, but he has now rejected Ford’s airport plan out of hand. The prime minister might have called the expansion proposal “a very interesting vision” in March, but it turned out that he was speaking more like a parent who is trying to avoid telling their child “no.” ( Can you get your ears pierced? Hmm, that’s an interesting idea. We’ll see. )
It’s not like Carney has proven to be a stickler for public consultation, having introduced a bill that would allow the federal government to fast-track certain major projects through the usual environmental review and public feedback stages.
Ford might have thought that he would get a sympathetic hearing from his friend on the airport expansion, given that it fits some of the same criteria of the federal plan to build things faster.
But it turned out that the public feedback that Ottawa solicited on Billy Bishop was just the political cover that they needed to kill it — and to make life easier for the downtown Toronto Liberal MPs whose constituents were most opposed to turning the island airport into a much larger transit hub.
That the airport will no longer be a live issue for the federal byelection that was just called for a downtown Toronto riding is probably just a happy coincidence, too.
Carney can at least tell Ford, the next time that sees him, that on the airport thing, he was just listening to the people. It’s a message with which the premier is quite familiar.
