Doug Ford can’t talk about big progress when he’s fixated on little things

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Has the Doug Ford government absolutely run out of ideas?

The Ontario provincial government is spending a disproportionate amount of time on policy tweaks and micro-adjustments that wouldn’t even make the A level at a city council. Its latest moves are only peripherally connected to the province’s major issues, which are its lagging economy, the housing crisis, and the increasing unaffordability of everyday life.

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Whether it is minor changes to rules for renters, speed cameras, meddling with bicycle lanes or inconsequential changes to bail rules, the Ford government is fiddling at the margins, not going after the big stuff. Nothing is too small for this government to address. It recently announced that it was “investing” $10 million to fix potholes in small municipalities.

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Perhaps that’s why only one-third of Ontarians polled by Leger earlier this month said the province was heading in the right direction. The poll identified housing affordability as Ontarians’ top issue, followed by health care, and trade and the economy. An Abacus Data poll this month shows a significant majority of those polled say Ford has failed to make improvements in any of those areas.

And yet, the Ford government would rather talk about Bill 60, the omnibus legislation passed Monday that was the centrepiece of this fall’s legislative effort. It’s a grab bag of this and that, and a monument to busywork.

The most talked-about element was small changes in rules for renters. The government is tightening timelines for appeals to the Landlord and Tenant Board and making it a bit easier for landlords to deal with tenants who don’t pay their rent. OK, great. Tweak of the day. The only significant part of the plan was a consultation on changing rules that allow tenants to stay in an apartment indefinitely after their lease expires. That was quickly abandoned as too controversial.

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Bill 60 was also the vehicle for getting vehicles moving on streets by preventing the construction of new bike lanes if they take away lanes for cars. Bike lanes drive Doug Ford crazy. Eliminating or limiting them is one of the premier’s personal pet projects, but there are so many more useful things to do.

The most important of the unimportant things the provincial government has done lately is banning speed cameras. Not that it makes the speed camera ban important per se, but everything’s relative.

Again, Ford has been heavily engaged on the issue. He called speed cameras, mostly placed in school safety zones, a “tax grab,” then quickly cancelled them. Evidence suggests that they were reducing speeding, but evidence isn’t always this government’s zone.

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Instead, the Ford government will spend $210 million on alternative ways to slow cars down in school zones, including speed bumps, raised crosswalks and really big signs that drivers just can’t miss. So big, in fact, that the first ones delivered are too large to install on standard sign posts. In Ottawa, the bilingual version of the signs is 12-feet tall including the attached wooden pole.

The good news for the government is that a separate Abacus poll shows 50 per cent of Ontarians prefer traffic calming to speed cameras. Unfortunately, only four per cent mentioned the issue at all when asked what stands out about the Ford government. Photo radar just isn’t on Ontarians’ radar.

But what about the bail change announced this week, the one that will make people pay cash up front to get bail, rather than just promise to pay it later if they don’t follow the conditions attached to the bail? While the proposed change will almost certainly succeed in keeping some people without money in jail until their trials, it doesn’t tackle the real issue of who is offered bail in the first place, which is outside provincial jurisdiction. Fortunately, the federal government is making significant changes to make receiving bail more difficult. On this issue, the Ontario government is a minor player.

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The problem with the Ford government talking about too many inconsequential matters is that it distracts from the more important things the government is doing.

Take health care, for example. The Ford government is attacking the system’s deficiencies on many fronts, adding hospital and long-term care beds, expanding medical schools and expanding family health-care coverage. Despite that, Abacus’s research indicates that only 15 per cent of those polled think the Ford government has improved health care. At least that’s better than the 11 per cent who think they’re improving housing affordability or the overall cost of living.

When a government gets out of sync with voters’ priorities, good things seldom follow.

National Post

randalldenley1@gmail.com

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