Do good, campaign against evil
'Elbows up' against a Carney-Ford alliance.
Screw it. Weapons-free.
The premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, and his strategy group and frequent campaign managers, Rubicon Strategies, are attempting to interfere in the 2025 federal election.
If you’ve been reading my work since Ontario’s interminable Covid years, you know in what little regard I hold the premier and a few of those closest to him.
His endless abdications on everyday priorities led to 2.5 years on the mandate and restriction yo-yo, leading to thousands of job closures, countless missed diagnoses, and pivotal years lost to young men and women they’ll never get back.
In the particular case of this writer, and in an occurrence far less grave than those who took their own lives, missed early cancer detection, or watched their children retreat into themselves, never to return, I even picked up a heart condition for my troubles. (You can guess how.)
Every step of the way, Ford, piloted by an inner circle of consultants, particularly Kory Teneycke, his former campaign manager and new-found right hand (his former right hand, a good man, would have never abided by the last few years), deferred to the Liberals, to Justin Trudeau, to his “close personal friend” Chrystia Freeland (it’s breaking kayfabe, but he’s also close with Olivia Chow when the cameras aren’t rolling), and even to an unelected ‘Science Table’ of so-called media experts, who got everything wrong about Covid from its origin to the emergency playbook they tossed out to cater to the sensibilities of the Rosedale and Annex types who could truly “Stay Home, Stay Safe,” damn the rest of you.
He tossed candidates critical of 2.5 years of sitting on a province’s growth potential, even as it pinched him desperately while running out of air.
He committed an unforgivable sin, over and over, of lumbering out week after week for a daily demoralizer of a press conference — showing zero vim and vigour, impressing little agency on the public, and offering even less hope.
It was, in short, and for many of you reading here: Ineffable, inexcusable Hell.
By the time it was over, Ontario had — and still has — an economy less productive than lowly Mississippi’s.
Now, it seems, that hell it’s back.
“They’re trying to sabotage the campaign,” I hear from inside the war room.