Soft-peddling Doug Ford: Ontario’s Mini-Trump

RE: Guardian article 15 June 2018 by Ashifa Kassam: Rob Ford’s brother voted in as Ontario’s populist leader

Soft-peddling Doug Ford: Ontario’s Mini-Trump

According to Ian Lee; talk radio personality and Carleton University associate professor of business, Doug Ford’s political victory in Ontario is unrelated to right wing populist trends in the U.S. and Europe. However, the new Conservative Premier’s background and public behavior is quite Trumpish, including Ford’s record of publicly belittling gay pride activists and the developmentally-handicapped.

According to a 2014 Toronto Star article on Doug Ford, “Toronto’s leading class warrior is a millionaire businessman who drives a luxury SUV, vacations in Europe, owns properties in Florida… and inherited his company from his politician father.” Hardly a “rags to riches-man of the people” narrative but yet it has traction.

Lee also credits Ford’s victory to the province’s rejection of defeated Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne, “…who had steered the province to the left.” Rather than offer at least a basic justification for that bland claim, both Lee and Kassam surrender clarity to popular assumptions.

Such simplistic analysis; common enough, imagines sharp ideological borders that encourage exclusion rather than compromise. Therefore, Lee’s quoted remarks may well reflect his quantitative perspective rather than the messy complexity of reality.