Can Doug Ford still rely on 'Ford Nation' for electoral success？
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Summary
In this episode, I speak with Hamish Pritchard, a political journalist and professor at the University of Toronto, about Doug Ford s reign as Ontario s premier. We talk about the impact of the Ford administration on the culture of the province, and the challenges Ford faces in order to keep his party on the right.
Transcript
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Hamish, it seemed to me that in the beginning part of Doug Ford's premiership, he faced a lot
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of criticism from the media. There were a lot of protests. There was a lot of anger at sort of
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another conservative government, and they were sort of making it out to be this really boogeyman
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that was going to like cut all our services and get rid of all these unions. That didn't happen.
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It seems that that kind of criticism has really gone away, that the sort of centrist sort of base
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of the party and base of the province is actually pretty happy with Ford and the way that he managed
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things. The sort of most, the biggest criticism that I see comes from the political right, people
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who are very unhappy with the lockdowns, people who didn't like the fact that Doug Ford wouldn't
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engage in some of the culture issues. Like he was very quick to denounce the truckers. He didn't
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provide any support or any compassion, any empathy, any understanding of them. We saw this really
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very ideologically left-wing CRT, critical race theory proposal coming from the Department
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of Education, really pushing the sort of worst of the worst of the woke ideology. Do you think
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that Ford faces the risk of sort of losing the base of the Conservative Party and sort of
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not being able to motivate his Conservative base to show up for him?
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Yeah, I mean, I think that's always a concern when you're in government. You have to make
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decisions about compromises. I think his approach to that is going to be to raise the threat of the
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Liberals and the NDP. And he's going to say to these voters, you know, you might not be enthusiastic
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with every choice that I made, but these guys are going to be a whole lot worse. And, you know,
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the point you made about Del Duca talking about mandatory vaccines for all school-aged kids,
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well, anybody who thinks that the vaccine mandates have gone too far, Doug Ford simply has to say,
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I'm not for that. That is too far for me. That's, you know, it's that Del Duca wants to do that.
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And what are people going to do? They're going to, you know, vote for the, they're going to vote for,
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they'll rather see Ford in power than Del Duca. I think it is, and the other interesting thing that's
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happened is that there's a whole bunch of these sort of other small splinter parties on the right.
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You know, there's a bunch of MPPs that have left his caucus for a variety of reasons. Some of them
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related to this, and some of them have started new parties. There's, I believe, the True Blue Party
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that Carrie Halley also started. There's a sort of a provincial version of the PPC, but because
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they've all splintered and there's multiple of these parties, there isn't a single focus
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for that feeling. There's no leader who can get into the debate. You know, if all those MPPs that
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sort of joined together and said, we're all together in one caucus and we're running with one party
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that's going to have 120 candidates on a, on a anti-vaccine mandate platform, they can make the
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case, well, we've got a couple of them, MPPs or three or four MPPs, and therefore we should have
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our leader in the debate. And they could really have been there to, to perhaps siphon off some of
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that support. And I think with the splintered environment, we've got two or three of these
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little parties, plus some independents, there's no singular focus for that, that, that, for that
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sentiment and Ford's the big winner because of that.