Juno News - Can Doug Ford still rely on 'Ford Nation' for electoral success？

00:00:00.000 Hamish, it seemed to me that in the beginning part of Doug Ford's premiership, he faced a lot

00:00:04.900 of criticism from the media. There were a lot of protests. There was a lot of anger at sort of

00:00:09.440 another conservative government, and they were sort of making it out to be this really boogeyman

00:00:13.360 that was going to like cut all our services and get rid of all these unions. That didn't happen.

00:00:18.720 It seems that that kind of criticism has really gone away, that the sort of centrist sort of base

00:00:26.480 of the party and base of the province is actually pretty happy with Ford and the way that he managed

00:00:31.840 things. The sort of most, the biggest criticism that I see comes from the political right, people

00:00:40.720 who are very unhappy with the lockdowns, people who didn't like the fact that Doug Ford wouldn't

00:00:46.680 engage in some of the culture issues. Like he was very quick to denounce the truckers. He didn't

00:00:51.020 provide any support or any compassion, any empathy, any understanding of them. We saw this really

00:00:56.080 very ideologically left-wing CRT, critical race theory proposal coming from the Department

00:01:03.480 of Education, really pushing the sort of worst of the worst of the woke ideology. Do you think

00:01:10.200 that Ford faces the risk of sort of losing the base of the Conservative Party and sort of

00:01:16.640 not being able to motivate his Conservative base to show up for him?

00:01:21.680 Yeah, I mean, I think that's always a concern when you're in government. You have to make

00:01:24.480 decisions about compromises. I think his approach to that is going to be to raise the threat of the

00:01:29.080 Liberals and the NDP. And he's going to say to these voters, you know, you might not be enthusiastic

00:01:33.180 with every choice that I made, but these guys are going to be a whole lot worse. And, you know,

00:01:37.220 the point you made about Del Duca talking about mandatory vaccines for all school-aged kids,

00:01:42.200 well, anybody who thinks that the vaccine mandates have gone too far, Doug Ford simply has to say,

00:01:46.800 I'm not for that. That is too far for me. That's, you know, it's that Del Duca wants to do that.

00:01:51.480 And what are people going to do? They're going to, you know, vote for the, they're going to vote for,

00:01:55.240 they'll rather see Ford in power than Del Duca. I think it is, and the other interesting thing that's

00:02:00.980 happened is that there's a whole bunch of these sort of other small splinter parties on the right.

00:02:05.860 You know, there's a bunch of MPPs that have left his caucus for a variety of reasons. Some of them

00:02:10.320 related to this, and some of them have started new parties. There's, I believe, the True Blue Party

00:02:15.000 that Carrie Halley also started. There's a sort of a provincial version of the PPC, but because

00:02:21.240 they've all splintered and there's multiple of these parties, there isn't a single focus

00:02:25.220 for that feeling. There's no leader who can get into the debate. You know, if all those MPPs that

00:02:31.460 sort of joined together and said, we're all together in one caucus and we're running with one party

00:02:35.920 that's going to have 120 candidates on a, on a anti-vaccine mandate platform, they can make the

00:02:43.500 case, well, we've got a couple of them, MPPs or three or four MPPs, and therefore we should have

00:02:47.600 our leader in the debate. And they could really have been there to, to perhaps siphon off some of

00:02:51.920 that support. And I think with the splintered environment, we've got two or three of these

00:02:56.340 little parties, plus some independents, there's no singular focus for that, that, that, for that

00:03:01.360 sentiment and Ford's the big winner because of that.

00:03:05.920 Thank you.

Juno News - May 11, 2022