Last week I wrote about Doug Ford’s Development Skills Fund scandal, mostly a brief outline. To quickly recap, Doug Ford’s $2.5-billion “Skills Development Fund” is ostensibly meant to help Ontario residents get and retain jobs by boosting their skills and training. Nobody denies that’s a good goal, not even partisan critics.

Except it’s gradually being revealed how many recipients were Doug Ford’s friends and donors, and whose applications were low enough to be disqualified, but were approved nonetheless by a hand-picked minister citing “minister authorization”, David Piccini. In October, Ontario’s Auditor General found that Ford’s political staff chose recipients in a way that wasn’t “transparent, fair, or accountable” more than half the time, concerning grants worth more than $750-million.

The latest scandal is a doozy: Ford’s family dentist received $2 million from the Skills Development Fund fund.

The relationship here is unusually close. A November 29 CP24 article noted that Ford’s dentist boasts of being the Ford’s dentist on his website. “We want you to feel as comfortable and relaxed as the Ford family has during their visits with us.”

While the wording didn’t mention Doug Ford by name, there are multiple direct connections between Doug and the primary dentist at the practice that received $2 million, Dr. John Maggirias:

• The Conservative party posted a photo of Doug Ford and Dr. John together at an event in 2023
• Dr. John donated just over $20,000 to Doug Ford and his candidates
• CP24 reported that Dr. John posted photos of Rob Ford on his website (Note: it’s Dec 2, I can’t find any photos of Rob on the site)

Actually, to write this post, I clicked the link inside the CP24 article to find the dentist’s website itself, and noticed the sentence directly mentioning the Ford family had been removed, which was confirmed by Jon Woodward from CTV, the reporter who wrote the original article:

Here is how Dr. John’s website looked before media reports connected the dentist to Doug Ford, as per the Wayback Machine (which pulls up how websites used to look):

For himself, Doug Ford denies ever being there! He issued a firm denial. As of last Friday, November 29, the premier’s office didn’t say whether any of the Fords had been there. Doug said that he’d ask his family if they had, but he insisted his dentist is in Scarborough. On the opposite end of town. OK.

We have several direct connections between them, and explicit denials. Maybe they don’t know each other, maybe they do. Who can say?

Well, here is a video from a 2022 fundraiser of Doug Ford together with Dr. John, telling the audience, “I have a 1-800 number…my 1-800 number is, 1-800-CALL-DR-JOHN.”

It’s amazing how openly chummy the two were before $2 million in taxpayer money changed hands from Ford to Dr. John, and how, once this $2 million transfer was reported on, suddenly they don’t know each other.

Ford’s government has already had to refer a forensic audit about one of the companies he gave SDF money to over to the OPP, to see if a criminal investigation is warranted. He’s currently being invetigated criminally by the RCMP over the $8-billion Greenbelt scandal. Red flags abound, an MO has been clearly established, and the opposition smell blood, as they’re still calling for David Piccini to resign.

This is not the first Doug Ford friend, donor, or ally to receive millions from the Skills Development Fund, despite several of them submitting mediocre to poor applications. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence and it feels like this will get worse soon.