The provincial election is tomorrow, February 27, so let’s review some reasons why Doug Ford deserves to be voted out. I don’t want to speak in hyperbole, but he has a long list of mistakes and scandals that all deserve attention. This is more of a list or summary than a detailed description, but I encourage you to read up on any of these stories if you’d like to go deeper.

The list is incomplete and in no particular order. Whichever one I’m currently thinking about seems like the worst policy, until I think of another.

1. Greenbelt Scandal: This Ford scandal is the most notorious because it was so flagrantly corrupt and illegal he actually reversed the policy, but here’s the gist. During the 2018 election, he promised not to open up any Greenbelt land to developers to build housing. Secretly, in 2023, friendly developers told his ministers which plots they were buying, so he could secretly undo environmental protections for these plots. The timing is everything: developers paid an ultra-low price for the Greenbelt property because the land wasn’t zoned for development at the time. After Ford’s reversal, the developers’ land soared in value by more than $8-billion.

The RCMP SII unit’s criminal investigation into the Doug Ford government, referred by the OPP, in relation to the Greenbelt scandal is still underway.

2. Soaring Homelessness: Homelessness was dire when Ford took office in 2018, and has only soared since. Estimates put the number of homelessness at 80,000, a 25% rise since 2022.

The growth in homelessness is caused by many different factors, several of Doug Ford caused or worsened. Ford ended rent control for new builds, failed to build even close to enough new housing, underfunded mental health…the list goes on. Ford is even using legal shenanigans to empower police to to in effect criminalize homelessness by giving cops tools to dismantle homeless encampments and jail or fine people for drug use.

3. Therme Spa at Ontario Place: I can’t think of anything obviously less important during a housing and healthcare crisis than building a private luxury spa on A1 public land, but Doug Ford is spending a shocking amount of political capital and public money on letting a private foreign company build exactly this. The mega parking lot on the waterfront alone will cost roughly half a billion dollars. It’s a giveaway.

The government’s procurement process for redeveloping Ontario Place was secret and shady. The government bulldozed 800 mature trees in the dead of night, when nobody was around to witness it, and only the next day, when it was too late to undo the damage, made the unfavourable terms of the 95-year lease public.

A public jewel, Ontario Place, will be greatly reduced. Every person in Ontario will chip in $400 to build this private luxury mega spa.

4. Destroying the Science Centre: We’ve all been to the Ontario Science Centre on school trips or birthdays or something. It’s an iconic building not just for the nostalgia or how it makes science exciting and fun for kids, but it’s also a one-of-a-kind architectural marvel that inspired copies elsewhere.

Doug Ford is shutting it down, claiming the roof is compromised and fixing it is too expensive, even though the roof has years left in its lifetime and a private citizen offered to pay for the roof repairs himself. Ford wants to build a new, much smaller Science Centre by the waterfront…suspicions the Science Centre is only moving there to share the luxury spa’s parking lot and justify its enormity feel warranted—Therme’s estimate for how many people will visit the spa daily are absurdly high, but the lease requires a shockingly high minimum of parking spots, 2,500. If you think gridlock on the Lakeshore is bad now, just wait.

Making this shadier, a Ford-friendly developer owns 60 acres of land adjacent to the original Science Centre. Ford’s pet transit project, The Ontario Line, has a dedicated subway stop for the Science Centre that no longer services the Science Centre, since it’s being demolished, but does conveniently stop right at the door of the developer’s site.

5. Healthcare’s Collapse: This could easily be the #1 scandal, except Doug Ford isn’t the only one responsible for this. Previous Liberal governments began defunding healthcare, if not leaving the door open for privatization. 

However, under his tenure, Ontario spends the least on healthcare per resident of any Canadian province, and the number of ERs that have closed in rural areas is shocking. In a typical example of Ford’s approach to governing, the government provided twice or three times as much money to agency nurses, fueling complaints that he is deliberately funneling public money to friendly private businesses. This is his MO and is far from an isolated example.

A shocking amount of people in Ontario can’t find a family doctor. Meanwhile, private healthcare companies are on the rise.

6. Ludicrous Underground Mega Highway: In what feels like satire but is real, Doug Ford is proposing to build a tunnel underneath highway 401, a subterranean superhighway under what is literally North America’s widest highway.

He has given no costs yet but speculation pegs it in the tens of billions, possibly $100-billion. Estimates say it may be ready in the 2040s, though nobody could say for sure if it’ll ever even happen. Ontario tends to be incredibly slow when it comes to building transit, and go overbudget, and the engineering challenges in this project will be way more severe. Of all Ford’s policies, to me, this feels the most outlandish.

7. Highway 413: Doug Ford’s policies are so unjustifiable and expensive, they’re almost as disqualifying as his scandals. One bedrock principle of urban planning, demonstrated in cities worldwide, is “induced demand,” the phenomenon where when you build new roads, they moderately relieve traffic for a short time, but they also encourage more cars to drive, and soon the gains are wiped out and you have the same level of traffic you initially had. In other words, building more roads never “fixes” traffic.

Squandering billions on new highways in pristine farmland is an obscene waste of money. In my view, to reduce traffic and Co2 emissions requires improved regional and local public transit; mega car-centric infrastructure projects like this only help the auto industry by locking in the usage of private cars long-term. Along the same backward lines, Ford is investing more than $40-million to eliminate public infrastructure to make cycling safe along Toronto’s major thoroughfares, even after the bike lanes were subject to years of intense studies, approval processes, and already exist.

As always, ford donors own enormous swathes of land adjacent to the proposed 413 highway, which will soar in value if the highway gets built. So many of his policies utterly fail in the given reason for building it, yet always seem to accidentally make his donors richer.

8. Housing Crisis: Despite Doug Ford’s cozy relationships with developers, he isn’t building much new housing. Affordable housing projects are at risk of falling apart before they get built. New housing starts are down since last year.

Ford’s favours greenfield developments, ie new housing on previously undeveloped land, typically on the outside of existing suburbs. This is the least affordable way to build housing because the infrastructure needs to start from square one, driving up costs. Plumbing, electrical, roads, things like that.

Ford isn’t the only obstacle to affordable housing. The government stopped building public housing in the 90s, and anytime a proposal for a new development inside existing communities arises, there’s usually pushback from local residents worried that more people will worsen traffic or “change the neighbourhood character.” In short, NIMBYism. However, Ford’s proposed solutions are all doomed to fail by design.

9. Education in Crisis: Public education in Ontario is in a dire state. It’s not exactly new, but it’s worsened under Ford.

According to the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario, Students in public school receive on average $1,500 less than they did in 2018, when Ford’s tenure began, akin to a $3.2 billion cut. The playbook is this: gut public education so your friends can sell the replacement.

Doug Ford has used the notwithstanding clause to try to force striking high school teachers into accepting unfavourable terms for the first and second time in Ontario’s history, in 2021 and 2022, respectively.

10. Booze Deal: Doug Ford has spent a shocking amount of political capital and public money to make booze more accessible to the public at a time when wine and beer were already newly available in grocery stores and could even be delivered to your door. Getting out of the Beer Store contract one year early cost the public $200-million…even if you support the policy, and many people are understandably not in love with the Beer Store’s monopoly, why the urgency and expense?

During the election, Ford pledged to remove the legal minimum the LCBO had to charge for alcohol, saying this was akin to a tax cut. It’s not. But it also won’t happen, just like Ontario never got $1-beers, something Ford campaigned on in 2018. When you consider the rise of alcohol and online gambling and sports gambling in Ontario since Ford took office, the view is extremely dystopian.

Final Thoughts:

I didn’t go into very much detail about any of the above scandals, but I’m confident that if you research them more, the thrusts will hold and they’ll only look worse. The idea he called for an ultra-short election while his maga peer in the US threatens Canada with tariffs to obtain a “strong mandate” is ludicrous; so far, advanced voting is the second lowest ever in Ontario, the election period is extremely short, and he’s been out of the country for much of it. Voter turnout was very low in the last election he won, and he’s counting on a February election to receive the same benefit. He had a majority government and was free to respond to Trump’s threats however he pleased.

There are many other excellent reasons to vote Doug Ford out and I swear, I can’t find a single reason to vote for him, even though his poll numbers are very high. Please vote in tomorrow’s election, February 27, and encourage other people to vote as well.