Doug Ford’s policy reversal habit is his best or worst virtue, depending on who you ask

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Ontario Premier Doug Ford may be Canada’s political leader in mulligans.

Mr. Ford’s government has taken many long, aggressive shots off the tee: Opening up the province’s protected Greenbelt for development, forcing municipalities to expand onto farmland, or vowing to rip up the Region of Peel, west of Toronto.

But each time, the Premier has shanked the ball into the bushes only to ask to hit another, withdrawing these policies after public outcries or damning reports from government watchdogs.

Mr. Ford presents this willingness to ask for second chances as a virtue, saying he knows how to listen and admit his mistakes. Critics say it reveals a Sunday-duffer government that swings without pausing to consider which club to use, or where the fairway is. But it’s far from clear whether that habit will matter to Ontario voters.

Nelson Wiseman, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Toronto, said Mr. Ford’s “authentic” public persona is so unlike that of other politicians his constant reversals might not make a difference when the province returns to the polls in 2026.

“I don’t think it hurts him, I think it helps him,” Dr. Wiseman said in an interview. “A lot of people say, ‘Hey, I don’t normally hear politicians saying we’re reversing because we listened’.”

This pattern of doubling back was already well-known when Mr. Ford faced voters in June, 2022, and he handily won a second term, Dr. Wiseman points out. While recent polls rank Mr. Ford among the country’s least popular premiers, Dr. Wiseman said his Progressive Conservatives would still be re-elected today, with support especially from rural Ontario.

However, the rushing out of so many high-profile policies, only to reverse them when they turn out to be rash or ill-conceived, suggests the government has undermined the normal due-diligence process for plans sent before cabinet, says former senior Ontario civil servant Michael Mendelson, who served as deputy minister of cabinet office under NDP premier Bob Rae in the 1990s.

Nonpartisan ministry experts, as well as officials in the cabinet office, are supposed to thoroughly scrutinize government proposals and ensure ministers have all relevant information they need to make a decision at the cabinet table.

But among the findings in her report last summer on the opening of parts of the protected Greenbelt to housing development, then-auditor-general Bonnie Lysyk said cabinet wasn’t told that 14 of the 15 properties selected were put forward by a single political staffer and that the civil service was not able to do a proper evaluation of the plans. (A government memo after the Greenbelt report came out last fall warned that proposals submitted to cabinet or its committees must “provide accurate and complete information.”)

“There’s going to be mistakes,” said Mr. Mendelson, who is now chair of the board of the Environics Institute for Survey Research and a fellow at the Maytree Foundation, a social policy think tank. “But you want to minimize your mistakes. And the way to minimize them is to empower a potent and rigorous due-diligence process. It’s not that different than what you would do in a well-run private sector company.”

Some mistakes, he warns, might not be so easily reversed. Plus, Mr. Ford’s tendency to retreat is already emboldening opponents of other decisions, such as those fighting the redevelopment of the Ontario Place site on Toronto’s waterfront, who think the government will back down if pressure mounts.

The Official Opposition NDP at Queen’s Park is quick to take credit for forcing the Premier to repeatedly retreat.

New Democratic Party Leader Marit Stiles charges many of the reversed moves were aimed at furthering the private interest of developers or other friends of the government. Speaking to reporters last month, she described Mr. Ford’s standard operating procedure like this: “Make a deal with an insider friend, consult no one, ram through legislation and then backtrack when you get caught.”

In December, Mr. Ford told reporters that he was unlike other politicians who “dig their heels in” even when they have made a wrong decision.

“We don’t do that. We run it like a business. If you have a business and you don’t think you’re going down the right avenue, you listen to the people, you listen to the stakeholders, and that’s what we’re doing,” he said.

Asked why his government doesn’t think more about the impact of its policies before passing them, Mr. Ford replied: “Isn’t that a good thing, that we’re open minded? We listen to people.”

Here’s a list of some of Mr. Ford’s most prominent reversals:

The Greenbelt:

Before apologizing and pulling back the entire plan in September, Mr. Ford repeatedly said his government’s removal of 3,000 hectares from the province’s protected 800,000-hectare Greenbelt area was needed to build thousands of homes and address the housing crisis.

The auditor-general concluded the plan favoured a small group of connected developers, who stood to reap as much as $8.3-billion from boosted land values. The RCMP has launched a criminal investigation.

And his flipflopping on the Greenbelt did not start there. The plan was itself a violation of repeated promises made not to touch the protected zone, which arcs around the Greater Toronto Area – promises made after the backlash from a video the Liberals released during the 2018 election campaign that showed Mr. Ford pledging to hand “a big chunk” of the Greenbelt to developers.

Even so, his government had also introduced legislation in 2019 that could have allowed municipalities to ignore Greenbelt restrictions – but then scrapped it.

Expanding urban boundaries:

As it was redrawing the protected Greenbelt, provincial political staff were also micromanaging what are known as the official plans of nearly a dozen municipalities, which lay out where growth can occur.

Among the changes, the government required Hamilton and Halton Region to expand the boundaries of their urban areas into farmland, over the objections of local councils. The rewrites earmarked thousands of hectares for what critics warned would result in sprawling subdivisions. Many of the changes were made at the request of developers.

Shortly after the Greenbelt reversal, newly installed Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Paul Calandra announced the province would introduce legislation that removed its additions to official plans. But he said mayors could request to keep some of the changes, potentially opening the door to a reversal of his reversal.

Regional government:

The government abandoned plans in December to dissolve Peel Region, one of the regional umbrella governments created 50 years ago to manage the suburban growth around Toronto. The change was already enshrined in legislation.

Mr. Calandra said the move would be too costly. He did not explain why the province passed a bill to dissolve Peel Region – legislation named for the late former mayor of the City of Mississauga who long championed the idea, Hazel McCallion – without studying the price of the move first.

An expert panel set up to oversee the divorce is now expected to look for ways to give Peel’s member municipalities, Mississauga, Brampton, and Caledon, more autonomy within the region.

Notwithstanding clause:

Just days after rushing a bill through the legislature using the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause to suspend parts of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and strip an education workers union of its right to strike, Mr. Ford made a complete about-face.

His hasty retreat in the November, 2022, confrontation came after the union, which acts for janitors, education assistants and some other support workers, walked out anyway and labour unions across other sectors vowed to strike in support.

Banning playgrounds:

In April, 2021, at the height of a deadly wave of COVID-19, Mr. Ford’s government announced a ban on playgrounds and a boost for police powers to enforce a stay-at-home order. Both policies were roundly condemned by health experts as ineffective and provoked a wave of public anger.

Within 24 hours, playgrounds were liberated. But some other new restrictions remained in place. A few days later, a tearful Mr. Ford appeared on television, in COVID-19 isolation at his home, to apologize.

Autism:

Mr. Ford vowed when he took office that the parents of autistic children, left on waiting lists or paying out-of-pocket for expensive therapy, would no longer need to protest outside Queen’s Park. But his government’s initial plan to fix the autism program, which consisted of offering subsidies to some parents as low as $5,000 or less, lasted barely a month, after it provoked a massive outcry.

Spending cuts:

In its first budget in 2019, the government included fine print that laid out sweeping and retroactive cuts to spending on public health, paramedics and child care funding, all services cost-shared with municipalities.

After weeks of denying the cuts were cuts and threatening to audit municipalities on their ability to absorb the extra costs, Mr. Ford put the moves on hold. He later announced new smaller cuts to public health budgets but offered “transitional funding” to soften the blow.

With a report from Laura Stone