The Star had a very interesting, if very infuriating, longread out yesterday, which charted the ways in which Conservative-affiliated lobbyists impacted on the decisions that Doug Ford made over the course of the pandemic – the laundry list of exemptions that kept growing by the day, the fact that the long-term care industry has insulated itself from any and all accountability and is getting their licenses renewed as if the deaths of thousands of seniors aren’t on their hands, the illogical restrictions for small retail but not box store, right up to the illogical closure of playgrounds.
Almost every major LTC company that operates in Ontario employed at least one and in some cases three or more lobbyists with ties to the PC government during the pandemic. https://t.co/5WzYe2CdUI
— Richard Warnica (@richardwarnica) July 15, 2021
“No one has been fined. No one has been charged. No one has lost their job. No one has lost their license,” one critic told me. “Instead, the government is rewarding them by giving them increased licenses so that they can make more money at what they’re doing.”
— Richard Warnica (@richardwarnica) July 15, 2021
The piece was illuminating not because of the look at lobbying – all of which is legal, above-board, and not the same as we’d understand from an American context of the cartoonish Hollywood portrayals – but rather because of what it shows us about Ford himself. He’s someone out of his depth – his sole experience was a single term as a junior city councillor while he brother was mayor – who was not only struggling to understand his job, but who also has a pathological need to be liked, and to be seen to be doing favours for people he knows. People like these former Conservative staffers and operatives who are now in lobbying firms. It less that these lobbyists are cozy with the provincial Progressive Conservatives – it’s that Ford wants to please them and do them favours because he knows them. That’s why the pandemic in this province turned into such a clusterfuck – because Ford needed to please the people he felt close to.
That allowed me to spend hours (and hours and hours) reading individual entries in a single dataset and then more hours trying to map out what government actions may have correlated with what asks.
— Richard Warnica (@richardwarnica) July 15, 2021
What eventually emerged was a story of the chaotic early days of COVID, some very influential Tory lobbyists and millions of dollars at risk on tests Ontario will almost certainly never see.https://t.co/2b0Ur4Cupl
— Richard Warnica (@richardwarnica) July 15, 2021
https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1415672572574715909