Social Policy in Ontario

Even if none of his ministers dares stand up to Ford, a sitting judge had no hesitation speaking truth to power last week. More may soon follow.

In the first of Ford’s legal confrontations, he was trounced by Tesla — that emblem of elitist environmentalism. The Tories had tried to make an example of the luxury California carmaker by depriving it of rebates flowing to competitors. But Justice Frederick Myers wasn’t buying it — lambasting the government for acting in an “egregious” and “unlawful” way. He also ordered it to pay $125,000 for Tesla’s legal costs.

Unlawful. Egregious.

We’re not making this up: Ford is making it up as he goes along.

Smart governments focus on wise legislation, not wild litigation. Let us count the legal battles looming over the Tories after two months in office:

• Government lawyers were in court last week defending the premier’s impulsive meddling in the middle of Toronto’s municipal elections. They had to explain why Ford ordered a virtual halving of representation after candidates had begun campaigning and fundraising — an intervention without precedent. A baffled Justice Edward Belobaba asked rhetorically whether the premier had bothered to seek formal legal advice from his attorney general before interfering: “I’ll bet the answer’s no.” Government lawyers wouldn’t say.

• The Canadian Civil Liberties Association sought a court injunction against the government’s arbitrary rollback of the updated sexual education curriculum (reinstating a dated, two-decade-old version). The Tories want all parents consulted (father knows best), ignoring the 4,000 parental representatives from schools surveyed for the 2015 update written by panels of pedagogical experts. Will a judge let a government erase the minority rights of LGBTQ students on the say-so of the loudest online voices?

• Recipients of a minimum income program prematurely cancelled by the Tories have launched a class action lawsuit. More than 4,000 impoverished people enrolled in the pilot program — set up on the recommendation of Hugh Segal, a former Conservative senator (and adviser to ex-premier Bill Davis) — which the Ford campaign explicitly pledged to keep going. Within weeks, the government went back on its word. Promise made, promise broken?

• All these legal costs pale beside the $30 million budgeted by the Tories to fight Ottawa over a federal carbon tax triggered by Ford’s cancellation of Ontario’s cap and trade program (costing the province its exemption). Even Manitoba’s PC government has refused to join Ford’s fight because its legal experts say contesting an undisputed federal taxing power is pointlessly political.

• Rolling back renewable energy laws has exposed Ontario to litigation by companies that collectively spent billions of dollars on carbon allowances under the cap and trade regime. It has also opened the door to lawsuits over cancelled wind turbine contracts.

• How long until the families of overdose victims sue the government for recklessly endangering lives by suspending emergency prevention sites on the flimsy grounds that more evidence is needed? Bad enough that the premier ignores outside evidence on sex education; how can he flout the medical consensus on overdose prevention?

• While Ford keeps talking up buck-a-beer — never mind that virtually no brewers were interested in turning back the clock to an unsustainable price dating from a decade ago — he has conveniently forgotten his campaign promise to provide beer in corner stores. Just as well, as that would expose the province to major legal claims for breaching a 10-year contract negotiated in good faith with major supermarkets and the Beer Store when the province liberalized alcohol retailing in 2015.

Will Ontarians be bamboozled by buck-a-beer? His proudest policy “gives a little relief to people across Ontario that want to go in, buy a cold beer, go to the grocery store, buy some steaks, go home and have a cold beer,” proclaimed the premier (who himself does not drink alcohol or eat red meat) with a straight face.

Let them eat steak. And drink cheap beer. Even if Ford doesn’t touch the stuff.

Ford boasts (selectively) that a promise is a promise, implying he won an unassailable mandate as the all-powerful leader of “Ontario’s First Government of the People” — end of argument. It’s hard to imagine judges accepting that line of reasoning.

Governments cannot act in capricious, discriminatory and arbitrary ways. For all Ford’s incantations and repetitions about “Promise made, promise kept,” his own inconsistencies prove the opposite. He broke his public promise to maintain the minimum income program, and he has reversed his vow to stop the Bala Falls hydroelectric project (a recklessly unaffordable promise, as he grudgingly acknowledged last week).

On the campaign trail, Ford studiously ignored the maxim that it’s best to under-promise and over-deliver. It paid dividends for him on election day, and during the honeymoon that followed.

That’s how the political pendulum swings. The scales of justice operate differently.

After the summer honeymoon comes the fall. We will all pay the price for promises that were not just ill advised but illegal.

Governments have every right to write their own laws, but it is wrong to overwrite our legal rights. It’s also against the law.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2018/09/03/courts-are-catching-up-to-fords-unlawful-ways.html