Three years ago, Ontario’s Doug Ford won an overwhelming majority government on the basis of the ballots of less than 18 per cent of the province’s eligible voters. Are voters still disengaged?

Author: Mark Winfield, Professor, Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Canada

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has justified his early election call on the need to respond to United States President Donald Trump’s threat to impose 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian imports.

While the threat of tariffs on all Canadian imports has been paused — although Trump has since slapped levies on all steel and aluminum imports into the U.S. — Ontario voters need to reflect more than ever on the province’s circumstances and the performance of its government as they prepare to head to the polls next week.

The Ford government’s approach to the environment and climate change, as well as its policies on a range of other issues like housing, health care and education, is best understood in the context of its overall “market populist” approach to governance.

Several defining features of this model have emerged over the past six and a half years under Ford’s rule.

  • Avid Amoeba
    1·
    21 hours ago

    Last time I checked the OTPP wasn’t a major BCE shareholder. This seems to agree

    But that doesn’t invalidate the general pattern. I think the ownership of a large corporation by a labor union or its pension plan is an improvement over traditional ownership. Reason being that the negative externalities produced by such a corporation are felt much more by the union’s members who have much lower incomes than some fat cats. As a result these members have on one hand the incentive to extract value from this corporation, but on the other the incentive to not overextract.

    Another related thought I had some time ago is that if union density is very high and union members manage to extract the lion’s share of the company profits, then they’ll be able to accumulate much bigger savings. In such a reality the economic equation flips from having a financial system extract the value of labor for your pension to workers getting that value right in their paycheque, every two weeks. Of course there are other issues like some workers perhaps still not making enough for a decent pension due to the generally lower pay in some sectors. That’s why I think if union density goes high enough, we’d likely move to a much stronger national pension system.