Perhaps emboldened by weekend chants of “Lock her up!” the premier convened his caucus first thing Monday, and summoned the media to make a melodramatic announcement:Doug Ford told Ontarians to “follow the money.” He boasted of a forensic “line-by-line audit” that would prove incriminating. And he claimed the numbers tell a damning story of Liberal “corruption” and enrichment.Invoking his majority muscle, Ford announced a special “select” committee to “compel” evidence in a legislative witch hunt, lest Liberals “walk away from this.”Beware the Orwellian word play.A premier who threatens his predecessors is once again degrading our democratic discourse. Like his unprecedented and unhinged attacks on our “unelected” judiciary, Ford’s latest threats to pursue his predecessors may be business as usual in America, but is entirely foreign to Canada.We import those sinister overtones at our peril. A Progressive Conservative government that once promised an optimistic vision is now peddling a vengeful outlook.It begins with wild claims from Finance Minister Vic Fedeli that he has uncovered a “coverup” of unimagined scale, with a deficit $8 billion higher than in the Liberals’ pre-election budget.But the outside report he ordered up, and relied upon for those claims, said no such thing. For all the overheated allegations that the last government “cooked the books,” the undisputed truth is that its pre-election budget was an open book, fully vetted by the province’s auditor general (even if she disagreed with the bottom line Liberal analysis).Now, that “select” committee — dominated by a Tory majority, including token New Democrats, but with not a single Liberal MPP at the table — is on the warpath. With a straight face, Ford describes the accounting dispute as “the biggest government scandal in a generatio ...
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