A slogan on a licence plate may be utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of what’s to become of Ontario — but it’s already proving the greatest hit in a growing list of hot-topic distractions sucking up political oxygen just as the Doug Ford government embarks on actual era-defining change.Buck-a-Beer at your corner store. Stickers on the gas pump to remind you just who is taxing carbon. Trained-seal obedience in the legislature, with not just fealty but requisite standing ovations for Ford’s every utterance. Oh, and don’t forget bars wide open for business at 9 a.m. and American-style tailgating parties coming soon to a football game near you. Wear a toga, why doncha? And behind and between the widely scattered flurries of distraction, a hard rain of powerful policy — this week alone, Thursday’s future-shaping Ontario budget, coupled with Wednesday’s shredding of Toronto’s years-in-the-making transit plan, supplanted by Ford’s giddy, back-of-the-matchbook vision for the next 30 years of subways, subways, subways.It’s easy enough to dismiss it all as simply more seat-of-the-pants chaos and contradiction from a premier who has made no shortage of pratfalls since he took the reins last summer from Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals. From the vengeful, shock-and-awe downsizing of Toronto City Council to the ham-fisted and ultimately failed attempt to install old family friend Ron Taverner atop the Ontario Provincial Police, isn’t Ford still simply bumbling forward with a haphazard bagful of random ideas, still clumsily feeling out the limits of his new-found power?No, according to many veteran scholars of Ontario politics, who see in this government’s latest moves — and in the distractions themselves — clear evidence that old, tried and true Progressive Conservative patterns now are taking hold around Ford. They now see sophisticated method in the seemingly populist madness.Rea ...
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