Martin Regg Cohn: Message to Doug Ford´s Tories: The core of democracy is accountability
(The Star Fashion & Style)

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.You can elect a leader to power but you can’t make him think.Horsepower and political power have one thing in common: They both rely on communication to get you where you need to go.If a horse doesn’t heed you, or a politician doesn’t hear you? You’re stuck.That’s the stark challenge facing Ontario as Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government approaches the first anniversary of its landslide victory. The land is slowly sliding out from under it yet the government doesn’t know it — because it’s not reading the signals.The problem is not that our premier doesn’t talk. It’s that he doesn’t listen.What we have here is a failure to communicate.To be sure, Ford gives impassioned speeches to friendly audiences. He boasts of his achievements on Twitter. He looks directly into the camera for those staged video clips produced by the PC-operated Ontario News Now social media stream. And his government is spending $30 million in your tax dollars to fight a federal carbon tax, launching blatantly misleading attack ads Monday.You see the problem? One-way communication isn’t communication.Ford’s government is always on transmit. Rarely on receive.Remember those old two-way walkie-talkies? Whenever you pressed the button to transmit your message, you couldn’t pick up whatever the other person was saying — talking without listening (happens on speaker phone too).That’s what made question period in the legislature so lamentable late last week, when Ford stonewalled the Official Opposition by reading from a list of accomplishments. Neither listening nor responding, merely self-promoting; not just non-answers but non-sequiturs.In truth, question period is rarely answer period. But rarely has a self-styled “Government For the People� been so disrespectful of so many opposition MPPs who also represent ...