Ontario is not just the Toronto area - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Voters in Ontario are less than a week away from an election nobody wanted. Oh, certainly Premier Doug Ford will claim he is only seeking a fresh mandate to deal with the tariff demands of U.S. President Donald Trump but then the Premier started hinting about an election back before Trump was re-elected, thus providing him with a perfect chance to look like the election was needed.

 

What the Premier really wants is a new mandate to keep him in power until 2029, because who knows, if he waited for the normal election a year from now, he might not be as popular as he is at the moment with a new leader of the Liberal Party still trying to find her feet.

 

We’ve had somewhat similar elections in the past. In 1990 with the Progressive Conservatives in a supposedly weak position, Ontario Liberal Premier David Peterson called a snap election, seeking what was supposed to be a sure majority. He lost to Bob Rae in an upset. Such an upset seems unlikely this time, when polls midway through the campaign showed Ford well in front.
I’ll admit freely to never being a fan of Doug Ford, from the time he was a Toronto councillor supporting his brother Rob Ford, the unstable former Mayor of Toronto and drug addict. I feared Doug as Premier because I thought he might show his dictatorial side. 

 

He wasn’t that in his first term, possibly because Ontario was suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic. Ford led the province steadfastly through the emergency, never bending to the flakier side of politics in the era. And so when the Premier competed for his second term, he easily won the election of June 2, 2022.

 

But in his second term, Premier Ford became the leader I feared he’d be the first time around. Despite now being Premier for seven years, we still have shortages of doctors and nurses, while the Premier has offered private medical clinics his support. Local hospitals like Clinton Public Hospital haven’t operated 24-hour emergency service for years because of the shortages. (Ironically, it was the plans to close that hospital, and others, during the days of Premier Frank Miller, that helped catapult David Peterson to the Premiership in the 1980s.)

 

But while we don’t have money apparently to fix medicare, the Premier found money for a $2 billion remake of Ontario Place playground, including moving the Ontario Science Centre from Don Mills to the expanded Ontario Place.

 

He also has money to, for instance, promise a tunnel under the 401 highway across the north of Toronto to carry even more traffic, although he doesn’t even have an estimate yet of what that will cost.

 

Of course, parts of the problem that rural voters in places like Huron County face is that Ontario voters are asked to choose between a selection of leaders for the different parties for the province’s top job, none of whom, to my knowledge, have shown they understand the unique problems we face.

 

NDP Leader Marit Stiles, Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie and Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner all come from Ontario cities of varying sizes. Understanding the challenges we in rural ridings face is not something that comes firsthand to them.

 

The Premier, for instance, sees the problems of finding enough homes in the endlessly-growing Toronto area and has proposed building more superhighways and more housing developments on prime Ontario farmland. With shelves in urban supermarkets still overflowing with food, it’s hard to make the Premier or other leaders see how dangerous it is for us every year to keep losing millions of acres of some of the world’s best farmland.

 

Millions of people in the world have food shortages. They’re dependent on places like southern Ontario to export food to them. Yet our leaders, all urban based, don’t understand this dilemma.

 

So, I don’t know yet exactly who I’ll support as the provincial election approaches, except that it won’t be for the Premier, who doesn’t see, let alone understand, the problems of rural farmers. I’m hoping one of the other leaders will grasp the problem of feeding the world and come up with a plan to stop the expansion of urban areas onto good farmland.

 

It’s silly that we keep growing areas onto the best farmland while huge areas of Ontario to the north feel abandoned by their politicians. It is a huge task - one few politicians are up to - to redirect urban growth from some of the world’s most precious farmland in southern Ontario to parts of the province that have no good food-growing land.

 

I suspect it will take a real crisis to get us to see how important our food-growing land is (after it’s too late to save valuable food-growing soil). In the meantime, in one of the last times this old guy will have a chance to vote, we have a decision to make.