unacceptable

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday October 3, 2020

Doug Ford should take a serious shot at himself

Doug and the people. He’s for the people, he says, but so’s everyone, en principe. Now it’s at a point where he should take time off from hectoring the people about their own failures and yell at himself.

He’s good at it. He went after the thousand yahoos who attended a car rally in Ancaster: “If they had brains they’d be dangerous.” Those types are “a few fries short of a Happy Meal.” They’re clichés, but not typical Ford ones — they hover above his usual arsenal. At such moments, his vocabulary glows.

The problem? He puts blame for the mess we’re back into, on individuals: student partiers, car ralliers. But the difference between them and him is they didn’t have the capacity to alleviate or screw up the lives of a whole province.

The students and car guys should yell back: Stop screaming at us and fix the damn testing system! Why weren’t you ready for the fall surge you knew was coming? There’s no excuse for standing in line for hours, then being sent home untested. He doesn’t take responsibility. Instead, he waxes Trumpian: our record is “fabulous,” “like you’ve never seen before,” others ask how I did it.

(I firmly believe that one duty of a “people’s” leader is not making citzens’ lives more miserable than need be. That includes wretched crowding on transit or airlines, grinding daily commutes — and ingeniously humiliating test lines.)

Why didn’t he mandate smaller classes, as we watch the schools grind predictably to a mass closing, instead of dicking around with more nurses and custodians? Sending teachers into those packed classrooms is sadistic. What about kids who go home, transmit the virus to parents and in the worst cases may have to spend the rest of their lives feeling guilty for it?

Long-term care homes are again the main source of this second wave, since Ford has done “nothing” for them (as the Globe and Mail said) since the first round.

What is he doing? Step one was tell us to get flu shots, which aren’t even available yet. Next was getting pharmacies to test. Huntsville didn’t have a test centre until its MPP called Doug and he conscripted Shoppers. I like the “on call” shtick, but it’s redolent of Russian serfs feeling if only the Czar knew, he’d fix it. Please, just acknowledge the difference between individual and political roles.

Still, compared to the U.S., they’re all there with their masks on at briefings, daintily distancing as they angle to the mic — though there’s always a moment when Doug says he relies on the advice of his chief medical officer. We deserve medals for not expiring each time he blurts that out. He did an impressive turnaround when this began. He’s managed to piss it all away since then. (Rick Salutin – Toronto Star)