When the Ontario Superior Court ruled against the Ontario bill to reduce the number of Toronto city councillors, Doug Ford announced his willingness to override the charter of rights and freedoms by invoking Section 33 of the constitution. Others have already commented on the larger context - the role of the courts, the timing of the legislation, Ford's private grudges, and so on. I want to pause instead over a piece of logic that illustrates very neatly a key and frightening part of the populist's playbook.
When a reporter noted that Ford had said nothing during the election campaign about drastically reducing the number of Toronto city councillors, Ford bristled. He said that he had made clear during the campaign that his plan was to see that government became smaller, less expensive, and more efficient. He had been democratically elected, and he intended to fulfill the promises on the basis of which people had voted for him.
He left the reporter's question behind as quickly as he could, and headed for the easy populist rhetoric about democracy and working for the people, the only rhetoric where he's comfortable. What's astonishing was the implication that he has, after all, been given a mandate by voters to reduce the size of Toronto's city council. If he didn't mention his plans for Toronto during the campaign, how can he say he has that mandate?
He must be thinking along the following lines. (1) People showed by their votes that they favoured certain general propositions that he put to them - in particular, that government should be made more efficient. (2) Reducing the size of Toronto's council to 25 is an instance of making government more efficient. (3) Therefore, the electorate favoured reducing Toronto's council to 25.
People seem to have focussed on whether or not the council reduction really will make city government "smaller, less expensive, and more efficient." And it's quite right to question it - the court questioned it as well, and found no evidence that it will be less expensive or more efficient (although it will, on the face of it at least, make the city government smaller). But suppose for a moment that 25 councillors will be less expensive and "more efficient," in whatever is the relevant sense of efficiency. That wouldn't be enough. Voters could still be surprised by, and be against, the 25-councillor solution. They might well say that if they had been told during the campaign that Ford thought his general proposition implied the 25-councillor solution, they would have objected to the general proposition. In short, Ford's claim is that he said he'd do A, and that since A secretly implied B, voters have given him a mandate to do B. That's just not true.
It's bad enough that the 25-councillor solution might not be a good one. It's worse to claim that it was supported by voters who didn't know Ford had it in mind when he trotted out some generalities. But the worst part is in the generalities themselves. Ford puts up a very specialized piece of legislation and claims it's implied by what he said during the campaign. What exactly does he think are the general propositions that he announced and that voters supported? What does he think those propositions imply? This is where it gets scary.
Ford has been saying that people elected him to get things done, that he has a mandate to do what the people want. A day after the Section 33 announcement, one of his functionaries said, by way of support for overriding the charter of rights and freedoms, that Ford was elected to bring change and to do things differently, and now he's doing it. What should be obvious is that under that loose description of a "mandate," nothing at all could ever count as falling outside the mandate. It's like astrological predictions, which are so vague that there's always some sense in which they can be said to have come true. That should be terrifying - politics conducted according to astrological standards. Ford can do whatever he likes, as long as it's a change, as long as it's different. That's what voters want, what they elected him to do, to do "for the people."
Doug Ford, like Donald Trump, wants us to believe that "the people" have given him something like the remarkable "letters of transit" in Casablanca. Doug or Don can fill them in as they like, and they "cannot be rescinded, not even questioned." They might as well just say plainly, "People have elected me to be their dictator." They claim that literally everything they do falls within some occult "mandate." And the entity that granted the mandate, "the people," itself gets more and more occult as the bizarre reasoning unfolds further and further. "The people" knew that something drastic needed to be done. "The people" have shown that they are behind the leader. He's acting "for the people." Never has there been such a leader, a leader who is sure to get us to our rightful place.
Ford isn't pulling a section thirty-three, he's pulling a nineteen thirty-three. Speaking of which, did you hear what one of Trump's people said about the NAFTA negotiations? He said that Canada needs to appease Trump - he actually used the word appease. Trump has to be given a victory - or else.
Appease the Leader. Follow the Leader.
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