Doug Ford is running the unprecedentingest government you ever did see. Every time you turn around, he is unprecedenting.

Those aren’t established words, of course — unprecedenting, unprecedentingest — but you read or type the sentence “this is unprecedented” so many times and you start looking for an appropriate verbs and superlatives.

Because indeed, this matter of the Toronto municipal election and the premier’s determination to foul it up beyond all recognition has been getting unprecedenteder and unprecedenteder all the time.

First, the law that cut the size of city council in Canada’s largest city, and only in that one city, in half. Unprecedented, but maybe not all that surprising. Then the decision to introduce that idea publicly, pass it into law, and implement it immediately, all in the middle of an ongoing election campaign, after the nomination deadline had already passed.

“Unprecedented.” That’s what Justice Edward Belobaba called the matter before him in a rushed judgment issued Monday morning. Not just that, but “unconstitutional,” and “antithetical to the core principles of our democracy,” and “hurriedly enacted to take effect in the middle of the city’s election without much thought at all, more out of pique than principle.”

The judge said all that in striking the law down and restoring the previous 47-ward election, for which early voting is set to begin in about one month. Unprecedented. (Also unprecedented, he described the entire provincial government legal argument on an important point up for discussion with one word: “Crickets.”)

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Now here comes Ford again, ready to deploy the anti-Charter nuclear option: invoking the “notwithstanding clause,” which allows a provincial government to enact a law even though a court has found it violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Never before has an Ontario government done this. Ford said in his speech he would use it again in the future. “Unprecedented” seems to understate it.

Governments run by Ford family members have a history of inspiring writers to create new language. When the late Rob Ford was mayor of Toronto, the writer Ivor Tossell coined the term “uncompetence” to apply to his attitude, to great social media acclaim. I bring it up because the concept is useful again. As Tossell defined it, the term described not just the lack of competence indicated by incompetence, but an outright, conscious contempt for it because “competence is something the elites do.” A rejection of expert opinion because it was expert opinion, a considered refusal to provide any consideration, a belligerent insistence on rolling over any checks and balances and established democratic processes. Government by intentional unreasonableness.

That quality, whatever word you want to use to describe it, is a proud part of the Ford political brand. And it is that, and that alone, that has got us all — Ford, Toronto’s municipal government, this city’s voters — into this unprecedented mess.

If the premier wanted to shrink the size of city council, he could have done so by introducing legislation after this fall’s municipal election, holding normal consultations and study of the matter, debating it normally, and then passing it well before the next election, giving potential candidates, the city clerk’s office, voters and everyone else lots of notice and time to prepare.

Belobaba ruled that the province’s actions violated candidates’ rights to free expression because it changed the rules in the middle of the game. That objection disappears if the legislation is introduced on a reasonable time frame. He also ruled that voters’ free expression rights, through their right to effective representation, were violated, but in his rationale pointed out clearly that the province provided no evidence it studied or even considered what it was doing, and presented no real arguments that effective representation could be provided in this scenario.

The judge pointed out that these rights don’t inherently apply to municipal electors or candidates — there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to run in or vote in a city election. But if the provincial government creates a municipal election process, he wrote, that process needs to comply with the Charter.

Especially in light of that, it’s not hard to see how a reasonably competent process might have answered or headed off all of those successful arguments.

It still would have been a wrong-headed law, in my opinion, but it would have been an unequivocally legal one, and one that avoided disruption and uncertainty.

Had Ford proceeded that way, this year’s election would have proceeded with only the usual amount of fuss, the debate over the change would have proceeded with the usual amount of anger, any legal challenges to it would have proceeded with a minimal amount of drama, and the next election would have proceeded with the usual amount of fuss.

But that would have been too normal, too competent, too … precedented. That is not the Ford way. The Ford way is to create maximum chaos. At a certain point, you strongly suspect that is not an unfortunate or unforeseen byproduct of his way of doing business, but one of his key goals.

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If things proceed smoothly, if the rule of law and established political conventions are observed, it is a sign you are being too meek. Ford wants to stir things up, to break rules, to trample on convention. And to be seen to do so.

It’s a simple power play. The mayor of Toronto and the entire municipal government will be forced into chaos on his whims. The entire province should be on notice. He has explicitly put judges on notice. The courts, even the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, will not restrain him.

The thing about precedents is they let us know what to expect. Ford will likely go on proudly unprecedenting every issue he lays eyes on. We’re in uncharted, and un-Charter-ed, territory. The only thing we can reasonably expect is more unnecessary chaos.

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