By: Doug Ford

Did you expect anything else? In your heart of hearts, in the place where your greatest hopes and darkest fears reside, in that netherworld between sleep and nightmare at which possibilities are as endless as they are terrible, surely you knew. Surely you must have known that it would be me.

What other result could be expected in such a maudlin, decrepit and perverse universe such as ours? That the fates would cast their die upon the rocks of our existence and turn up anything but snake eyes? That somehow, a group of passionate, politically conscious members of the Progressive Conservative party would gather and select one of the two highly qualified female candidates for leader?

Tell me you were never such a fool.

This result has been in our stars since before either of us ever gazed out at the cosmos. Every event in my life has been leading me here, even though I may not have known it at the time. For I needed to become the creature I am today. And the world needed to become the hardened shell it now is in order for people to turn to me.

And so even as you mocked me, laughed at me, ridiculed the people who supported me you knew. As you told yourself that what happened in the United States could not happen here, you knew. And even as you debated joining the PCs just to vote against me, you knew.

Just as I know now that you are hoping my prominence will prevent my party from coming to power. Abandon this hope. My rise is as inevitable as the darkness I will bring. There will be no escape. No respite. No recovery.

I will grant you only this one small indulgence: Even as I torture you, even as my presence makes your existence less palatable, even as I turn your cities to ash, I shall always call you: folks.

Sleep well.