If Ontarians drove as erratically as Premier Doug Ford’s clown-car of an administration governs, they would be pulled over by police and subjected to every test for inebriants known to (wo)man.

And, should such motorists claim the reason for such chaotic wayfaring was the search for “efficiencies,” the arresting officers would likely laugh themselves into puddles.

Of course, offenders could declare that the rules governing the roads — admittedly a nuisance to any bent on reaching a destination promptly — simply no longer applied.

Welcome to Ford World, a political wonderland untethered from the realities and responsibilities of the sort of forethought, reflection and careful stewardship that once was the watchword of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario.

In a different place, in an earlier time, the governing strategy — such as one exists — might have been called “Bread and Circuses.”

This week, let’s call it “Beer and Casinos.”

On Monday, Ford’s PC government tabled a bill to scrap a 2015 agreement between the Ontario government and the brewing companies that own the Beer Store.

It is “a terrible sweetheart deal,” declared Finance Minister Vic Fedeli. Under it, consumers are “held hostage by three multinationals,” he said.

That may very well be so. And the Ford government’s antidote — and reason for its move Monday — is to allow beer to be sold in corner stores.

Yet what the province did with this audacious move is to poke a tiger — those self-same multinationals, the parent companies of Labatt, Molson and Sleeman — in the ribs with a very short stick.

The Beer Store, which operates 450 outlets across Ontario, has already warned that expanding sales to corner stores would put jobs and the chain’s future at stake, while raising costs to drinkers and reducing the monitoring of under-aged and already-inebriated customers.

After Monday’s news, it was examining legal options that could — if its right to damages over the scrapped contract is upheld — leave taxpayers on the hook for the mother of all rounds.

This horse-galloping-amok-in-a-hospital approach to public policy that is already the premier’s signature caused jaws to drop around the province.

“A dangerous message!” “Never seen anything like this!” “Kicking good jobs to the curb!” “Billions of dollars in damages!” “Creating chaos!”

And this about a government that has adopted as its slogan, and inflicted on some provincial licence plates, the banal phrase “Open for Business.”

What business would risk making agreements with a province that could be annulled with any change of government and where the rules of the game change on a whim?

Or in a jurisdiction where “no-remedy” clauses, such as the one in the Bringing Choice and Fairness to the People Act, become law?

In a patent abuse of power, the province proposes to protect itself from the consequences and financial liabilities of arbitrarily ripping up contracts, contracts that the businesses to which it declares itself so open negotiated in good faith. And it is doing this for the second time in less than a year as green energy companies know all too well.

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Meanwhile, back at Ontario Place, the province announced Tuesday it has abandoned its pipe dream of a casino to anchor the planned redevelopment of the former waterfront amusement park.

As it proposed on the one hand to rip up contracts already in place, it beckoned to businesses worldwide with the other to submit “the best, most remarkable concepts to transform Ontario Place into the world-class destination it was always intended to be.”

Even the tone deaf might recognize the jarring cognitive dissonance of the two messages.

And the international wooing goes on even as the provincial government refuses to properly include those with a stake in the redevelopment closer to home.

Mayor John Tory and Toronto council rightly insist the city be involved in any discussions on the future of the site.

“Here we go again,” said Councillor Joe Cressy. “The City of Toronto has not been consulted. To be clear, the City of Toronto owns part of the Ontario Place lands.”

It is well-known that Doug Ford largely lucked into the PC leadership just before the 2018 election and campaigned unburdened by much in the way of a platform.

Even so, the scribbled-on-the-back-of-a-label-package nature of government proceedings is something to which Ontario is not accustomed, and something recent polls suggest have left citizens of the province duly alarmed.

On Tuesday, Opposition Leader Andrea Horwath put quite nicely why that is the case.

“When they look to this premier and his priorities, all they see is somebody who is offering more beer. Really? That’s the priority for Ontario families? The premier is ready to lose 7,000 jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in a fight with the Beer Store, but he can’t find funding for children with autism? What kind of priority is that?

“How did the premier lose any sense of Ontario’s priorities?”

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