Doug Ford is a long distance admirer of Boris Johnson. It’s easy to see why.

Both are bombastic municipal politicians who climbed the greasy flagpole to the top, rising to become first ministers for Her Majesty ⸺ one as premier of Ontario, the other prime minister of Great Britain. Blond ambition incarnate.

Now, both have achieved a more dubious distinction: Almost simultaneously, they are being second guessed by their judiciaries for giving the Queen flawed advice about the fundamentals of democracy.

Johnson deployed a prorogation ploy to suspend debate in the House of Commons, immersing the mother of parliaments in the mother of all battles. This week, Britain’s Supreme Court nullified the PM’s move as unlawful, issuing an unprecedented order to return to democratic norms.

For his part, Ford didn’t merely prorogue ⸺ he pre-empted a municipal election in Toronto after winning power last year. This month, Ontario’s highest court came awfully close to repudiating the premier’s move.

In a 3-2 split decision, the court upheld Ford’s manoeuvres by a slender thread, setting the stage for a final ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada. If they agree to hear the case, the judges could shine more light on one of Ford’s darkest hours, in an unfortunate echo of Britain’s historic legal drama.

One major difference: Brexit, and Johnson’s handling of it, are consequential matters affecting the future of Britain’s relations with Europe; by contrast, the manufactured municipal election crisis that rattled Toronto last summer was a capricious and utterly unnecessary assault on democratic norms. Spoiling for a fight, Ford wanted only to win a grudge match with the city council he never quite conquered.

In midcampaign, our premier unilaterally rewrote the rules and rejigged the boundaries, playing jiggery pokery with democracy to shrink city council in half. He got away with it only because of a quintessentially Canadian legal quirk by which cities remain, constitutionally, creations of our all-powerful provinces — a legal technicality for every municipality.

If our federal government trampled on provincial rights in such a way, our premier would be apoplectic. But three of the five judges on the court conceded that, constitutionally, Ford could pretty well do as he pleased, despite their evident displeasure with what he did and how he did it. For it is surely anachronistic that a megalopolis such as Toronto, whose size and economic heft would ordinarily qualify it as a city-state, should be shorn of its basic rights on so fundamental a matter as an election.

Our premier would do well to ponder the reasoning in the latest court ruling from London, for much of it applies to his municipal meddling.

In their historic verdict ⸺ which has implications for all parliamentary democracies that trace their roots to Westminster ⸺ the British judges stressed that the first minister does not have unlimited power. While the U.K. relies on an unwritten constitution, it has well understood political and legal conventions; now the judges have made new law to remind us that no prime minister is above the law:

“It is impossible for us to conclude … that there was any reason ⸺ let alone a good reason ⸺ to advise Her Majesty to prorogue Parliament,” the judges wrote, noting the lack of “reasonable justification” for the prime minister’s precipitate actions.

A similar tone of incredulity can be found in the language of the strong dissenting opinion signed by two judges in the Ontario case, who wrote that Ford’s intervention “interfered in an unwarranted fashion with the freedom of expression of candidates in a municipal election.” Hundreds of candidates were running for elected office in wards that disappeared overnight, in midcampaign, yet on Ford’s order, the government “left a trail of devastation of basic democratic principles in its wake.”

The violation of Charter rights was “extensive, profound, and seemingly without precedent in Canadian history.” And almost certainly unprecedented in British history.

Two decisions, delivered mere days apart, in two different parliamentary systems. Two first ministers with decidedly populist and all-powerful pretensions decided to ride roughshod over democratic traditions.

In Britain, an abuse of power has been overturned. It hasn’t happened yet in Ontario ⸺ and may never come to pass: Any final Supreme Court ruling remains unpredictable, but the ultimate outcome is preordained, for our populist premier “of the people” has already declared that if he is overruled by mere unelected judges, he will override them by invoking the “notwithstanding clause” of the Charter of Rights.

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Despite dodging a bullet, Ford remains ready to trigger his own democratic mayhem here at home. Not even his British counterpart can override any judge who overrules him.

That, it must be said, is the difference between the damage Boris Johnson tried to do, and the wreckage Doug Ford has wrought.

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