The premier has a plan — but not a pathway — to reopen a shuttered economy.

Doug Ford’s plan fails the test because it falls short on the widespread testing we need to conquer COVID-19. Without testing widely, there can be no planning wisely, no recovering broadly.

Ford’s long awaited “Framework For Reopening Our Province,” released Monday, is a framework for failing our province.

“This framework is a road map,” Ford announced breathlessly to a province still holding its breath after being in lockdown for several weeks.

But it is a road map without measurements, with no way to track our progress or get our bearings. This framework tells us where we’ve been, not where we want to go.

It chronicles the premier’s persuasiveness at winding down the economy, not waking it up from hibernation. He is awfully good at preaching social distancing, and we are — for the most part — good at keeping the faith and keeping our distance.

Yes, Ford is getting better at tough love — most recently on the weekend, when he condemned a band of protesters at Queen’s Park who demanded he open up the economy prematurely. Give him credit for being at his best, but it is not nearly good enough.

Suppressing the spread of COVID-19 with social distancing is merely a desperation tactic, not a recovery strategy for the economy. To plot our next move, we need to plot the data points that tell us where we are on the curve with better accuracy.

You don’t have to be an economist or an epidemiologist to know that in a pandemic, the prerequisite for saving livelihoods and lives is mass testing. The premier claims to know this better than most, because he keeps citing his business background where “metrics” and “measurements” are prerequisites to success.

“I’m a business person,” Ford reminded reporters pointedly Monday.

He knows full well that by failing to test how many people are ill, our nursing homes and hospitals couldn’t cope with the spread of COVID-19 in real time. But he also knows that if we don’t track how many people are still sick going forward, our workers and workplaces can’t hope to stay safe.

He has not measured up. Ford has been unable to keep his promise to roll out mass testing — neither when it was needed desperately this month to save lives, nor when needed massively next month to safeguard an economic recovery.

Despite Ford’s public excuses and frequent pledges to catch up, Ontario still lags most of the country and much of the world in testing for the novel coronavirus. Overwhelmed by the spread into nursing homes, where the death toll has surged unconscionably high, we are finally targeting the elderly and caregivers for priority testing — the right decision, given the continuing shortage of testing materials.

But the mere fact that our limited capacity forces us to test selectively reminds us that we cannot yet test massively, which holds us back strategically. It is evidence not only of how overstretched we are, but how underprepared we are for the metrics that are the prerequisite for a planned economic recovery.

Without testing everyone, we cannot be confident that our co-workers or customers are not still sick. We will be flying blind and falling further behind.

If Ford’s framework was designed to inspire confidence, it looks more like a distraction — a way to make his Progressive Conservative government appear hard at work — rather than a serious plan to get the province back to work. Governments in other jurisdictions have already made clear that essential businesses will get priority, that factories must find workarounds, and that public-facing events — concerts and professional sports — will be the last to come back.

There is nothing terribly wrong with the 13 pages of bromides and briefing materials put forward Monday by Ford and his finance minister, Rod Phillips, just nothing intrinsically right. It puts the cart before the horse, laying out a phased return to work built on a foundation of uncertainty.

It is a framework without facts. It is like submitting an ambitious business plan without first conducting basic market research.

Ontario has only recently compiled up to date data about total deaths, after embarrassing discrepancies emerged in the province-wide totals that were outdated on the day of release. On Sunday, the government quietly released even more comprehensive statistics about deaths in nursing homes that should have been disclosed earlier.

Yes, we have avoided the carnage of Italy, Spain and New York state. But the numbers of COVID-19 cases and casualties in this province are far higher than in other jurisdictions, from British Columbia to California, which are rolling out widespread testing to lay the groundwork for an orderly recovery.

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It’s not just that the numbers are bad, what’s worse is that we don’t have enough numbers. All the planning and sequencing for an economic re-emergence — the dialing up and down — won’t matter if we can’t measure our progress in real time at every step.

On Sunday, Ontario conducted only 12,550 COVID-19 tests in a province of 14.5 million people. How will we scale up testing to safeguard a workforce of more than 7 million people, and the millions of students who need to attend classes?

A lack of precautions and protection have cost us dearly in human lives. Now, by failing to make preparations for widespread testing, we will pay a high price for our economic uncertainty, while others prepare for recovery.

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