Ontario’s transportation ministry issues licence plate stickers that manage to stay on a vehicle’s plate for two whole years, through summer heat waves, rain storms and freezing winter weather.

That’s the sort of basic competency that people should be able to expect from a government.

And it’s what Premier Doug Ford fails to deliver, time and time again. In big ways, when it botches autism services and public health funding, but also in small ways that speak volumes about its inability to get much of anything right.

First, of course, are Ford’s own stickers.

Those are the ridiculous and misleading anti-carbon tax stickers that are happily peeling off gas pumps faster than replacements can be ordered.

Given how much thought the government put into the ways gas stations might try to undermine its edict to put up this bit of taxpayer-funded Conservative propaganda, it’s, as those short on characters like to say, LOL that the pumps themselves are rejecting the stickers.

But that’s what happens when the government goes with a lowball bidder and gets indoor stickers meant for a metal surface rather than outdoor stickers meant for a vinyl-coated one, as reported by the Star’s Robert Benzie.

And this from a premier who really should know his way around a sticker. Ford has made much of his experience running the family label business but yet his government can’t manage to do what the provincial bureaucracy, that he’s so keen to minimize and modernize, has no trouble doing.

Second, it seems the Ford government has hit a new low with its troubled roll-out of cannabis stores.

Ontario’s alcohol and gaming commission, which is running the cannabis licence lottery that Ford introduced to replace the former Wynne government plan, can’t manage to send a congratulatory e-mail properly.

According to the lawyer representing 11 plaintiffs, the commission sent the winners of the latest lottery an e-mail notification but it bounced back and, as a consequence, some of them didn’t complete the next stage of paperwork on time and were disqualified. A divisional court judge has now put the entire lottery for 42 stores on hold to sort out what to do.

Sending e-mail is something that Ontarians in their business and personal lives manage to do daily. And yet on something as important as this the Ford government can’t seem to get one across the finish line.

So, here we are, almost a year after cannabis was declared legal, and Ontario has still only issued 25 retail licences.

And a third showing of Ford’s inability to handle the task of day-to-day governing was his bizarre decision to announce that hallway medicine would be over within a year. That forced Health Minister Christine Elliott to rush out and set the record straight. The government, she said, can’t actually say when it will solve that complex problem. It certainly won’t be as Ford claimed.

These have all happened since the premier tried to reset his entire government by getting rid of his former chief of staff Dean French and shuffling his cabinet in June.

Ford’s first year was a fiasco. And there’s no sign things are getting better, even as Ford tries to keep his head down during the federal election lest his poor ratings rub off on federal Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer.

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Ford doesn’t know the most basic facts about his government’s health care plans. His government can’t manage to run a cannabis lottery without winding up in court. And quite possibly the only premier in Ontario’s history to know about stickers buys the wrong ones.

Ford’s gas pump stickers were always a dumb idea. Rather than achieve any of his dubious aims all they’ve done is remind Ontarians that his incompetence doesn’t peel off as easily as his stickers.

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