When Katheen Wynne became Ontario’s premier in 2014, she signalled her commitment to open and transparent government by publicly releasing ministerial mandate letters for members of her cabinet.

Following Wynne’s unprecedented move, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2015 posted mandate letters for federal ministers online so Canadians could track progress on his new government’s priorities.

Since then, the practice of publicly releasing ministerial marching orders has spread across the country, from Brian Pallister’s Progressive Conservatives in Manitoba to Rachel Notley’s New Democrats in Alberta.

Suddenly, previously obscure ministerial mandate letters have become expected tools to guide civil servants and help voters hold their governments to account.

Only in Quebec are these letters still private. And Saskatchewan doesn’t issue them at all.

So it is unsettling, but sadly not surprising, that Ontario’s new premier, Doug Ford, is reverting to the province’s previous policy of keeping mandate letters secret.

As cabinet documents, they are not subject to freedom of information requests nor will they be available to most civil servants.

For a government that is forcing teachers to return to a sex education curriculum penned in 1998, bringing back “buck-a-beer” and promoting lower gas prices, this is part of a disturbing pattern. It’s another indication of the Progressive Conservatives’ regressive policies.

It also highlights the disconnect in Ford’s election promise to “restore accountability and trust” to government in Ontario. How can he claim to be running an accountable government when he keeps mandate letters secret? And how can we trust his government when he refuses even to tell us what he expects from his cabinet ministers?

More worrisome is that the secrecy surrounding Ford’s mandate letters adds yet more credence to the growing concern that his government is making up policy on the fly.

How else to explain Ford’s surprise move to slash the number of Toronto city council seats in half midway through a municipal election, throwing the campaign into chaos? When Ford said he would find “efficiencies” in government during the provincial campaign, no one thought he was talking about Toronto. Even many in his own caucus were caught off-guard by the decision.

Then there was his government’s sudden cancellation of Ontario’s basic income pilot project. When asked during the election about the fate of the innovative experiment being watched around the world, a PC party spokesperson said the project was safe and they intended to see it to its conclusion.

But no. With zero evidence that the project was failing, Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod claimed it was a bust and not sufficiently focused on her government’s belief that a job is the best answer to poverty. This despite the fact that almost three-quarters of the 4,000 people receiving the basic income already had jobs that didn’t pay them enough to lift them out of poverty.

Other seemingly out-of-the-blue decisions include cancelling a $500,000 grant to a Toronto after-school program for at-risk youth, ending youth pharmacare for those with private coverage, and halting planned overdose prevention sites in Toronto, St. Catharines and Thunder Bay.

For a government elected without a costed platform and whose explanation of how they would run the province amounted to little more than slogans to “make Ontario great again,” the lack of public mandate letters is particularly troubling.

Public ministerial mandate letters would give voters who have been whip-sawed by this summer’s erratic sitting of the legislature some sense of where this government is headed.

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As Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner said this week: “Ontarians deserve better than a leader who governs by surprise. They deserve honesty and transparency about what the next four years will look like.”

Instead, we’re left with the feeling that things are being hidden by a government whose agenda is still largely undisclosed.

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