Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford is throwing an Ontario campaign tradition under the bus.

Ford has scrapped plans to have a media bus following his election tour later this spring.

“You guys are more than welcome to come to every event,” said the rookie leader, who did not answer repeated questions from reporters about the reason for abandoning the practice.

“I didn’t think there was any law about having media on the bus,” he said Thursday at Queen’s Park.

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Asked why he won’t be with Premier Kathleen Wynne, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath, and Green Leader Mike Schreiner at a Black community debate next Wednesday — moderated by former Star columnist Royson James — Ford said he will be in Northern Ontario.

“There’s no other politician in this country — no other politician outside of Rob Ford — who has supported the Black community more than I have,” he said, referring to his late brother, a former Toronto mayor.

“I love them ... they know that,” said Ford, adding he annually buses scores of underprivileged Black youth to his Muskoka cottage for a picnic, which he called “the highlight of my summer.”

The PC leader — who took over on March 10 after Patrick Brown’s resignation due to a sexual impropriety scandal — said he expects to square off against Wynne and Horwath in “two, three televised debates” during the campaign.

But he also signalled he will be campaigning on his own terms with evening rallies to supporters around the province and everything livestreamed online.

Wynne, whose party will have a media bus, said it “looks like there’s some hiding going on.”

Ford shot back: “I find that ironic ... the only person that should be running from the media is the premier based on her record.”

But Wynne emphasized that “it’s very important for me and my team to have an interaction with the media because it’s through the media that we have the interaction with the people of Ontario.”

“To not have a media bus, it’s unusual,” she told reporters at an Etobicoke GO Transit rail yard earlier Thursday. “If a politician doesn’t want to talk to the press, doesn’t want to talk to the people, whose role it is to analyze and interpret and bring information in a responsible way to the people of the province, I think it’s a problem.”

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath — who will share her bus with journalists to facilitate coverage and reduce the New Democrat campaign’s carbon footprint — said she is “shocked” at the Ford decision, which appears aimed at avoiding daily press scrutiny.

“It flies in the face of the transparency that is required. If you’re not prepared to tell people what it is that you plan on doing, then how does that give anybody any confidence to put you in the premier's chair? This is a serious position that is being sought by all of us,” said Horwath.

“Anybody who’s been on a campaign knows that it’s quite a challenge, quite an undertaking. We’re going to all the same venues. It’s to our advantage as the candidates, as the leaders, to have media access to us.”

While a media bus allows reporters and camera operators easier access to aspiring premiers with space to write, edit and file stories, it also allows party officials quick access to journalists seeking deeper explanations of campaign promises and how they would be carried out.

Media outlets traditionally pay between $6,000 and $8,000 per seat on each campaign bus to cover travel, meals and wi-fi costs.

But campaign bus tours are expensive to run and logistically complex — especially for a new leader still learning the provincial ropes.

Toronto Mayor John Tory, who was PC leader in the 2007 campaign and defeated Ford in the 2014 Toronto mayoral race, noted he has “spent almost 50 years around this business, most of the times as organizer of campaigns, and there have been customary ways to do things.”

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“But, you’re going to have to go and ask ... the people in different campaigns why they’re doing things the way they are and they’ll answer for that. I really have no particular view on it. So, we’ll leave it at that,” said Tory.

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