Article content continued

In the future, a Liberal or NDP government can just go ahead and give city council more power — including the power to set its own complement. Some of Ford’s other ideas might prove far more difficult to overturn.

Ford is partisanship in the raw, devoid of the Mulroney-esque niceties

Let’s stay in Ford’s beloved Toronto: Should we trust a premier so obsessed with his former job as to bust up an election with just weeks to go before voting day to, say, upload and manage Toronto’s $2 billion-per-annum transit system in a coherent and defensible fashion that would be, he promises, “nothing but a benefit”?

Folks, no we should not. In addition to their labels and tags concern, the Ford family runs a breeding centre for white elephant transit projects. Ford has never met a subway he didn’t love, no matter how sparse the population atop it, or a perfectly serviceable piece of surface rail he didn’t hate, no matter how empirically compelling the service it could provide.

And while it’s reasonable to hope his caucus might balk at spending gazillions on subways to nowhere — hardly a vote-winner in the hinterlands — in the meantime there is a more basic threat to the body politic. Ford is partisanship in the raw, devoid of the Mulroney-esque niceties and utterly immune to cognitive dissonance. Few if any like him rise to the top, but every party’s base has its share of these people, and he can only embolden them.

Photo by Ernest Doroszuk/Postmedia

If Ford were running for mayor of Toronto and Kathleen Wynne had pulled a stunt like this, he’d be hollering bloody murder. Ford claims a near-absolute right to pursue his agenda subject to censure only from voters, even as he challenges the federal Liberals’ carbon tax in court. On Monday Ford personally attacked Belobaba as an appointee of Dalton McGuinty. Superior Court justices are federally appointed. But I wouldn’t be surprised to hear him say it again. This week an anonymous Conservative source told the Toronto Star the party was considering contrasting Ford’s decisiveness with Justin Trudeau’s refusal to use the notwithstanding clause to protect the Trans Mountain Pipeline project.