Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: after facing a wave of backlash, Premier Doug Ford’s government has backed off on a planned cut to a municipal program.

I know, I know. This basic story has played out so many times since Ford took office it’s hard to keep track. In this case, I’m referring to last week’s announcement that the Ford government wouldn’t proceed with cutting $15 million from Toronto child-care programs as had been previously announced.

Turns out in a city where the average annual cost of child care for a toddler is a cool $17,000, cutting the number of subsidized spaces is unpopular.

This keeps happening. Ford has developed a nasty habit of proposing cuts that spark a firestorm of backlash. Feeling the heat, he backs off and either fully or partially reverses course.

Before child care, the threatened cut was the Transition Child Benefit, a social assistance program administered by city hall. The Ford government backed off after it came out that eliminating the program could make 1,700 families homeless in Toronto. Not ideal.

Before that, it was Ford’s move to retroactively cut millions from Toronto’s public health programs — reversed when medical professionals repeatedly pointed out these programs do a darn good job of keeping people alive.

It’s an absurd pattern. And no one benefits.

For people who believe in these kinds of programs, it’s led to a constant state of uncertainty.

While the Ford government has backed off most of their municipal cuts, they’ve left the door open for more. There’s still a $2.8 million cut to child-care programs on the books next year, and while Queen’s Park has agreed to kick in for the construction of new child-care centres, they’re so far refusing to fund the cost of operating them. Public health isn’t out of the woods either — unless something changes, changes imposed by the provincial government will cost them $14 million after next year. The fight continues.

Meanwhile, people who think there’s value in cutting government aren’t benefitting from this either. Threatening cuts and then largely backing away doesn’t save anyone any significant money. It just wastes a lot of time.

This is a failure of governance from a premier that has a long history of this kind of failure. No one would suggest there aren’t always ways to make government more efficient, but Ford has demonstrated no special aptitude for finding any efficiencies.

Since he was first elected to Toronto council in 2010, Ford has been working a theory that says there’s lots of waste to be found in municipal programs. But his attempts to prove the theory as a councillor, a would-be mayoral candidate and now premier have amounted to a whole lot of nothing.

Ushered to municipal power alongside his brother, the late mayor Rob Ford, on a “stop the gravy train” campaign slogan, the brothers hired a consultant to find government waste. But the report offered little except suggestions like maybe Toronto has too many library branches. When they floated the idea of cutting those, people revolted. In the end, with no real examples of uncovered waste — no gravy train to derail — the Fords were left clinging to a widely-discredited claim to have saved Toronto a billion dollars.

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After Ford lost to Tory in the 2014 mayoral election, he spent a few years laying the groundwork for another mayoral run and taking potshots at the new mayor for supposed waste, but the math stood against him — per-capita spending hasn’t grown under Tory.

And now, with more government power than ever to help prove his case, Ford’s still flailing, like a doctor trying to diagnose a patient by poking various body parts with a pointy stick. “Does this hurt? How about this?” It all hurts, but mostly because it’s annoying and he’s been at it for almost a decade straight now. Years of trying and years of failing. Please, try something else.

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