A year ago, a victorious Doug Ford launched his quixotic campaign against carbon pricing.

A month ago, a still-triumphal Ford promised he’d heed the people’s verdict in the Oct. 21 federal election.

Supremely confident they’d side with his anti-tax crusade, our populist premier proclaimed that “when the election’s over, once the people decide, I believe in democracy.”

The people are always right — until they’re not.

In two consecutive federal elections, voters have given Prime Minister Justin Trudeau the mandate he sought to press ahead with a carbon levy that targets global warming. In 2015, his federal Liberals won a clear majority mandate to impose carbon pricing; and in 2019, the Liberals, Greens, NDP and Bloc Québécois won a strong majority of parliamentary seats backing carbon pricing.

In Ford’s provincial fiefdom, the electoral map is especially compelling: The federal Liberals swept 79 of 121 seats and the NDP won six, leaving the premier’s anti-tax Conservative cousins with a mere 36 seats in Ontario.

Despite that drubbing, notwithstanding his grandstanding about democracy, the premier remains unrepentant. His Progressive Conservative government will continue spending a budgeted $30 million to oppose the carbon tax in the law courts and the court of public opinion — using costly litigation, agitation and advertising aimed at persuading judges and voters that they’ve all been wrong all along.

Ford is entitled to his personal views, even if he is out of step with majority sentiment. But he has no right to siphon off taxpayers’ money to bankroll an expensive propaganda campaign whose sole purpose is to whip up public opposition against a federal program that taxpayers have twice voted in favour of.

Doing so is not only anti-democratic. It’s also antithetical to Ford’s declared goal of federal-provincial concord.

Voters “don’t want to see the fighting, they want to see people working together,” the premier told the Toronto Star last week.

Compare Ford’s obstinacy and hypocrisy with the clarity and reality in New Brunswick, where another Tory premier, Blaine Higgs, has reconsidered his opposition to carbon pricing in recognition of the results: “People voted for it, so we in New Brunswick have to find a way to make it work,” he acknowledged.

Not so in Ontario, where Ford has tapped his most cantankerous cabinet minister to continue the fight against federal Liberals: Greg Rickford, who proudly boasts of once being in Stephen Harper’s Conservative cabinet (until he went down to defeat), helms the energy ministry at Queen’s Park with a vengeance — literally.

“Stick it to the Liberals” was Rickford’s publicly declared motive — proclaimed in the legislature — for passing a law requiring that anti-tax stickers be affixed to 25,000 gas pumps across the province. In the aftermath, the plan is not only unseemly but unstuck.

Thousands of the misleading stickers are peeling off the province’s gas pumps, thanks to a poor adhesive and a bumper sticker slogan that doesn’t add up. It falsely claims that “The federal carbon tax will cost you.”

In fact, as independent arbiters have concluded, it’s not a tax but a levy because it doesn’t stay in federal coffers and is almost entirely reimbursed at tax time. Oddly but perhaps unsurprisingly, the Ford-Rickford stickers mischievously omit that reality.

According to Rickford’s haughty view of democracy, “a minority government doesn’t validate the carbon tax.” Even if a majority of MPs do.

Rickford insists with supercilious certainty that “there’s no evidence to support the stickers are not sticking.” Even if his premier fumed in public over the fiasco, saying his staff had to “pull me off the ceiling.”

By Rickford’s account, the stickers must stay in place to give taxpayers “transparency” about carbon pricing. Even if the strategy is transparently cynical.

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Why use taxpayers’ money to buy stickers that hector taxpayers into believing they are being gouged by a carbon tax that isn’t a tax? Why pay for stickers that don’t stick — and didn’t succeed in sticking it to the Liberals on election day? Why ignore the twin truths of a carbon rebate and mandate?

In today’s political environment, most provincial voters want to spare our planetary environment from the perils of greenhouse gas emissions. The premier knows full well from his own legal advisers that his judicial challenges are doomed.

But Ford cannot resist going through the motions, using global warming as a wedge issue to whip up his narrow political base. Even if we all pay the price — in wasted taxes, pointless wrangling, and wedges that pit people against each other.

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