The Ford government has dug itself into a hole in the matter of appointing a new leader for the Ontario Provincial Police. And true to form, it just keeps on digging.

It was glaringly obvious all along that Ron Taverner, Premier Doug Ford’s old chum from Etobicoke, must never be appointed commissioner of the OPP.

Installing a close crony of the premier at the top of the province’s most important police force, the very force that’s expected to investigate political wrong-doing at Queen’s Park, is a complete non-starter.

Regardless of Taverner’s qualifications or the purity of his intentions, making him boss of the OPP would politicize the force in the worst way. Just the suspicion that he could be acting as a political tool of the premier should be enough to bury his chances.

But trust the Ford team to find a way to make this bad situation even worse. It did just that on Monday with the abrupt firing of the senior OPP commander who had the temerity to publicly challenge the premier’s decision to appoint Taverner.

For the record, the government insists it had nothing, nothing at all, to do with the firing of Deputy Commissioner Brad Blair, the man who blew the whistle on this terrible decision in December, warning it would cause “irreparable damage to police independence.”

No, says the government, it was all done by the book. For an hour or so on Monday, the minister in charge publicly maintained that she didn’t even know why Blair got the boot.

That’s what Community Safety Minister Sylvia Jones asserted with a straight face when she met the news media. An hour later, she was up in the legislature laying out detailed reasons for the firing. How much she learned in 60 minutes!

According to Jones, the key decider in this matter was her deputy minister, Mario Di Tommaso, who recommended to the Ontario Public Service Commission that Blair be fired. She was just a bystander, she says.

But we know that Di Tommaso is a former top Toronto police officer who was previously Taverner’s boss. That he was on the hiring committee that massaged the job requirements for OPP commissioner to favour Taverner and then recommended his appointment. And that he’s palled around with both Taverner and Ford.

In other words, up to his ears in this whole affair.

As a cover story, it’s a remarkably bad one. If someone’s out to hoodwink you, you’d hope they’d at least pay you the compliment of concocting a convincing tale.

In this case, the government doesn’t seem to think we’re worthy of even that kind of back-handed respect. They appear to believe we’re all gullible enough to swallow this remarkably threadbare story.

Blair has indeed been treated shabbily. On the face of it, he’s right that his firing amounts to a political reprisal by the government and “an attempt to muzzle me.”

But in the wider scheme of things, Blair’s fate is a sideshow. The real stakes here haven’t changed: the independence and integrity of Ontario’s provincial police force must be protected. It must not be subverted by having a personal friend of the premier installed as its boss.

This is glaringly obvious, but apparently it needs to be repeated for the benefit of a premier who seems determined to get his way regardless of any damage done to the reputation of the OPP.

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This is no theoretical risk. If the force had been headed by a Liberal crony back in 2015, would it have charged a former Liberal premier’s chief of staff with tampering with computer data? Or would it have backed off?

Ontario needs to have full confidence that crime will be investigated fairly and fearlessly wherever it occurs. For that simple reason, Ron Taverner must not become commissioner of the OPP.

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