Apparently, it wasn’t an April Fool’s Day joke: the government on Ontario — ahem, the Government For the People — confirmed on Monday that it plans to rebrand the province’s licence plates in its Dear Leader’s image by replacing the “Yours To Discover” tag line that’s been on them for decades. Commercial plates will soon apparently bear the hackneyed cliche adopted as a slogan by Premier Doug Ford, “Open For Business,” while the search is on for a suitably Fordian alternative for private plates.

My colleague David Rider called for suggestions on Twitter (putting forward the joke, “Ontario: Nice to your face”) and drew a lot of suggestions illustrated by clever photoshop illustrations that sum up the sometimes grim mood in the province today. “Ontario: It Can Always Get Worse.” Or “Ontario: Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.” Or just, simply, “Ontario: Help.”

Such was the mood at a press conference held at city hall Monday, where politicians, service providers, addiction counsellors, and the city’s medical officer of health were reacting to the news that Ford’s government was withdrawing funding for two of Toronto’s supervised injection sites in Toronto. The harm-reduction sites are meant to prevent overdoses in the midst of an unfolding opioid epidemic that has seen fatalities spike in the past few years as the potentially deadly additive fentanyl has entered the illegal drug supply (leading to 300 deaths in Toronto in 2017 alone). One site in Toronto says it has reversed 750 overdoses by administering life-saving medication in the past two years. Another, open since June, estimates it has prevented one death by overdose every two weeks.

So, Ford is shutting two downtown sites in neighbourhoods where a lot of addicts live and congregate. How’s that gonna go? Toronto’s medical officer of health, Dr. Eileen de Villa, put it bluntly: “I expect you will see deaths.”

Now there you go. That’s it. Put it on the licence plates: “Ontario: Expect You Will See Deaths.”

I mean, the marriage of something as purely symbolic and ultimately frivolous as a licence-plate slogan with a stark reminder of the effect of less visible government decisions is almost a perfect summary of the Doug Ford approach to governing Ontario.

Read more:

Premier Doug Ford, Ontario plates can do better than a licence to shill

Ford confirms ‘Yours to Discover’ will be replaced on Ontario licence plates

He trundles along cranking his perpetual outrage sideshow generator of buck-a-beer promotions and petty vindictive backbench firings and beer-in-a-corner-store musings and gas-pump photo opps and licence plate resloganeerings. Here and there, he and his ministers will toss another can of gasoline onto the campfire and watch the pundits explode into bitter chatter. Add the never quite official rumblings of how long-planned projects are going to be scrapped and replaced by Ford bizarro-world versions: Maybe a monorail! Maybe a casino! Spin the Great Wheel of Chaos and let the shouting begin.

Meanwhile, the families of people with autism try desperately to figure out how their children will get treatment, and whether that treatment will bankrupt them. They continue to have no answers to that question even as changes to the autism services policy came into effect — and then a day later the province announced it’s still working to figure it all out.

Meanwhile class sizes are slashed in such as way as to ensure a bunch of teachers get pink slips despite campaign trail promises that no one would lose their job. Students will have fewer teachers, fewer educators will have jobs.

People who had been promised stability through the basic income pilot program, and made plans based on that assurance, have their lives turned upside down by the program’s sudden cancellation. At roughly the same time, many people on social disability support see eligibility requirements write them out of the program, and planned increases to the minimum wage are cancelled. Hundreds of million in planned funding for mental health programs cancelled.

People will suffer. And, yes, as Dr. de Villa says, people are going to die.

Ford says he wants to get addicts into rehab rather than giving them a safe injection site. But at the risk of stating the obvious, an addict isn’t going to notice the lack of a supervised indoor space and suddenly decide treatment is their preferred immediate alternative. We’re talking about a population who feel so compelled by their addiction that the known possible presence of a fatal fentanyl hit in every dose does not tip the scales away from using. If that isn’t stopping them, kicking them out to do it in a back alley or someone’s stoop isn’t going to either.

Which is to say, as my colleague Rosie DiManno recently put it, rehab only works for addicts who are still alive. And you have a much better chance of steering those living addicts into rehab if you can bring them indoors where you can see them, and talk to them, and treat them.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

It’s not clear whether the premier has failed to consider this before taking drastic steps that could hurt and kill people, or if he has considered it, and doesn’t care. That’s a bit of a theme with his government, which breaks things first and considers the consequences later.

A bit of a mouthful for a licence plate, though.

Read more about: