Ontario Premier Doug Ford is busy backtracking. He would be wise to backtrack more.

The extent of the Progressive Conservative premier's policy reversals is breathtaking. Ford has given up the idea of reforming Ontario's regional government system. He has backed away from controversial changes to the way families with autistic children are funded. He has dropped plans to take over the Toronto subway system.

He has come up with a sex education scheme for Ontario schools that is eerily similar to the Liberal one he once trashed. He has reversed some cuts to social services. He has signalled that he's willing to compromise on plans to increase class sizes in the schools. He now wants to fund a French-language university in Ontario, an idea he once dismissed.

His government has even changed its mind on vaping. Ford had opposed former Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne's proposal to regulate the display and promotion of e-cigarettes. He now favours it.

Politically, Ford's dramatic reversals mark his belated recognition of the reasons behind the PC election victory in 2018. Ontarians wanted to get rid of Wynne's governing Liberals. But they didn't necessarily want to get rid of everything the Liberal government had done.

In thinking that his victory awarded him carte blanche to radically reconstruct the province, Ford misunderstood the mandate Ontarians had given him.

It seems he is now more realistic. He may even recognize that most Ontarians are Red Tories at heart and tend to favour governments of that stripe, regardless of whether they are labelled Liberal, Conservative or whatever.

One area badly in need of regulatory reform involves the rules governing work. Ontario's laws on employment standards and labour relations are out of date. They were developed for a time when full-time work was the norm and unions relatively easy to set up.

These conditions no longer hold. Employers prefer part-time workers because they can pay them less per hour. Many employers pretend their workers are independent contractors in order to avoid paying Canada Pension Plan and Employment Insurance premiums.

Typically, workers in the new economy must hold two or three low-wage, part-time jobs to make ends meet. They have no control over their schedules — which makes it near impossible to juggle these different jobs.

They are always on call — meaning they must come into work, at short notice, if their employer demands it. But if, at the last minute, their employer decides he or she doesn't need their services, they can be sent home without recompense.

Usually, they work in parts of the service sector — including fast-food franchises — that are notoriously difficult to unionize.

In the dying months of her Liberal government, Wynne brought in reforms designed to address the problems of precarious work. At the time, most attention focused on her plan to boost the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

But arguably more important were provisions to alter employment standards. One would have required employers to pay most full-time and part-time workers at the same hourly rate. Another would have made employers pay at least three hours worth of wages to workers whose shifts were cancelled less than 48 hours before they were due to begin.

Yet another would have made it more difficult for employers to pass off employees as independent contractors.

One of Ford's first actions was the repeal of most of the Wynne labour reforms.

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Now that he's in a contemplative mood, the premier might want to revisit this decision as well. My guess is that a lot of Ontarians would think that changing the rules governing employment to match the new reality of work makes sense.

Thomas Walkom is a Toronto-based columnist covering politics. Follow him on Twitter: @tomwalkom

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