When five consecutive public opinion polls show your popularity fizzling faster than buck-a-beer, it’s time to cut your losses from all those budget cuts.

Now, Doug Ford wants Ontarians to drown their tears in few beers, by tearing up a Beer Store contract.

The premier raised the white flag Monday morning by reversing his controversial cutbacks to municipal health and child-care services — for now. If all goes according to plan, the storm of protests against his Progressive Conservatives will subside.

Hours later, Ford raised the red flag by ripping up a signed contract with the province’s biggest brewers — details to come. If all goes according to strategy, Ontarians will rally behind his populist attack against the Beer Store.

All in a day’s work: Reverse cuts; rip up contracts; repeat.

All in a year’s work: As Ford’s Tories approach the first anniversary of winning power, they keep on changing the channel as needed — and adjusting their ideology when necessary.

A premier who helms “Ontario’s First Government For the People” is grappling with the awkward realization that the people of Ontario are against his government. It’s especially hard to be a populist if you’re unpopular.

A premier who leads Ontario’s right-wing party has grudgingly accepted that Mayor John Tory (himself a former PC leader) and other right-leaning Toronto councillors were united against Ford’s unilateral cuts to municipalities. And so, after talking down to city hall, Ford is now backing down.

“We’re a government that listens,” he said in a tone of contrition before returning, reflexively, to defiance.

Ford couldn’t help boasting about his decision in the middle of last year’s municipal election to cut council’s seat-size in half. Interestingly, the rationale for that draconian measure — in which he threatened to use the Charter’s notwithstanding clause to overturn any court decisions — was supposedly to improve decision-making in Toronto.

Yet all the while, under his own stewardship, the province’s decision-making has been marked by disruption rather than deliberation — culminating with the most disastrous budget rollout in recent memory. Which brings us to the biggest paradox and hoax of Ford’s first year in power:

As the April budget unravelled, Ford’s cabinet insisted it had no choice but to cut — because Ontario faced a Venezuelan-style fiscal wall. Now, his government has embraced Venezuelan-style political tactics.

Welcome to the Venezuela of the north. In what will be remembered as a low point in the annals of Progressive Conservative governance, Ford’s Tories introduced legislation Monday to essentially expropriate the private interests of the Beer Store’s owners.

I have written my fair share of columns lambasting the Beer Store and urging its owners to raise their game. But there is a big difference between exhortation and expropriation.

After signing a 10-year deal with the previous Liberal government to invest $100 million in their outlets, while 450 supermarkets elbowed their way into the market, the Beer Store has done its fair share, more or less. Yet the Tories, unhappy with the contract — or more precisely, unsettled by their own decline in the polls — are determined to dismiss it as a “sweetheart deal.”

Perhaps they hope Ontarians will forget it was negotiated on the government’s behalf by former TD Bank CEO Ed Clark, who broke the nearly 90-year stranglehold of the Beer Store while engineering a smooth transition and maximizing revenues over a 10-year span. The rushed report delivered Friday by the Tories’ designated alcohol guru — a little-known ex-Alberta politician, Ken Hughes — also speaks of “transition” and “phased” changes to alcohol retailing (while retaining the LCBO under government ownership).

Why then is the government in such a desperate hurry for disruption and expropriation — apart from its desperation for a political distraction? Because it can.

If the PC government were a private enterprise, it would be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages for breach of contract, given that the Beer Store fulfilled its investment obligations. But like a Venezuelan dictator, Ford has decreed that damages shall be banished by legislative fiat.

Insulating his government from legal recourse is an unjustified abuse of power, not unlike the notwithstanding clause that Ford included in legislation last September to override any adverse court rulings. A decent deal is a deal, whether or not you like the government that signed it.

Most governments can get away with expropriation on an exceptional basis. But when cancelling contracts becomes the rule — first for green energy, and now for beer retailing — it undermines the rule of law.

When it falls to the opposition New Democrats to defend private sector contracts against a Progressive Conservative government that treats the legislature as a plaything, you know the province isn’t “Open for business.” It is open to expropriation.

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A better slogan would be, “Business beware,” or “Caveat investor. Or better yet, “Caveat voter.”

A premier who promised to avoid cuts to front-line services has been called out by fellow Tories at city hall for breaking his promise. Now he is putting those cuts on a temporary hold — until next year — while going after the big brewers for show.

From cutting funding for people, to tearing up contracts with big brewers, our premier wants to drown our tears in beers. Don’t cry for Ford, Ontario.

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