Timing and temperament are everything, in politics as in policing. It takes just one bad call, jumping the gun, to trigger a crisis.

Today, after holding their breath and holding fire, the Ontario Provincial Police are breathing a sigh of relief. Exercising restraint, they belatedly dismantled a Mohawk blockade of our cross-country railway without loss of life.

No thanks to Doug Ford. During the 18 days that paralyzed national rail service, the premier only occasionally carped from the sidelines and on the phone lines to Ottawa, largely resisting the impulse to inflame a combustible situation. Until late last Friday.

That’s when Ford gave in to his worst instincts for the wrong partisan reasons. The timing couldn’t have been more delicate — and dubious.

Moments away from facing his fellow Progressive Conservatives at a weekend convention, the premier decided to play politics:

“The prime minister needs to step up and take responsibility,” Ford argued in a public statement issued by his office just after 4:30 p.m. “Enough is enough. The illegal blockades must come down…The federal government must co-ordinate action to take down these illegal blockades across the country.”

Ford’s comments contributed nothing yet spoke volumes. In fact, Justin Trudeau had already made public statements acknowledging that dialogue had gone nowhere, and that the time had come for the barricades to come down.

Like Ford, federal Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer had already goaded Trudeau for supposedly showing “weakness” against Indigenous protesters, arguing he should have ordered police to swoop in sooner. Both their statements ignored two inconvenient facts:

First, the biggest blockade happened to be on Ford’s own doorstep, just outside Belleville, under the jurisdiction of Ontario’s own provincial police force. The premier never needed the prime minister’s permission to ask the OPP to charge ahead, so why pretend otherwise?

Second, police don’t take direct orders from politicians. In the wake of the disastrous Ipperwash crisis when Mike Harris was premier, the OPP learned to think long and hard before acting rashly or rushing into the fray.

As tragic as the outcome of Ipperwash was, resulting in the death of an Indigenous protester, the occupation of an outlying park inconvenienced almost no one. By comparison, responding to a railway blockade is no simple matter, for nothing would be easier than for protestors to erect countless new barriers across thousands of kilometres of unsecured steel ribbon spanning the country — beyond the reach of police deployments or political rhetoric.

Despite the seemingly long period of limbo, it was surely worth waiting and trying to resolve this through negotiations. It allowed Indigenous protestors to make their point — both in Ontario and B.C. where Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs triggered the standoff — and, possibly, permitted tensions to peter out, at least for the moment.

While Ford played politics, others in his government took a more restrained tone. Indigenous Affairs Minister Greg Rickford, often prone to partisan excess, seemed for a change to grasp the gravity of the current situation and the historical legacy of Ipperwash by stressing the need for dialogue and engagement.

Approaching the midpoint of his mandate, Ford needs more in his cabinet to temper his tendency to oversimplify and overreact. The only consolation in this crisis is that we were spared the premier’s plan to install an unqualified crony as commissioner of the OPP last year, after his clumsy ploy was publicly exposed and came to naught.

Imagine if his longtime police pal Ron Taverner, who formed a friendship with Ford during his years at the Etobicoke station, had been appointed as provincial police chief, locked in a confrontation with Indigenous chiefs across Ontario. Instead of an arm’s length relationship, with the commissioner capable of speaking truth to power — and distancing himself from the premier if need be — Ford and Taverner would have been answerable only to each other.

This isn’t the first time Ford has inserted himself into a delicate situation only to whip up potential tensions and resentments. Within weeks of winning power in 2018, he provoked a pointless public fight with Trudeau over the issue of asylum-claimants slipping into Canada away from authorized border crossings.

Back then, Ford tried to stir up a crisis by using inflammatory language to claim Ontario was being overrun by “illegal border crossers,” falsely claiming Trudeau had somehow brought the problem upon himself rather than the reality of geopolitical pressures. “This mess was 100 per cent the result of the federal government,” Ford alleged cavalierly.

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Asylum-claimants who cross the border outside of authorized crossings are certainly “irregular,” as Ottawa, Ontario and Quebec have long described them. But they are by no means “illegal” if they make a well-founded claim for refugee status, protected by international law.

No one wants our borders to be porous, just as no one wants our railways to be impassable. But we look to our leaders to de-escalate complex problems, not exacerbate them with simplistic or divisive rhetoric.

A former Ontario premier, Bill Davis, once mused that you will never be criticized for the speech you don’t give. Ford would do well to follow that advice, rather than indulging his base instincts by playing to his partisan base.

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