Chris Selley: A cavalcade of bad news for Doug Ford

Ontario Premier Doug Ford pictured at first minister's meetings in Ottawa.

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Ontario Premier Doug Ford had had a borderline absurd run of good luck: For most of his nearly eight-year tenure, according to the Angus Reid Institute’s polling, he has been Canada’s least or second-least popular premier — and his main rival in that race to the bottom, Quebec’s François Legault, is now an ex-premier.

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When Ontarians next vote for a government, it will probably be a Liberal one. The official Opposition New Democrats know that better than anyone. Yet Ford has never faced a non-interim Liberal leader in the legislature in his eight years as premier, because neither of the party’s two leaders during that time managed to win a seat. The Liberals won’t have a new leader until November, some 10 months after Bonnie Crombie’s resignation, and the way that leadership race is shaping up, the winner is unlikely to hold a seat at Queen’s Park, either.

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In recent days, though, you could start to see what the end of this lucky streak might look like. After eight years, every government has baggage. But boy, is it ever piling up.

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Let’s begin with public safety. On Tuesday, based on documents obtained by a University of Ottawa criminology PhD candidate, The Canadian Press reported the Ontario government was “planning a massive expansion of jails over the next decades.”

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It’s bad news that we need so many new jails, public safety having become a rather serious problem, and because it’s going to cost a ton of money. But it’s also good news because it shows the government is actually doing something about it instead of blaming the federal government for all its crime-and-punishment troubles. Overcrowded and poorly run jails are bad for everyone and everything and they’re one reason judges lean more towards bail.

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Not mistakenly in the sense of “ill-advisedly” — literally by mistake. “Improper releases are typically due to administrative or technical/data entry error by any one of the justice sector partners,” a briefing note to Solicitor General Michael Kerzner explained. Others are apparently due to “human error.” (Human error? As opposed to what, exactly?)

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Yikes.

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Speaking of public safety, online outlet The Trillium reported Wednesday that associate attorney general Michael Tibollo’s claimed doctorate in psychology from the quite prestigious University of Southern California was actually from California Southern University, a for-profit correspondence school whose parent company is based near Chicago. The government chalked it up to a former staffer’s error.

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Embarrassing.

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Reforming dysfunctional school boards has become something of a signature issue for this government, which is arguably good news, because some are very dysfunctional indeed. On Monday, Education Minister Paul Calandra announced a new regime that would see elected school trustees have considerably less power. That could be a positive, though National Post columnist Randall Denley, among others, argued it will make the system more complex.

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But how much trust should we put in Calandra’s plan? After eight years of Tory governance, we learned this week that many kids just aren’t bothering to go to school. Just 40 per cent of secondary students are attending 90 per cent of the time, which is the official and not really very ambitious standard.