Doug Ford's populist bluster eerily reminiscent of Trump's

If you thought, or hoped, that Doug Ford might have learned little restraint and circumspection from his years in the desert out of politics, his recent announcements should have brought you thumping back to earth.
It looks like the approach of the recently-elected leader of Ontario's Progressive Conservative Party will continue in the vein of what might best be described as "populist bluster". Clearly, he has seen the success this approach has yielded south of the border, without learning the lessons of the havoc that Trump's actions are wreaking on his country and his political system.
Take his latest outburst, for example. Ford vows that, if elected Premier in the Ontario provincial elections this June, his very first action will be to fire Mayo Schmidt, the CEO of Ontario electricity utility Hydro One. Now, Schmidt is admittedly overpaid, and Hydro One have admittedly often been less than efficient in their decision-making over the years. But summarily firing Schmidt - whom Ford refers to in an eerily Trump-esque manner as "Kathleen Wynne's six-million dollar man" - is a rather puerile and deliberately dramatic response. And, unfortunately, as even his own aides admit, the Premier does not even have that ability, as the province no longer has a majority shareholding.
Similarly, Ford's easy populist message that a Conservative government would cancel the province's current cap-and-trade system and refuse to participate in any carbon tax would, even if you agreed with it in principle, be extremely difficult and inadvisable, and open the province up to any number of unforeseen costs and legal challenges that the simplistic message chooses not to address.
But these kinds of details will not worry Ford. The point of a populist message is to ramp up the outrage of the unwashed and less-educated masses against the "elites" (Ford may not be a billionaire like Trump, but he is at least a millionaire business owner, and thus an elite in most people's eyes, were they to think about it).
Still, this kind of bluster has served Ford well enough thus far in the absence of solid policies, and has got him elected PC leader, and positioned him as favourite in the election race against the terminally unpopular Wynne. The parallels with Trump's 2016 campaign are all too troubling, but populism is designed to appeal to knee-jerk social conservatives who don't like to trouble themselves by thinking too deeply about issues and consequences.