It's Doug Ford's little actions that are most telling

It's no secret how much I dislike Doug Ford and everything that he and his administration stand for. His first budget for Ontario, vague as it is in most respects, includes any number of things that most progressive people would howl in anguish over (cuts to healthcare and legal aid, loosening of regulations around drinking and gambling in public, cuts to the environment ministry and Indigenous Affairs, post-secondary education funding tied to performance outcomes, funding for Toronto transit options not previously agreed on by anyone, least of all the City of Toronto, etc, etc). Even if it was not quite the Mike Harris-style slash-and-burn budget that many expected, it was definitely not good news on many different fronts, and not even the much-touted "budget for the people" (whatever that might mean).
But some of the smaller proposals are almost as annoying. Changing the Ontario licence plate slogan from "Your To Discover" (which is anodyne enough, and surely hard to object to) to "A Place to Grow" (which conjures up images of cannabis grow-ops), and, even worse,  "Open for Business" for commercial vehicles, makes one wonder where Ford's priorities lie. Is this - what a Globe and Mail editorial calls "the least significant initiative of any government, ever" - really what keeps him awake at night?
The other one that really rankles is his brain-storm of an idea to put stickers on all gas pumps in the province designed to attention to how much extra drivers are paying for their gas due to the federal carbon tax which into came into force in Ontario recently (and which came into force, it should be noted, because Ford cancelled Ontario's existing cap-and-trade carbon-reduction scheme). Ford and his ministers are calling this a "transparency" measure, although they are choosing not to be transparent about the income tax rebate that accompanies the imposition of the carbon tax or, for that matter, the costs of climate change itself and the costs of not imposing a carbon tax. Worse, Ford seems to think he is legally allowed to force gas stations to display his stickers on pain of a $10,000 fine - I can see there will be court cases over that. I sincerely hope that Greenpeace or somebody is hard at work as we speak producing alternative stickers to put Mr. Ford's partisan propaganda campaign into some perspective.
Issued in the same week as the release of the Environment and Climate Change Canada report "Canada's Changing Climate", which points out that Canada's climate is changing about twice as fast as the global average, and predicting a catastrophic increase in extreme weather events and coastal flooding, this petty little action seems particularly insensitive and blinkered.
But then, it's Doug Ford. What are you going to expect?