Ontario Premier Doug Ford sent me a $600 cheque recently. I should be happy - at least, that's what Doug Ford thinks - but I'm really not. In fact, I'm incensed! And I'm not the only one.
The cheque is a couple of years' back-dated refund for the license plate fees I have paid. I didn't pay them in error; it was the law of the province at the time. But Doug Ford, just a few weeks before an Ontario election in which he is standing for re-election, decided that should be changed. The way he tells it, the fees are a gross and unfair imposition, and it's only fair that we drivers and voters should get that hard earned money back.
In fact, the fees should be used to help repair our crumbling infrastructure and improve our criminally underfunded public transit. But Ford, in his wisdom, is deliberately turning away $1 billion in reliable income. This kind of thing apparently plays well in the 905 area of suburban Toronto and in rural areas where the car rules, which is where Ford's major voting block lives. The urban core, which is largely anti-Conservative, will be solidly against subsidizing car-drivers in this way. But then Ford is unlikely to win any votes in these areas anyway, particularly not using this kind of bare-faced bribery, and he is more interested in holding onto the rural/suburban votes that brought him to power four years ago.
As an exercise in cynical vote-buying, it does not get much more crass than this. The shame of it is that it will probably work.
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