Chris Selley: Queen's Park flirts with maximum ‘Buy Canadian’ incoherence

Sometimes I wonder if Doug Ford and his quite accomplished team of political advisers are on a mission to discover the extent to which Ontarians will tolerate their province being run purely according to the inscrutable whims of their premier. Last week was one of those times. As is often the case with Ford — who doesn’t drink — alcohol was involved.

Manitoba Progressive Conservative MLA Derek Johnson represents the riding of Interlake—Gimli, where global liquor colossus Diageo makes Crown Royal whisky from the finest grains of the Canadian Prairies. Ford doesn’t like Diageo because it intends to move bottling for the American market from southwestern Ontario to the United States. At a toe-curling press conference in September, Ford poured a bottle of Crown Royal onto the ground to emphasize his displeasure, and threatened to yank the whisky from Ontario’s socialist liquor store shelves and bar rails. On Monday, he told reporters he “can’t wait” to do so, just as soon as the Ontario bottling facility closes.

In a quintessential piece of utter Ford-brand nonsense, he then advised Ontarians to “stock up” on Crown Royal — the Canadian whisky we should, in his mind, be boycotting.

In response, Johnson, the union representing Diageo workers in Gimli, and others attempted to remind Ford that his campaign against Crown Royal was “jeopardizing livelihoods” in Manitoba. There is no indication that will make any difference in the premier’s office and, one might argue, nor should it: He’s premier of Ontario, not prime minister of Canada.

But not so long ago, during the “elbows up” fraud, Ford found himself dubbed “Captain Canada” in the media for his patriotic performance (which is what it was) — and Danielle Smith dubbed a traitor for unabashedly protecting what she perceives as Alberta’s interests as zealously as Ford has always protected what he perceives as Ontario’s interests.

Also, banishing Crown Royal isn’t in Ontario’s interests. Free trade and open markets across the 49th parallel are. Opposing free trade is a funny way to support free trade, and Prime Minister Mark Carney is every bit as guilty of that as Ford.

That brings us to Toronto on Thursday, where Ford stood proudly in front of a handsome new train his government had purchased on Ontarians’ behalf. It is the revived Northlander, which will soon travel between Toronto, Timmins and Cochrane, via Muskoka and North Bay. The former Liberal government at Queen’s Park pulled the plug on the Northlander in 2012, citing enormous financial losses (which all Canadian passenger-rail services incur). Ontario Northland, the train’s former operator — a provincial Crown corporation — increased bus service to compensate.

The Tories promised to revive the train and, somewhat to my surprise, they followed through. (I may have harboured some mad delusion that a Progressive Conservative government would want to spend less than its Liberal predecessor, rather than more. Lesson learned!)

Service is supposed to start later this year. The published schedule takes nearly 11 hours, roughly the same as the bus. As it was when I rode that train as a lad, it will travel at night. It will leave Timmins for Toronto at 15 minutes after midnight, and arrive in Timmins from Toronto at 5:15 a.m. Unlike when I rode that train as a lad, there will be nowhere on the train to lie down and sleep. The emotional case for reviving the Northlander relies in large part on senior citizens travelling to medical appointments and such. Do senior citizens want to sit up all night on a train, sooner than sit up all day on a bus? I guess we’ll find out!

Future discomfort aside, though, Queen’s Park did this in relatively intelligent fashion. Rather than insist on some bespoke train for Northern Ontario, it piggybacked on Via Rail’s order of new trainsets from Siemens, whose rolling stock transports many Canadians from A to B: Calgary’s and Edmonton’s LRTs, for example, and Via Rail’s new trainsets on the Windsor-to-Quebec City corridor. Via’s new European-style trainsets — with a locomotive at each end — aren’t resounding successes as of yet. Notably, they have had trouble in snow. Via is currently affixing old locomotives to the new trainsets in hopes of getting them where they’re going. The new trainsets also aren’t big enough to automatically trigger level-crossing signals to the satisfaction of CN, which owns most of the rails on which Via Rail operates — and many of rails on which the Northlander will operate. (“We are working with rail industry partners to explore solutions,” a Ministry of Transportation spokesperson said in an email.)

The main point, though, is that those Via and Northlander trains were built in California. And that’s absolutely fine. But why does California outrank Manitoba at Queen’s Park?

Ford’s “Buy Canadian” shtick always meant “Buy Ontarian.” But these filthy American trains satisfy neither criteria whatsoever. American hooch has been banished from Ontario’s socialist liquor market for ages. If that train was a bottle of whisky, Ford would have poured it out on the sidewalk and expected applause for doing so.

This is no way to run a province. It’s no way to run a country. If we want free trade, we should act like it.

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com