mdyetmetaphor.com

Hmmm… Missing: One moral compass. If found, return to Queens Park, Office of the Premier.

Once again Ontario Premier Doug Ford is making headlines spewing controversial and insensitive remarks every time he steps in front of the camera. No one likes publicity more than Ford. Think he is just telling like it is for the general good of all? Think again.

Ford has taken aim at the homeless in Ontario with remarks so insensitive they are staggering. He told reporters that those who are homeless and are healthy, should “get off your ass and start working like everyone else is.” He has suggested that people living in encampments “just need to get a job to lift themselves out of poverty.”

Doug, listen and listen well. No one chooses to be out of work and broke. No one chooses to be homeless. No one chooses to live in an encampment. People find themselves in this predicament because society has left them behind. Some of them have disabilities or special needs that cripple them.

Shame on you for trying to get political mileage out of the disadvantaged.

Ford has also taken aim at immigrants. Recently, after a shooting at Toronto Jewish girls school, he accused people of bringing problems from everywhere else in the world to the province. Adding: “…don’t come to Canada if you’re going to start terrorizing neighbourhoods like this.”

If that remark sounds disturbingly familiar, it is because it echoes the orange-faced guy south of the border who is trying to get elected president a second time by promising mass deportation of immigrants some of whom he accuses of eating cats and dogs in Springfield.

Ford has also targeted environmentalists. He wants to fast-track the environmental impact assessment standing in the way of his promise to build Highway 413 across the top of the GTA connecting Halton, Peel and York regions. His remarks on this front:

“There’s hundreds of thousands of people stuck in their cars, backed up from here to Timbuktu, and you’re worried about a grasshopper jumping across the highway.” That is a gross oversimplification of the issue. The proposed highway could have devastating impacts on Ontario’s protected Greenbelt as well as on rivers, farms and many endangered species.

Doug, listen and listen well. Many of us care about grasshoppers and the habitats that support them. If you took the time to educate yourself, you would learn that there is a direct link between human health and wellbeing – and in fact the sustainability of humans as a species – and the health of natural ecosystems.

Why is Ford sounding off so indiscriminately now? It is all about prepping for an election. The next federal government election will happen no later than October 2025. The Trudeau Liberals are on their way out and the Poilievre Conservatives are poised to take over.

Ford knows that the province of Ontario does not like to have the same party in power provincially and federally. So he is seeding the ground for an early provincial election to get ahead of the political swing that will be happening at the federal level… not to mention getting ahead of the outcome of the RCMP criminal investigation into his Greenbelt scandal.

Politics is by nature a self-serving organism. The primary purpose of any government is to get itself re-elected. But there is a dividing line between political opportunism and plain old lust for power. A political leader must have a moral compass to prevent him or her from crossing that line. Ford lost his moral compass some time ago. Sadly, once it is lost, is rarely ever recovered.

~  Now Available Online from Amazon, Chapters Indigo or Barnes & Noble: Hunting Muskie, Rites of Passage – Stories by Michael Robert Dyet

~ Michael Robert Dyet is also the author of Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel (now out of print) which was a double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’s website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com .

~ Subscribe to Michael’s Metaphors of Life Journal aka That Make Me Go Hmmm at its’ internet home www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog2. Instructions for subscribing are provided in the Subscribe to this Blog: How To instructions page in the right sidebar. If you’re reading this post on another social networking site, come back regularly to my page for postings once a week

Tags:   Doug Ford · metaphor · moral compassNo Comments