Prime Minister Doug Ford?

When does a $11 billion corporate tax giveaway get classified as “tariff support”? 

When it’s proposed by Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

Legacy media, as part of their career-long obsession with appearing politically unbiased, do favours for him like this all the time, because they love people like Doug. He’s a classic “I’m sticking up for the little guy, too much government, lower taxes” conservative who doesn’t likely give a single solitary shit about the possibility of a trans kid playing basketball and would probably wince at the idea of sending immigrants to a foreign gulag. You might lose intellectual credibility by giving credit to Dougie, but you won’t lose your soul.

Moreover, he’s at least nominally affable. He comes to his bad conservative ideas honestly, as someone who might actually have a life outside of politics.

This matters because Doug Ford is almost certainly going to be the future, if not next, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. Though the federal election is still weeks away, it’s Mark Carney’s to lose. And every person in the country is going to say the reason Poilievre lost, ultimately, is because he’s more a one-note attack dog than a leader, an ideological robot whose alpha male transformation only fooled the con base who were already knee-deep in the koolaid.

Meanwhile, Doug is laser focused on jobs jobs jobs. All about jobs. And after four years of Trump laying waste to the global economy, when people realize that even seasoned economists can’t halt the machinations of global commerce, they’ll see Doug talking about “too much nonsense in Ottawa,” and legacy media will write long love letters about Doug’s avoidance of “divisive issues” distasteful to most Canadians who just want to hear about jobs jobs jobs.

So I’m calling it now. In four years time, Doug Ford in a landslide. The only wildcard is whatever the NDP decide to do post Jagmeet.