Time for Doug Ford to face reality: CUPE Ontario

TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Only three weeks into his 21-week summer break, Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s popularity is crashing. But his response hasn’t been to reverse any of his government’s disastrous decisions or listen to the concerns of ordinary Ontarians.

Instead, he cries “fake” at a recent poll that finds him to be Canada’s least popular premier and casts slurs on the methodology of a professional polling firm.

“This time Ford has not only borrowed from the Trump playbook; he’s stolen one of Trump’s favourite phrases as well,” said newly elected CUPE Ontario President Yolanda McClean.

Ford’s behaviour isn’t new; it’s part of an established pattern of denying reality and gaslighting the rest of us. Ford had the same reaction to three public opinion polls carried out by Abacus Data for CUPE Ontario, the province’s largest union, over the past nine months. Those surveys found:

• a majority of people of Ontario agree the real problem in schools is provincial underfunding and understand that the Ford government has underfunded schools by billions of dollars since 2018;

• more than half of Ontarians believe Labour Minister David Piccini should resign or be fired from Doug Ford’s cabinet because of the stream of scandals around the misuse of the government’s Skills Development Fund;

• 60% of the people of Ontario oppose Doug Ford’s recent changes to the province’s Freedom of Information laws to exempt the premier, cabinet ministers and their entire offices from requests for access to information by journalists and the public.

After CUPE Ontario released that last poll, Ford was reported as claiming that the poll was biased because “CUPE hates” him.

His latest reaction prompted McClean to observe, “Public opinion polls, just like the protest by workers at Ford’s political picnic this past weekend, are the people of Ontario judging Ford on what his government is doing and they’re telling him very clearly: you’re failing, Doug.”

She pointed to a recent report from the Financial Accountability Office that shows the Ford government is “shortchanging every one of us in Ontario by at least $3,200 a year, compared to the average of every other province.” Similarly, CUPE Ontario’s own analysis shows that under the Ford Conservatives, Ontario is last among all the provinces in per-person spending.

McClean had a final message for Ford: “Doug, if you want to be more popular, do more popular things. Stop privatizing our health care. Keep our water public. Bring in a wealth tax to pay for what the people of Ontario need their government to do for them: properly fund our hospitals, our long-term care, our schools and universities, our social services and our towns and cities.”

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