Why we simply can’t afford Doug Ford

I would like to persuade as many people as possible to vote for their economic interests and to defeat Doug Ford.

Under his leadership, people can’t afford to rent, to own, or to get around. Increasingly, people with good jobs are busting their grocery budgets. Imagine those front-line workers earning minimum wage and facing the same rising grocery bills, but now also double their rent.

Defenders of the government will say problems like high gas prices are beyond the control of the province. How the province responds to global events, however, is fully within the premier’s grasp.

The housing affordability crisis leading to encampments was made much worse when Ford amended the Residential Tenancies Act creating an economic incentive for landlords to evict existing tenants.

The average electric vehicle will increase household energy demand by one third. A typical Ontario household operates 1.5 vehicles. We’re all going to be paying for more electricity even if the rates don’t go up — and they will go up.

Where will that electricity come from? Ford is going to burn natural gas. It’s true that while people will pay more in electricity to charge a car battery, they’ll save on gasoline. However, gas-powered generating plants will now compete on the market for the same fuel most

heat their homes, charge their batteries and that farmers will use to grow crops.

Ford didn’t create the energy crisis, but his killing of renewable energy agreements out of ham-fisted ideology have made it worse. His government spent a quarter of a billion of Ontario tax dollars to tear up energy agreements because, he said, we didn’t need the energy. Apparently, we do need it. Get ready to pay more for everything. It gets worse, too.

For most of us, food comes from the grocery store. It gets to the store via nodes of distribution interconnected around the world. Many farmers don’t feed cities so much as they do the global supply chain. There is a global food crisis that may be unprecedented in scale. It is driven by the war in Europe and global warming. India, the world’s second largest producer of wheat, for example, is facing losses attributed to a heat wave that stretches to Africa.

That’s not the premier’s fault. Of course not. It is Ford’s decision, though, to pave over farmland and habitat to build more highways through the Greenbelt.

Those highways will erode the Greenbelt from within, forming ribbons of sprawl alongside the pavement laid over fields owned by Ford’s billionaire donors.

Surely, it’s unreasonable to look at the state of the world and decide to lay waste to Ontario’s ability to feed ourselves. So much of the best farmland in Ontario is already gone, and Ford wants to take it all.

After four years of Ford everything has gone up. No, he is not responsible for the events of the world, but he is responsible for how we manage them and he has left us ill-prepared.

For housing he has left us with encampments. For energy he has left us with few options but to pay more. You will compete on gas prices to heat your home with the electrical generation necessary to charge 9,000pound Hummers and with Europeans contracting new gas supply. You will pay more for everything at the grocery store while watching savings and local food security shrink away.

We can’t afford Ford. If for no other reason, reject Ford to save the Greenbelt. It’s in everyone’s best economic interests.