On the afternoon of June 8th, I loaded my Konica with some Ilford HP5 black and white film and went for a walk. It’s part of a nostalgic journey that sees me revisiting a practice I first took up 45 years ago when my father gave me a 35mm Yashica. My walk was winding down when I bumped into my next door neighbour on Bloor Street. As we chatted, he interrupted me to say: Isn’t that Doug Ford? Sure enough, Ontario’s premier-elect was glad-handing passers-by outside the offices of the National Post where, presumably, he was going for an interview. I excused myself and ran into traffic. Shooting with 35mm film and a Tamron 70-150mm lens, the results are old-school, a throwback to simpler times, just like Doug Ford.
On June 7th, 2018, 58.4% of eligible Ontario voters showed up at polling stations. 40.5% of those voters handed Doug Ford and his Progressive Conservative party a majority government. In other words, Doug Ford received his mandate from 23.65% of the electorate. With characteristic lack of humility, Ford claims this as a ringing endorsement of his hard-right platform. In fairness, the Liberal Party whom he defeated can in no way be understood as a defender of liberalism, not in the traditional sense of the word. Trump extremism has delivered to the world a tectonic shudder that has shifted the entire political landscape to the right. But long before that, Ontario’s Liberal Party adopted talk of fiscal restraint, privatization, and austerity, as if these were concepts native to the centre, or even to the left.
I like my “Shifty-Eyed Doug” which captures pretty much what I think of the man. The night of the election, I ran into a woman who grew up in Etobicoke and she recalled trips to buy drugs from the Ford brothers. For legal reasons, I don’t want to come right out and say “Doug Ford was a drug dealer”, but there are so many stories circulating in the GTA smog that people generally take it as a given: Doug Ford’s claims of business acumen and entrepreneurship stem largely from his experience dealing drugs. I expect he’s had many years of practice making this particular look.
Like his orange-haired mentor to the south, Mr. Ford has a tendency to run at the mouth without help from facts. His campaign was littered with proposals that simply aren’t possible. He promised to save the province money by slashing the CBC budget. Unfortunately for Mr. Ford, the CBC is a federal institution. He demonstrated an appalling ignorance of a fact which any grade 10 student would learn in their Civics class. He also promised to save the province billions without reducing jobs or services, but he provided no costing of his plan. No matter. He’s had years of experience as an entrepreneur.
Doug Ford wants to take us back to the Mike Harris years which were strongly influenced by Thatcherism. We can expect union-busting and mass layoffs of teachers and healthcare workers. These austerity measures will be be coupled with pro-business concessions which will magically create jobs (though not teaching and healthcare jobs). We’ve been here before and we know (or would know if only we remembered) how it plays out. The middle class loses ground and, in its frustration, becomes susceptible to all sorts of explanations which, even a short time ago, were unthinkable.
I didn’t take too many shots. After all, film costs money and, quite frankly, this guy isn’t worth it. He stopped his glad-handing and turned to enter the National Post building. A Native woman passed, and when she recognized him, started to shout at him. He was a racist, misogynistic son-of-a-bitch who didn’t give a fuck for First Nations. She saw me smiling and laughed and we fist-bumped. Sure, it’s one thing for me to complain about Doug Ford. I’m a white man roughly the same age as him. But there are a lot of people in this province who have far more reason to complain.
