Sandford Borins

The Ford Government, as reported in the Toronto Star, is going ahead with its plan to require gasoline stations to post stickers denouncing the federal government’s carbon price by the end of August. As I discussed in my post on June 19, the Ford Government gave citizens until July 9 to comment on that initiative.…

I will be on holiday for a few weeks, so I won’t be blogging for a few weeks. Here are some things I will be working on when I return. My website is in need of a bit of a refresh. I will be trying to increase subscriptions with slightly more persistent nudging than is…

When I was at Kathleen Wynne’s concession speech a year ago, a media type asked me to prognosticate about the Ford Government, and I predicted Ford would be gone in two years. The reporter looked at me like I had two heads, but exactly a year into Ford’s mandate, the odds of his departure have…

The Ford Government is getting set to roll out its controversial gas pump stickers. The stickers, like the ads it is already running on radio and television, tell us the average payment in 2022 under the federal government’s carbon price without adding that most of the payment would be rebated. To implement the sticker policy,…

There is an obvious contradiction when a government slaps “Open for Business” signs all over the highways while it is passing legislation that unilaterally and without compensation breaks contracts with the private sector. That is what the Ford Government did to firms that bought credits in the Wynne Government’s cap-and-trade greenhouse gas emission market and…

Without a doubt, the most successful deficit-reduction exercise in recent Canadian history was the Chretien Government’s Program Review of 1994-97. As discussed in David Good’s magisterial study of Canadian fiscal policy, The Politics of Public Money, the program review had several important features that contributed to its success. After the Mexican currency crisis of December…

Doug Ford campaigned on the claim that Ontario’s budget could easily be balanced by finding 4 percent “efficiencies” in every government department. It turns out, of course, that the voters were sold a pig in a poke, and the budget cuts have gone far beyond easily-found efficiencies and included deep and painful program cuts. One…

In my previous post, I said that Premier Ford would be a wild card in the relationship between the universities and his government, as he could readily attack professors as elitists. We actually saw a precursor to such a political attack the day after I posted this. Here’s how it happened. On May 14, Globe…

If you look at the Ford Government’s policies towards Ontario universities and connect the dots, the inescapable conclusion is that it has declared war. It wants to reshape the universities to conform to a radical vision, and it is trying to use funding cuts, incentives, and regulations to achieve it. That vision is a university…

The Ford Government’s standard justification for its actions is that they are “for the people.” The government’s policies are, apparently, what the people want, an expression of the will of the people. Three such new initiatives are making alcoholic beverages more widely available, increasing opportunities for gambling, and increasing the speed limit on major (400-series…

The Ford Government is showing in the Budget Implementation Act (Bill 100) how it intends to deal with post-secondary institution staff who receive both a salary and a pension. Its proposed legislation for “reduction, limitation, and alteration of compensation” is on pages 132 and 133 of the pdf (or 116 and 117 of the bill).…