Doug Ford, the great flip-flopper: Ed Keenan and Martin Regg Cohn debate the premier's Greenbelt reversal and the merits of changing your mind

Ed Keenan: The thing with Doug Ford as premier is that he has been forced — or has been willing to eventually be forced — to sort of back down and do a complete reversal on things. I remember before the pandemic, before I left for the United States. So we're talking a long time ago. But he was implementing cuts to the Toronto Public Health Department and then sort of after a lot of public pressure and outcry, he turned around on that. But this is a case where now he's reversed course twice. But it seems fairly obvious that in his mind, you should open up the Greenbelt, or he would like to, because that's what he was promising privately before he was forced to turn around. After obeisance to public opinion, to say, “no, no, it's untouchabl,” he did come around again. He dug in his heels, even as those integrity commissioner and Auditor General reports were coming out. And the reports from the Toronto Star and the Narwhal and other journalists that showed just how dodgy looking this whole thing was. He was digging in his heels and saying that this was the right thing to do and that, you know, the Greenbelt was some kind of semi-communist ploy. So obviously, that's what he believes. And so the question now is, are voters ever going to believe him again, like when he says it's untouchable, I've learned my lesson. I won't touch it. He said he learned this lesson before.

Martin Regg Cohn: Yeah. And so this is a podcast is a chance for you and me to dig a little deeper about maybe even political philosophy for half a second. So I believe it's okay to change your mind once in a while. I don't believe you have to be doctrinaire or have some sort of not just ideology, but you have to be ideological about it or an ideologue where you just rigidly have this this outlook on life. It's okay. Dalton McGuinty changed his mind a few times, not just on gas plants, but on other stuff when he would say, you know what, I made a decision and now I'm realizing I was wrong. That's okay.

Keenan: Not only is it okay, it's good. I would just say it's often good if you've made the wrong decision and you realize that you shouldn't fear you're looking like a flip flopper. You should do the right thing.

Regg Cohn: Yeah, this is this is a podcast on politics that I life right? Seriously, it's okay to change your mind. No one's perfect, as the premier keeps saying. But when you when you don't believe what you're doing and when you are fibbing and when you are kind of playing a game and it gets kind of tedious. And so what I meant about that, that little history and recap was that for the last five weeks, we've heard the Premier say over and over again, when given the chance — because journalists can be merciful — when given the chance to atone, to reverse himself, to explain, he just tried to pretend that this was the right thing to do. And it isn't the right thing to do, because look what he says: that the Greenbelt is akin to what they do in North Korea or communist China, that it's a land grab, that it's a fact that it's confiscatory. He's relitigating the Greenbelt. Look, the Greenbelt was a controversial idea two decades ago. It just says, look, we're codifying for the sake of certainty. We are codifying that in perpetuity, barring some special change, this land will stay agricultural. That's all the Greenbelt essentially did. Doug Ford is philosophically opposed to it and politically opposed to it and has been kind of trying to play both sides. You could not have been more unequivocal in 2018 when he said, I've heard the people, it will not be touched. You can't then go back and say, even if you didn't like the Greenbelt, you can't go back and say sorry, changed my mind. I was just kidding. So that's the problem there, is that we've had to endure five weeks of him playing with words, frankly, and saying that that we have a housing crisis and there are 500,000 people coming in every year to Canada. So we really have no choice. We're bound to do this, when in fact, his very own housing advisory task force, which included Tim Hudak, a fairly right leaning member of and leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, was on that advisory panel saying, you don't need Greenbelt land to create new housing. You need to fix the roadblocks that are all over the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area. You don't need a little band of Greenbelt two to create land. All you're doing with the Greenbelt play here is take a shortcut. It's a disruption and a distraction to try to pretend that you can create thousands of new homes on virgin land. That's not going to solve the problem.

Listen to the full This Matters episode.