Month: April 2026

Let me be clear: on the underlying question, Doug Ford was right.

Every serious executive in this country, every CEO running a national operation, every big-city mayor, every premier who has to be in Thunder Bay in the morning and Windsor by dinner understands the same elementary truth. Time is the one resource you cannot manufacture. And that’s why a plane is not a perk. It is a tool. The prime minister has one. The federal cabinet uses it. Major bank CEOs have access to one. Heads of government across the Western world have one. The reason is not vanity. The reason is that a leader who spends 11 hours on a commercial flight with a layover at Pearson is not leading.

Ontario is the economic engine of Confederation. Its premier runs a government larger, by GDP, than all but a handful of countries. Ford’s own stated rationale: that the province is geographically vast, that single-prop aircraft are the grim alternative for northern travel, that a secure aircraft matters when you’re flying into hostile Trump-era trade meetings, is not unreasonable. It is, in fact, precisely the case that should have been made to taxpayers before the purchase, not after it.

That was the mistake. Not the plane. The ambush.

But here’s what’s important: when Ford realized the politics had turned past the point of recovery, he did exactly the right thing. He killed the decision. The plane went back to Bombardier. The full $28.9 million came back to the province. No loss to the taxpayer. He apologized for how the transaction was rolled out, he refused to apologize for the underlying logic, and he moved on. Total elapsed time from announcement to reversal: four days.

He ended the game.

I’ve just written a book on crisis management, and if there is a single lesson drawn from decades of watching leaders either survive their bad days or be destroyed by them, it is this one. When a story turns, you have one job: compress the news cycle. Get ahead of it. Deny it oxygen. The single worst thing a political leader can do when a decision has gone sideways is to defend the indefensible one news day at a time, bleeding credibility in daily increments until the only remaining question is why it took so long to do what was obvious from the start.

Think of the leaders who got this right. Think of the ones who didn’t.

Equifax waited a month to acknowledge its 2017 data breach. By the time executives spoke, the story had already hardened into “cover-up,” and they spent years in front of Congress paying for that hesitation. Ticketmaster, more recently, waited so long to disclose a massive hack that the hackers themselves broke the news. Buckingham Palace operated for decades under the “never complain, never explain” rule— right up until the former prince Andrew’s behaviour around his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein curdled into something the Crown decided there could no longer tolerate as it had become something from which they could not recover.

In every case, the leader or institution believed that holding the line was the safer play.

In every case, they were dead wrong.

The fact is that the modern news cycle does not reward stubbornness. It rewards clarity. A bad decision acknowledged quickly is a one-day story. A bad decision defended becomes a week. A bad decision defended badly becomes a referendum on your judgment itself.

Ford, to his credit, saw where the story was going and changed course before the narrative could calcify. Over the weekend, the calls flooded his cellphone. The “gravy plane” label was already airborne. The auditor general was about to be asked to investigate. By Sunday, he had agreed to sell. By Wednesday, he confirmed the money was back in the treasury. The oxygen was cut.

Make no mistake: There is a political cost to reversing course. Interim Liberal leader John Fraser is already calling him out of touch. Opposition leader Marit Stiles is pushing for an audit anyway. The penguin line will get quoted for weeks. None of it matters much. The damage from a four-day climbdown is an order of magnitude smaller than the damage from a four-month defence.

This is the thing most politicians never learn, and the thing Ford, despite the pundits eyerolling about his style, has learned better than most of his peers. He governs with the same instinct he campaigns. Read the voter. Respect the voter. When you are offside the voter, stop being offside the voter. Don’t explain. Don’t litigate. Move.

Here’s the thing: the premier was right about the substance of the plane. He was wrong about the plane’s politics and the communications around it. And when he figured out which of those things mattered more to the people who elected him, he acted on it in a weekend.

That is not weakness. That is discipline.

Other political leaders, watching from their capitals across the country, should take note. The premier who spent years being caricatured as impulsive just executed a textbook reversal — no money lost, no lingering contract, no dragged-out defence. The jet is back with Bombardier. The story is running out of runway.

And the rest of Ontario’s agenda, the one that actually matters to the people who elected him, gets to move forward.

Doug Ford read the voter – then moved on. That’s the story.

By the time this column appears in print, the Liberal party will have wrapped up its convention in Montreal.

It promises to have been quite the celebration, and with good reason. The party is riding high in the polls, drawing support from unexpected quarters, and, by all accounts, is on track to secure a majority government following this week’s byelections. It has all the makings of a victory parade.

Cue the rain.

With this momentum, the national media has begun poking holes in the Liberal “big tent,” questioning whether it can plausibly accommodate politicians with sharply divergent ideological histories.

These are valid concerns. But let’s not stray too far from the big picture.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has engineered a remarkable political turnaround for the Liberal party. The fact it is being reshaped into a broader, more ideologically elastic coalition should not come as a surprise. Nor should the willingness to welcome floor crossers.

Make no mistake: a majority is worth securing. Beyond the basic stability of not living vote to vote, control over parliamentary committees provides the government with the ability to set agendas, manage scrutiny, and advance legislation with far greater certainty.

But majorities, especially those assembled in unconventional ways, come with their own challenges. And mitigating these challenges depends on the hard, unglamorous work of caucus management.

It is not a headline-grabbing skill. But it is an essential one. Because the effort required to attract floor crossers and secure a governing majority can quickly turn pyrrhic if it produces a caucus that is unwieldy, internally inconsistent, or prone to fracture.

Prime Minister Mark Carney says any MP who joins his caucus must adhere to Liberal values, including support for abortion and LGBTQ rights.

What these floor crossings ultimately reveal is something simple: politicians are people just like us. And in recent months, we’ve seen several make the calculation that influence in government is preferable to obscurity in opposition. But that same instinct reveals something less flattering, a willingness, in some cases, to abandon former allegiances for a blend of conviction, opportunity and self-interest.

In a slim majority Parliament, that matters. Backbench MPs, particularly those with independent streaks or divergent ideological roots, can quickly become centres of leverage. At the same time, slim majorities can, in some ways, be easier to manage than large ones. Big majorities breed complacency. They also prove the adage that idle hands are the devil’s workshop. Smaller ones demand discipline. They require focus. They force governments to pay attention, both to their opponents and, critically, to themselves.

And it is precisely that discipline that will now be tested.

Because this is, at its core, a test of political leadership for Carney. It’s not economic stewardship or policy design, but rather the craft of holding together a coalition of competing interests, personalities and ambitions.

It is a skill every great prime minister has had to master. Jean Chrétien, for example, managed to keep both “orange or red Liberals” and “blue Liberals” around the same cabinet table, no small feat. Brian Mulroney, for his part, held together a coalition of Quebec nationalists and Western conservatives long enough to deliver transformational change. Eventually, those tensions proved unsustainable. But that is precisely the point. Managing the internal politics of a party riding high is every bit as important as managing the external political battlefield.

Which brings us back to the present moment.

The differences between figures like former Ontario NDP deputy leader Doly Begum (who might well be elected as a Liberal MP in Scarborough Southwest this week) and newly minted Liberal Marilyn Gladu are not trivial. They are real. And over time, they will need to be reconciled, managed, or, at the very least, contained.

History suggests that is easier said than done. And it is in moments of strength that these pressures begin to build.

Because when the polls are strong, when momentum is on your side, and when your opponents are preoccupied with their own internal divisions, the greatest risk is not from outside. It is from within.

History, after all, is littered with governments undone not by their opponents, but by themselves.