The Superior Court isn’t ridiculous, Doug Ford’s cascading failures are

Premier Doug Ford has verbally abused an Ontario Superior Court Justice for a decision he didn’t like. The ruling says the Region of Waterloo won’t be allowed to remove people living at an encampment in downtown Kitchener because it violates residents’ Charter rights. After calling the ruling ridiculous and crazy, Ford said he’d like to find out where the judge lives so he could get people to camp in his backyard. Doug Ford’s outburst was an intemperate reaction to another court decision he doesn’t like. He’s done it before, and it is a troubling pattern of behaviour.

The court ruling didn’t tell Waterloo region it can’t do anything about encampments. It didn’t say people can camp wherever they want to. The ruling cited options for the Region to find another site similarly accessible to city services and pointed to acceptable examples in Thunder Bay and London. In fact, the judge helpfully pointed out solutions to their issue that would not violate Charter rights.

People living in encampments are among the most vulnerable in society, dealing with health and poverty issues. Kicking them out of parks and ravines only sends them elsewhere, often onto transit or other public places. There is insufficient shelter space, which is unsafe anyway, and no affordable housing. Politicians have absolutely failed them at every level of government. Public servants have made some progress, but it has often been cancelled by political bosses.  

Ford has a particularly bad record. Politically, he has won elections. As the head of government, he has failed, most particularly in a central obligation of government, the duty to protect. He has been negligent in this and is guilty of a dereliction of duty. Rather than protecting the most vulnerable, he has chosen to kick them when they are down. And he’s done it time and again.

• Rather than finding a balance between keeping parks available for neighbours and creating housing for unhoused people, he has enacted a “Safer Municipalities Act” to impose arrests and fines on unhoused people. When they moved to transit stations and vehicles, he expanded the harsh measures there. The Association of Municipalities of Ontario estimates that more than 85,000 people experienced known homelessness in Ontario in 2025, an increase of 50 per cent since 2021. Just over half of people who experienced homelessness were considered chronically homeless. The number of people experiencing homelessness in Ontario is projected to more than double by 2035.  
• Rather than expanding the proven remedy of safe consumption sites for addicted people, many of them our former soldiers and workers, he has kicked supports out from under them, causing many to fail and some to die, and putting a strain on the health care system. According to the Ontario Drug Policy Research Network, the number of suspected toxicities treated by EMS in Ontario increased from 604 in Q1 of 2025 to 1,024 in Q3 of 2025, an increase of nearly 70 per cent. A 2025 report from Toronto Public Health warned that the Ontario government’s decision “will reduce access to an evidence-based clinical healthcare service leading to an anticipated increase in preventable fatal and non-fatal overdoses.” Indeed, people are not safer; they are dying.  
• Rather than making sure welfare payments are sufficient for recipients to get a foothold to climb out of poverty, he has kept payments too low to help enough. Maytree’s recent analysis of the adequacy of social assistance benefits found that, in 2024, all four of the household types that we analyzed in Ontario had incomes below Canada’s Official Poverty Line (the Market Basket Measure) and the Deep Income Poverty threshold. Government data obtained by Maytree through a Freedom of Information request found that, as of July 2025, more than 30,000 people receiving OW and ODSP benefits experienced homelessness, an increase of 72 per cent since July 2019. 

Given his long tenure as Premier, his cascading failures have made him the ridiculous one. While he never passes up a chance to talk into a microphone, he also never gets anything done. Ontario government ads tout phantom successes: protecting Ontario, building for the future, making middle-class neighbourhoods safe. This is a government that does little and leaves the most vulnerable more desperate by the day. And Ford wants to make this public relations facade exempt from scrutiny by weakening access to information about what is actually going on.

Fortunately, some of those cats are actually out of the bag, as the dire statistics above indicate. The judgment in the Waterloo case was full of data, which led to the ruling. Looked at over time, all this information illuminates the deterioration of conditions for Ontarians, not just the most vulnerable but everyone in precarious jobs, families strained by caregiving, workers with inadequate retirement savings headed for late-life poverty, and those unlucky enough to have had a bad boss, a bad spouse, or bad health.  

Ford doesn’t like the Charter and wants to use the disabling part of it, the notwithstanding clause. What he doesn’t understand is that the Charter is necessary to protect Canadians against the negligence and casual vandalism of politicians like him. The Charter is there to protect vulnerable people, not underpin careless and inept political leaders.

Democracy in Canada is not just elections and the exercise of power. It is about people having access to recourse when power has punished them. Viable and timely access to recourse would make politicians weigh their actions wisely, to fulfill their duty to protect and duty of care, lest they suffer the consequences of having their actions aired in the public forum of a courtroom. This would provide meaningful accountability.  

When Canadians elect political leaders, they don’t abandon everything to whatever that politician wants. Elections are blunt instruments, usually waged on a narrow set of issues, so ongoing monitoring and challenges are necessary. Some of this comes from opposition parties in the legislature, some from the media, and some must come from legal challenges. Without that access to recourse, we are left with what journalist Jeffrey Simpson once called a friendly dictatorship. In Ford’s case, it isn’t so friendly when he is kicking people when they’re down or denigrating other key actors in our democracy, like judges.

Those people Ford kicks when they are down may be our parent, child, sister, or friend. They are us. Their struggles aren’t an accident, but a symptom of neglect. After a decade in power, they are Doug Ford’s Ontarians. He should be ashamed of himself.