Scott Stinson: Doug Ford tweaks his cabinet and shows his winning hand

When Caroline Mulroney announced her surprise decision to “step away” from politics in the spring, there was one thing about which almost everyone around Queen’s Park agreed: she was getting out while the getting was good.

Premier Doug Ford and his cabinet had spent weeks getting battered over his spectacularly ill-advised purchase of a private jet for the ease of his travels. His Progressive Conservatives had been even with, and sometimes trailing, the provincial Liberals, who don’t have a permanent leader. It’s never a great sign when you are losing a popularity contest to Random Liberal TBD.

Rarely a day went by that the opposition parties didn’t accuse the Ford government of being stale or tired or both. There was speculation that a cabinet shuffle was imminent to try to inject some new life into the wobbly Tories.

Three months later, the cabinet shuffle has finally happened. But in the interim just about everything else about Ford’s situation has changed.

With the legislature on an extended summer break, and still not scheduled to return until late October, talk of the gravy plane has subsided. The controversy over PC expense scandals, in which more than a dozen MPPs admitted to charging taxpayers for Toronto hotel rooms that were within commuting distance to their ridings, has similarly fizzled out. If the legislature were sitting, Ford and his cabinet would be getting grilled daily about who spent what and where on what luxury hotels. But it isn’t, and so they are not.

More significantly, Ford has been given renewed purpose by one Donald Trump, who ratcheted up his trade war with a new round of tariffs on Canada. Trump continues to be a political gift to all who oppose him (Republicans excluded), and Ford’s off-the-cuff and off-colour remarks about the U.S. president, calling him a loser who could kiss his ass, were a perfect reflection of the prevailing Canadian mood. Ford’s temper can cause him to bluster his way into indefensible positions at times, but in vowing to fight against Trump’s bully tactics he took a stronger position than just about any Canadian politician.

And while the precise details for why Prime Minister Mark Carney walked away from a potential trade deal with the Trump administration last month may never be known, it seems clear that Ford’s unwillingness to accept a bad agreement was at least part of it. Indeed, if Carney had trial-ballooned a potential deal only to discover that the leader of the country’s biggest province wasn’t going to go along with it, then Ford may have inadvertently forced the prime minister into taking a harder line against the United States than he had planned. Whatever the actual sequence of events, the end result is that Carney is somehow still rising in the polls. And Ford, while starting from a much lower point, has experienced a Trump bump of his own.

Not only have his polling numbers improved, but there was the little matter of three provincial byelections last week, two of which the Progressive Conservatives held onto while the NDP held the third. Those votes were inconsequential in a balance-of-power sense, with Ford’s PCs continuing to hold a strong majority of seats at the legislature, but they blew a hole in any notion that the Liberals were rounding into form as a serious political operation. Byelections like those, for any opposition party, are a free hit, a chance to encourage voters to send a message to the government without any fear of actually toppling it. The once-mighty Liberals were instead shut out, despite the rampant popularity of their federal cousins in the province, suggesting that the next Ontario Liberal leader is not close to inheriting a government-in-waiting.

Three months ago, as Mulroney patiently ignored questions about whether she was plotting a path to her father’s old job in Ottawa, or indeed whether she would try a Queen’s Park comeback at some point, it seemed at least possible that Ford wouldn’t be long for his role, either. The premier kept insisting that he planned to stick around for a shot at an unprecedented fourth mandate and said he had internal numbers that showed his party was more popular than shown in those public polls that he didn’t trust in the first place. But he wouldn’t have been the first politician to head to the cottage for the summer and then just decide that the day job was no longer worth it. A walk at the lake, if you will.

Anyone betting on that outcome was wrong. Thursday’s cabinet shuffle was less an overhaul than a tweak, leaving most senior posts unchanged and instead filling vacated roles. Rumours of Doug Ford’s political demise were, it seems, premature. The premier has his Captain Canada hat back on, and he quite likes the fit.