Trudeau government throws travel ban back into Ford’s lap as Ottawa-Ontario pandemic split widens
Justin Trudeau's government has fired off a letter to Ontario this weekend, asking Doug Ford and his cabinet to identify which international travellers they want banned from entering the province.
The letter from Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc, shared with the Star, is a reply to Ford's escalating bid to pin the blame on Trudeau for the third wave of the pandemic, which included an attack ad launched by the provincial Conservatives last week.
We welcome your specific requests for further refinements to the mutually agreed list of acceptable international travellers," LeBlanc writes in the letter, sent formally to Health Minister Christine Elliott and Solicitor-General Sylvia Jones, in reply to a missive they dispatched to Ottawa in the last week of April.
The federal government stands ready, however to date we have not received such a request."
In the language of government, that translates to something along the lines of put your money where your mouth is."
LeBlanc's four-page letter lists in some detail all that the federal government has been doing for Ontario throughout the pandemic and essentially says that if Ford wants to lock down his province at the borders, he has to shoulder his own responsibility for those measures.
Trudeau also betrayed some frustration with Ford's government on the same score on Friday when he spoke to reporters and was asked about the ad.
Doug Ford asked me to restrict international students. There's been about 30,000 international students come into Ontario over the past months because they were approved by the Ontario government," Trudeau said.
If the Ontario government wants to do more to restrict the volume of people coming into Ontario, we are more than happy to work with them on it, but it's been a week since we've received that request directly from the premier (and) they haven't followed up, except with personal attacks which doesn't make sense and quite frankly won't help Ontarians."
This back-and-forth is a sign that the 2020 entente between the Ford and Trudeau governments is probably over. Gone are the days when Ford and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland held late-night therapy" calls and when the Ontario premier lavished daily praise on all Ottawa was doing to help out with the pandemic.
LeBlanc has been on the phone too to Ford in recent days, sources confirm, in efforts to de-escalate tensions.
In his letter, he praises Ford's government for shifting vaccinations to hot spots in the province and introducing sick-pay provisions for workers.
The difficult decisions your government has recently made, together with the most robust immunization campaign in Canadian history, will make all the difference," LeBlanc says.
The politicization of the pandemic along Ontario-versus-Ottawa lines is at once transparent and confounding. Transparent, in that most political observers have recognized Ford's anti-Ottawa salvos for what they are: an attempt to shift blame away from himself as Ontarians grow weary, frustrated and angry with the never-endemic.
But it's confounding as well, because Ford spent most of 2020 basking in high public-opinion standings, even from those who didn't vote for him, when he was working in harmony with the Trudeau government. Trudeau is still doing OK; Conservatives, not so much.
The latest polling from EKOS shows that Trudeau's Liberals now enjoy 42 per cent support in Ontario, while approval for Ford's handling of the pandemic has dropped from 80 per cent last year to just 19 per cent this month. In a post on Twitter highlighting the tumble, EKOS chief pollster Frank Graves said: That is unimaginably low. Biggest issue of last 80 years. Worst marks ever."
It has not been missed in Liberal Ottawa either that Ford's Conservatives have now installed Kory Teneycke as the full-time campaign chief, well ahead of the 2022 election. Teneycke is a veteran of the Stephen Harper Conservative era in Ottawa, which was marked by successive (and successful) attack-ad campaigns against Liberal leaders, including Trudeau.
Liberals haven't been beyond playing politics either with this latest impasse, putting out a fundraising pitch in reply to the provincial Conservatives' ad. Canadians very much expect politics to continue to function," the prime minister said on Friday when asked about his own party's wade into pandemic partisanship.
LeBlanc's letter is a government reply to what is also an evolving political dispute - an echo of pre-pandemic days when the Trudeau Liberals and Ford Conservatives were taking regular shots at each other.
When Ontarians say they're keen for life to get back to normal, though, it's not clear that's the old normal they want back.
Susan Delacourt is an Ottawa-based columnist covering national politics for the Star. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt