A new cabinet of multi-taskers

·        EDITORIAL OPINION

 Jul 2, 2018

DOUG Ford takes office as Ontario’s new Progressive Conservative premier on a promise of doing politics differently. By that he generally means a much leaner government than that of his predecessor Liberals.

Aside from a rash of cost-cutting measures even before he was sworn in Friday (including the ill-advised end of household energy-saving rebates) Ford’s first act on his first day was to name a cabinet. There are 21 people in charge of Ontario ministries versus 28 under former premier Kathleen Wynne. Four of them have two jobs. One, of particular interest to the North, has three.

Some will see this as an improvement to a top-heavy Liberal administration. Others, however, will worry that too much is being expected of too few people.

Many in the private sector are painfully aware of what can happen when reduced staff numbers are forced to carry out the same amount of work. Efficiency is good to a point. After that it becomes self-defeating. Quality suffers, burnout is a reality, things that need doing don’t get done.

Has Ford cut too close to the bone?

Take Greg Rickford. The new Kenora-Rainy River MPP has previous experience as a minister of natural resources in the federal cabinet of Stephen Harper. He didn’t get that job on Friday. He got three other ones.

Rickford is the new energy minister at a time of upheaval in the energy sector. The fossil fuel industry and proponents of clean energy are at loggerheads on any number of fronts. Ford has pooh-poohed global warming by announcing he’ll end cap and trade. Ford has promised to bring down electricity prices, in part by extending the former Liberal cut of 25 per cent on household bills by a further 12 per cent. How this will affect the necessary continuation of energy infrastructure upgrading will be one of Rickford’s big tests.

Then there is Ford’s promise to fire Hydro One CEO Mayo Schmidt and save his $6-million salary as his first act as premier. (He’s also said scrapping cap and trade and giving mayors more power would be his first act.) Presumably that task will be delegated to Rickford who will have to figure out how to fire the head of a company partly privatized by Wynne.

Rickford’s second responsibility is northern development and mines, the former purview of Thunder Bay MPP Michael Gravelle who knows a thing or two about juggling these two jobs in one. Not least among Rickford’s chores on this file will be the resumption of delicate negotiations with First Nations on getting the Ring of Fire mineral belt up and running, and reached by a road. Companies and now a government have come and gone trying to get this massive development under way.

Speaking of First Nations, Rickford is also now expected to minister over the Indigenous Affairs portfolio with all of its twists and turns of identity politics and the vastly higher expectations of a raft of Indigenous organizations that speak for First Nations, Metis and Inuit residents of Ontario, whether in the Far North or in cities and towns. That alone is a formidable chore.

One imagines Rickford coming to work each morning with three deputy ministers and their assorted staffs all trying to put their priorities first on the day’s to-do list.

Other ministers have only one job. Among them is Jeff Yurek, a St. Thomas-born pharmacist who was the PC health critic before Ford handed him the title of Minister of Natural Resources and Forestry, a role for which he did serve a brief term as Tory critic.

How will the member for Elgin-Middlesex-London handle the issues of trees, fish and wildlife? Not to mention the softwood trade debacle and pending U.S. tariffs on lumber? Maybe Yurek has some knowledge we don’t know about. Maybe he’s a fast learner. He does have a cottage. Or maybe Rickford, in a cabinet of multi-taskers, should be in charge of natural resources and northern development and mines, period.