If you grew up anywhere near Toronto, Doug Ford is a joke in an SUV yelling about gravy trains and axing the carbon tax. If you grew up along Highway 11 in Timiskaming or Cochrane, he’s the landlord who never fixes the furnace. The criticism people hear about Ford rarely touches on what his government has failed to do. This is about a two-lane highway that kills people, a pulp mill that went cold, and choices Northern Ontarians have read as intentional.
Highway 11 runs the length of Northern Ontario and is still a single lane in each direction with no shoulder to speak of and no cell service. It carries logging trucks, mining equipment, and commuters often in whiteout conditions, and it has earned a grim reputation for those who have no choice but to drive it. Community leaders and drivers along the route have spent years calling for stricter truck inspections and better winter maintenance, pointing out that the region sees far higher collision rates.
In one recent ten-day stretch, northern Ontario saw five separate fatal highway collisions, a toll that stunned the Ontario Provincial Police responding to them. Public records over five months turned up at least twenty crashes, jackknifed trucks, or weather-related closures on the Highway 11 and 17 corridor. On one stretch alone, the highway was closed for 32 days between January and September of last year, according to testimony given in the Legislature by a northern MPP.
Northern New Democrat MPP Guy Bourgouin has tried four times since 2018 to pass legislation forcing the government to properly staff truck inspection and weigh stations and to return winter road maintenance to direct government oversight. Every single attempt has been voted down by the governing Progressive Conservatives. Families of crash victims have stood outside the Legislature holding photographs of loved ones killed on these roads while noting that in every attempt to legislate improvements, the Ford government voted against it. Winter maintenance itself was privatised under a previous Liberal government, and the current government has kept that model in place despite pressure to reverse it.
During the 2025 provincial election campaign, Doug Ford stood in Iroquois Falls and promised that a PC government would extend safety upgrades on Highway 11 from Temiskaming Shores to Cochrane. More than a year later, the local MPP representing that riding has pointed out that there still isn’t even a timeline for the project, calling it proof that the announcement was an election promise to win votes. Highway 17, which runs along Lake Superior’s north shore, faces a version of the same problem: less consistently dangerous than Highway 11, but still largely a two-lane road through remote country where a single crash can close the only route in or out of a community for hours.
When your grocery run, your dialysis appointment, or your commute all depend on the same unforgiving stretch of highway, Doug Ford’s inaction starts feeling personal.
Long before the wildfires, forestry and emergency management experts were warning that Northern Ontario was heading into a severe wildfire season. It’s currently on track to be the worst wildfire season in Ontario, with well over a hundred active fires burning in the region. Entire First Nations communities, including Namaygoosisagagun, also known as Collins First Nation, were forced to evacuate, with residents fleeing across a lake in small boats after the fire reached their homes before help arrived. Whitesand First Nation and several other communities near Thunder Bay were also evacuated, with local leaders saying the province’s response came too late.
The frustrating part is that the government allotted 135 million dollars in 2025 for emergency forest firefighting, then ended up spending nearly double that once the fires actually arrived. Rather than adjust the budget upward, the government budgeted 150 million dollars for the following year, the same year that turned into the worst fire season on record. Critics, including the union representing provincial firefighters, have said the underfunding left crews stretched too thin to respond to multiple fires breaking out at once. The government disputes that its budgeting caused any failure, but the chronic underbudgeting followed by emergency top-ups after the damage is already done is not disputed.
What makes this sting is how Ford spends money when Toronto is involved. Around the same period, the government was finalising a 95-year lease with Therme to build a private luxury spa and water park at Ontario Place. The project has drawn controversy, including an auditor general’s report finding that the contracting process was not conducted fairly or transparently, and reporting that Therme had misrepresented its business track record during the bidding process. Ontario’s Liberals have criticised the province’s roughly 2.2 billion dollar commitment to the project, questioning what else that money could have accomplished.
Terrace Bay is a small, isolated community where one employer is the entire local economy. For Terrace Bay, that employer was its pulp mill, owned by AV Terrace Bay, part of the Aditya Birla conglomerate. In January 2024, the company announced it was idling the mill, citing market conditions, and roughly four hundred people lost their jobs.
Ford did step in with temporary support to help keep the mill heated through that first winter since pulp and paper equipment can be permanently damaged if it’s allowed to freeze following the closure. However, by the following winter, local officials and union representatives said they believed the company was planning to leave the mill unheated for budget reasons, and the local MPP warned that if the mill isn’t heated, the equipment becomes worthless and the mill’s future is over. Two winters later, Terrace Bay’s future remains uncertain.
Doug Ford’s path to the premier’s office ran through Toronto politics, where he served as a city councillor and, after his brother Rob Ford’s tenure as mayor. It was only after that loss that Ford turned his attention to provincial politics, winning the leadership of the Ontario PC Party and becoming premier in 2018. For northern voters, it’s difficult not to notice that a premier whose political identity was entirely around Toronto’s politics has struggled to treat the north as anything other than an afterthought.
It shows up in a highway safety bill voted down, a pulp mill left to idle. Most of all, in a wildfire budget that gets increased only after the fires have already burned through the province. They’re all votes in the Legislature, line items in a budget, ribbon-cuttings. In short, they tell a fairly consistent story about where this government’s attention goes.
There are popular stereotypes that see the north as a conservative part of Ontario. A handful of ridings, including Timmins and Kenora, have shown consistent support for the Progressive Conservatives, but the broader north has continued to elect New Democrats and hold Ford to account in the Legislature.
None of this changes with a single election, but there are things worth doing. Support the northern MPPs and community groups who keep bringing highway safety legislation back, because persistence is the only pressure a government feels between elections. Pay attention to how Northern Ontario Heritage Fund money gets allocated and ask your own MPP whether the North’s forestry and infrastructure are getting properly resourced. Moreover, resist the urge to stereotype Northern Ontario.
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