Billy Bishop, Bad Faith, And The Consequences Of Bullshit

Doug Ford is claiming that Mark Carney promised that he’d back Billy Bishop airport expansion in exchange for Ford’s support for high speed rail in a meeting in March 2025, before Carney called the 2025 election, with Carney having been on the job of Prime Minister for less than two weeks, and with no guarantees that Carney would be PM within 2 months. Sorry, that’s not true - sources close to Doug Ford are claiming this in the press.

And I am shocked by the number of allegedly sane people buying this shit, based on Doug Ford’s word. Or not even Doug’s word, as it is.

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The details of when this alleged grand bargain was allegedly struck really matters, because the details make this deal nonsensical. Mark Carney is alleged to have made this grand deal less than 2 weeks on the job, about a proposal there was no public plan for or prioritization of, with a Cabinet that was very clearly designed to be caretakers, when he walked into the meeting solely trying to make sure Ford wasn’t going to come out attacking him during the campaign. There’s no universe where Ford was clearly told yes to expanding Billy Bishop.

What would the benefits to the federal government be to commit one way or the other that early? The Liberals were a fucking shambolic mess at that point in time, scrambling to find candidates and staffers and relying on parts of a creaking machine while tossing other parts overboard. March 2025 wasn’t about taking decisions, it was about hanging on for dear life while we still had a poll lead. Everything radical the government has done - especially where they have done unpopular-but-necessary (in their view) pro-growth policies - they made those decisions once they had trusted people in place after the election, not before.

What is far more plausible is that Carney was non-committal because he didn’t know his ass from his elbow on this issue. Carney wouldn’t have had a strong opinion on this topic, and while I fully believe that Carney would make executive decisions and inform his relevant ministers about it later at this stage of his Prime Ministership, there’s just no way he would have been reckless enough to give a firm yes at this stage of the game.

Did Ford sincerely take Carney being non-committal as an agreement? Maybe, though why we would give Doug Ford good faith benefit of the doubt is beyond me. Does Doug Ford taking a non-committal answer as a yes make it binding, or mean that Mark Carney did something wrong? No, Doug thought the stripper actually loved him, and is now pissed that his delusions aren’t reality. There will be rapprochement in time, because the list of economic projects where Carney and Ford are on the same side is longer than the irritants. But this isn’t really what I’m so mad about, because Doug Ford is a corrupt Bond villain. What I am pissed about is the number of NDPers who are accepting Ford’s version of events uncritically.

Chris Glover, the NDP MPP for Spadina, claimed that there was “confirmation” of a “handshake deal” - Alto for Billy Bishop - based on Star reporting that actually says that PC sources claim there was a deal. That is not confirmation of anything - unless, of course, it is the position of the ONDP that Doug Ford’s word is unimpeachable gold now. Tom Parkin and the usual mouth breathers on Twitter are saying the same thing, that there definitely was a deal. And it drives me crazy because this is emblematic of why people no longer trust the NDP.

I used to resounding shit on the NDP under Jagmeet Singh for being, as I called them, a cancer to Canadian politics because of the cavalier and odious nature of their relationship to truth and honesty. Jagmeet would attack the Liberals day and night for all kinds of sins, but then refuse to vote against the government on the floor. I wrote for 2+ years that if the NDP were seriously opposed to the government as they claimed, they had a moral obligation to vote against the government, and if they weren’t seriously opposed, they needed to shut the fuck up with their over the top criticisms of the Liberals. It was offensive to public understanding to claim to be in staunch moral opposition to a government you were actively supporting, because it meant that nobody believed anything the NDP ever said.

In the same way now, if the NDP are going to take the approach that Doug Ford’s staff’s off the record word to the Star is gospel truth, then why do we need an Opposition at all? One of the main lines of Marit Stiles’ attack on Ford is that he’s a lying sack of shit who will say or do anything to hide Ontarians from the fact he’s destroying health care, education, and everything else we hold dear. And now her MPP is claiming that Ford’s leaked, post-facto spin is absolute truth? Are you fucking with me?

We can throw in Avi Lewis’ comments on how if America wants to invade us we’re fucked, so there’s no point investing in our military too, because since I wrote a column being nice about the NDP they’ve had a hell of a week trying to prove me wrong. Lewis’ defeatism is as ahistorical (look at the recent American military record, bud) as it is self-fulfilling (if we don’t have a strong military it’s much easier for them to win), but above all it is unserious. At a time when Canadians have embraced the idea of higher military spending - including a majority of NDP voters, according to Frank Graves! - this kind of hippy dippy bullshit isn’t helping. It’s also the same logic that led many leftists to say Ukraine shouldn’t have bothered fighting Russia, which is heinously dangerous territory to be in.

The fundamental crisis of the NDP is that I, unlike many die hard Liberals who read this site, think the NDP is a fundamentally useful institution. I want a party that can articulate moral principles and good ideas from the left, to stop the Overton Window and public opinion from shifting too far left. But that doesn’t mean that this version of the NDP is useful or good. The problem for the party, at both the Ontario and Federal levels, is that they don’t know what they’re supposed to be for, focused so much more on the easy dopamine of being against “bad” things and calling Carney insufficiently pure for various crimes against progressivism. Tom Parkin wants to codify municipal rights in a new Ontario Constitution Act, which would do …precisely fuck all to stop the next Premier who wants to meddle in Ontario’s business from just repealing the Constitution Act. But hey, it sounds good, right?

Even if you take Lewis’ defeatism at face value - there’s no way we could stop the US from invading us so there’s no reason to build tanks and submarines - what is the actual pitch there? Canada shouldn’t spend so much on new defence spending, and should spend it on … I don’t know yet. If you’re going to make this pitch, shouldn’t there be a positive answer about what an Avi vision for society would mean? I assume pharma and dental would be listed, but if not weapons manufacturing jobs, what exactly does Avi want to spend the money on? Fuck if I know!

The NDP needs to become a serious organization, or plainly we’re all fucked. The party’s rank unseriousness, defence defeatism, and willingness to accept Doug Ford’s spin as truth all add up to one thing - a party unable and unwilling to understand why voters keep rejecting it.

Until they do, they’re fucked