Colonel George Drew. And yes, they did call him the Colonel. This was back in the days when all of our premers of Ontario once upon a time were war veterans... He's an important premier for a bunch of reasons. Number one, he's the first premier in that 42-year long conservative dynasty from 1943 to 1985... George Drew was the first guy to use the expression, "we are building a big blue machine all the way from Windsor North and across Ontario through the east." ... Premier Ford was granted an honorary doctorate from Saginaw Valley State University... Doug Ford discovered at a very young age that postsecondary was not for him... and all these years later he finally has a postsecondary degree. So, good for Dr. Ford.

NDP leader Marit Styles saying that if her party forms government after the next election, she'll call a public inquiry to investigate the progressive conservatives and that Ford could even find himself quote "in jail" before then. Ford called the accusation Trumpstyle rhetoric... The background here is that some documents that were supposed to be released relating to the greenbelt scandal from 2022 and 2023, those releases have now been cancelled... I'm tempted to reach for the the admonition I might use with my 10-year-old: two wrongs don't make a right... Matthew 26:52, he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. Doug Ford has specifically used this kind of rhetoric... there's a new group called Decency Matters... to make decency the kind of default condition in business, in politics.

The legislature just voted down a bill to keep AI misinformation out of Ontario's elections... Bill 99, John Fraser's Free and Fair Elections Act. The bill would have forced anyone engaging in election advertising... to clearly identify when they've used AI to generate content for an ad... Interestingly, the majority almost always votes down the opposition's private members bill... Another issue is the electoral boundary adjustment... We have not adjusted Ontario's electoral boundaries since before the 2018 election... the current electoral boundaries I think are still based on the 2011 census. So Ontario's electoral map is out of date and needs updating and there is no word from the government on what Ontario is going to do next.

The government says it will give special constables the power to arrest drug users on the buses, street cars, and subways... Special constables... are not supposed to be used for all the same purposes that we use police officers... Ontario has made a deliberate choice to respond to a public health crisis with coercion instead of care... My column this week is that Ontario has electoral legislation for municipalities that functionally makes it impossible to have political parties... incumbency is the most powerful electoral force in Toronto politics... more city councilors died in office than were defeated by challengers. We have functionally things very very close to political parties but we're kind of lying to ourselves.

The Billy Bishop Airport story. The province wants it expanded. The city doesn't. And the feds, well, at the moment, crickets... The waterfront is basically run by a tripartite organization... The feds are being very purposefully quiet on this right now... 23 out of 24 (Liberal MPs in Toronto), and yet, for some reason, 22 of the 23 have really headed for the hills and are trying to avoid this issue... Former Liberal Minister of Finance Greg Sorbara has written a letter... still crickets from that minister's office... Interestingly, I can only remember one premier appearing as a witness, and that was Bob Ray... George Drew was called as a witness to appear before a legislative committee to testify about organized crime in the 1940s.