Welcome everyone to the OnPy podcast.

I'm Steve Pacen

and I'm John Michael McGrath.

Today on the pod, well, we want to talk about those $75 million ads featuring former President Ronald Reagan.

They certainly had impact as the current President Donald Trump has a hissyfitit about them.

The government floated a controversial trial balloon affecting renters and then that balloon promptly blew up in their faces.

We'll explain why they retreated.

Premier Doug Ford has introduced some big changes to the way we do elections in Ontario. And everything old is new again.

And in your column, my column, I will beg Ontario's reformers to stop being afraid of amending the Constitution.

And I'm going to tell you about a former member of the Ontario legislature who may be the most renaissance man you've never heard of.

Stick around for that.

It's Friday, October 31st, 2025. Happy Halloween, everybody, and let's get to it.

Little sugar. JMM. No sir. We are not exactly uh in costume today. No.

Although we do have kind of our World Series uniforms on.

Yes. Exactly.

There we go. We're both sporting the Blue Jays today. Yes.

You've got you've got the logo in the top left corner right over your heart where it belongs.

A bigger logo on the back, but I can't quite turn the camera in our chairs.

Okay. Okay. This uh is a 32-year-old shirt.

Yes.

That I am wearing. I'm going to stand up a little bit here so you can see it. The last time the Blue Jays won the World Series, I got this t-shirt.

I think it actually belonged to my mother, so I'm wearing my mom's t-shirt.

But, uh, as you will no doubt remember,

I do.

Uh, Joe Carter hit the home run to win the Blue Jays the World Series 32 years ago in game six.

Yeah.

And Friday night, it's game six back at the dome and they've got a chance to repeat make history again.

Yes. And and I mean, we were just talking a bit off mic about this, but you know, obviously I want the Jays to win, but it has been uh such a a gratifying series and and with with some lower points earlier in the season.

It's been a good year. So, I'm I'm uh very excited. Do

you know what's great about this team? They are so lovable. There's so many wonderful stories. There's so many unprecedented things they have done.

You know, Treya Savage with his incredible pitching.

Um, uh, Addison Barger with that pinch hit grand slam home run. Never happened before in World Series history.

I mean, there's there's a lot to love about this team. Win

David Schneider has been one of these guys all year, right?

David Schneider. Does that count for a Bill Davis reference calling him David Schneider?

I want to actually talk about because I'm not wearing a premier today.

And um, but 30 years ago today as we sit here taping this was one of the most consequential days in Canadian history.

Um, were you born yet? Yes, I was uh 14.

You were 14. Okay. Um

this was referendum day, October 30th, 1995.

Mike Harris had only just become premier of Ontario a few months earlier and suddenly found dumped in his lap this uh referendum uh on the future of Canada, Quebec voting again.

When I was a kid in 1980, it was the referendum between Pier Trudeau and Renie Lec.

And it wasn't close. It was 604. We're staying in Canada.

But this time it was 50.5% to 49 a.5% and it was well I know a lot of people sort of thought we were going to lose the country that night.

It it felt like a near-death experience.

It did. Yeah. Yeah. In some ways Mike Harris speaking of which took his kids to Montreal.

Can't remember if it was the day or two days before the actual voting day.

And he he basic you know one of those kids is a cabinet minister in Doug Ford's government now. Mike Jr.

and he basically just went there. No special attention, no security.

He went there just as a dad taking his kids to to kind of contribute to the demonstration of affection that so many English Canadians were giving Quebecers.

I think a 100,000 people gathered in downtown Montreal that day for the uh for that demonstration.

The forces of separation have been kind of in obeyance ever since then 30 years ago.

Um but you know the parti kebeekqua is looking pretty good right now in terms of winning the next election in Quebec and they have promised to hold another referendum.

So this issue never really ever totally goes away does it?

No no I I mean you know it's been part of our history you know literally you can read headlines on the the broad sheets from 1867 right like immediately after the British North America Act is promulgated and comes into force there's you know subheads about like Quebec separatists mull their next move.

Um, you know, I'm actually going to talk a bit more about this in your column, my column.

U but one of the you you asked if I was alive in 1995.

Um, you know, if you're old enough to remember that era, right, we went through Meech Lake, Charlotte Town, and then the second uh Quebec referendum.

And if if you want a a signpost for my adolescence, right, uh I remember the referendum on Charlotte Town, but did not really understand it at the time.

Uh by the time we get to the Quebec referendum, the second Quebec referendum, uh I was 14 and I both uh remember it and understood the stakes.

So just to give you an idea of like, you know, yes, I was one of those cool 14-year-olds who was, you know, staying up watching the returns come in that night.

Um and uh yeah, I think that era has so um scarred people uh with you know the the memories of of these attempts at constitutional revision uh in ways that still um affect our political justice.

We've been terrified to revisit this issue and I state for the record that that Quebec's signature is still not on the constitution.

They are of course bound by it but they have not yet signed it.

They didn't when Pierre Trudeau repatriated the Constitution with a charter back in 1982.

It did not happen again after the referendum of 1995.

And here we are 30 years later. Still no signature.

The the one federalist caveat that somebody is going to be angry if I don't uh point this out is that the majority of Quebec MPs did in fact vote for the passage of of the Constitution.

73 out of 75 something like that.

They were all liberals under Trudeau.

But yes, an ominous day in history.

Anyway, we're still a country.

Yeah, we're still a country. Not yet a 51st state. Still a country. Still with Quebec. It's a beautiful thing.

Okay. And with that, off to wish you one.

Is there anyone out there that hasn't seen the province of Ontario's anti-tariff ads starring Ronald Reagan?

Well, we know one thing. Donald Trump saw them and he didn't like them at all.

In fact, he had a little hissy fit and put an additional 10% tariff on Canada while at the same time acknowledging that if he were Doug Ford, he'd be doing the same thing.

JMM, let's talk about the fallout from this whole ad campaign,

right? Well, so first of all, let's talk a bit about the the effectiveness of the ad.

Uh the government says that they uh garnered 11 billion impressions, which is, you know, how we rate the effectiveness of ads.

Uh, Premier Ford says this marks it as the most successful political ad campaign ever.

Uh, those uh, retaliatory tariffs, however, that the president has announced, uh, they are announced, they have not yet been implemented and there is no stated timeline for implementing them.

Uh, it's just a thing that the president has said right now.

Are are you saying he he says something and and he may not mean it and he may not actually do it?

You know, sometimes words just happen, man. Wow. Wow. What a concept.

Um the the president had said that he was not going to speak with uh Prime Minister Mark Carney again for some time after uh the the provincial government's ad campaign went live.

And then apparently they actually had a a brief meeting and and spoke in South Korea this week.

Um again, I don't I don't want to scandalize anybody, but sometimes we can't quite take President Trump at his word.

Really, I want to write that down. I just uh that's a new thing.

Well, I mean, here we go again. Apparently, the American ambassador to Canada, Pete Hora, tore a strip off Ontario's man in Washington, who's David Patterson.

And when the premier found out about it, he was not happy.

And he demanded that Ambassador Hora apologize to Patterson.

And then he went further than that. Let's take a look.

Come on, Ambassador. He's a guy. Do you know something? I like him. Uh Pete, you got to call uh Dave up and apologize.

It's simple. you you know the cheese slipped off the cracker. I get it. You're ticked off, but call the guy up.

Um because you're a good guy and and Dave's my champion.

The guy is just instrumental in these trade deals down in Washington.

Yeah, David Patterson used to work for General Motors. He knows the auto industry obviously like the back of his hand.

He knows inter um interprovincial. He knows international trade extremely well.

That's what he's doing in Washington, trying to represent our interest down there.

Premier Ford, you know, he has faced some criticism for this ad campaign that it was needlessly provocative and, you know, putting a red flag in front of the bull, that type of thing.

Um, accused, I guess, of blowing up the latest round of negotiations.

What did the premier have to say about that? Let's find out.

Doug Ford, what do they expect me to do? Sit back and roll over like every other person in the world?

The intention wasn't to go poke the president in the eye.

My intention was to get a conversation going, wake up the Democrats a little bit down there.

And my goodness, it woke him up. All right.

And they're still talking about it on CNN. We love Americans.

Uh I'll tell you, we don't we don't love uh President Trump. I'll tell you that.

I think he was at in the poll I saw on CNN is minus 60.

I don't know. Minus 60. I don't know how much lower you can get than - 60.

So why don't why doesn't the president start being nice?

uh play nice in the sandbox to his biggest customer in the entire world and uh everything's hunky dory.

Everything's hunky. The minus 60 I think refers to the fact that when you ask people, you know, do you approve of do you disapprove of 60 points more people disapprove of Donald Trump.

I'm surprised it's only 60, frankly, but there you go.

Well, it it you know, for those of us who um don't mind that uh people net disapprove of the president uh right now, uh it is I think now uh his lowest approval rating uh ever and certainly lower than he was in at this point in his first term.

Uh and it's kind of shocking to remember that we are not yet a full year into Donald Trump's second term.

Um yeah uh this whole incident just uh I I don't know how else to put this except to say that I I really feel like we as a country are not dealing with serious people in Washington right now.

Well, they're unpredictable. Let's put it that way.

Well, you know, like how is this a reasonable reaction to a commercial, right?

Like this was not a commercial that said like anything actually insulting or demeaning about Donald Trump.

It just reminded Americans uh broadly and Republicans specifically that Ronald Reagan and like there are definitely critiques one can make about Ronald Reagan's record on free trade but on the whole he was a believer in free trade and specifically a believer in free trade with Canada like negotiated the free trade agreement for God's sake right?

You know Doug Ford has faced accusations about he you know he blew things up or uh you know some people are saying oh well like Mark Carney is not doing a good good enough job negotiating with Donald Trump and and I just I I wrote about this for the website as well, but I will just reiterate that the person responsible for Donald Trump's actions is Donald Trump.

Indeed.

You know, I'm going to drop a little story on you here because if we go back to those middle 1980s when Brian Maloney was the prime minister of Canada and Ronald Reagan was president of the United States, there was a terrible irritant between our two countries and it was called acid rain.

American pollution because of the prevailing winds was was going up the stacks of industry in the states, particularly close to the border, and it was pushing all that pollution into Canada.

And then, of course, when it mingled with the clouds and rain came down, it was killing our lakes and streams.

And we needed to do something about acid rain or our our environment was going to be killed.

And needless to say, the tourism that went along with that was going to be a problem.

And Ronald Reagan gathered his advisers around and said, "What do you think we should do about this?"

And the advisers said, 'Well, there's no votes in doing anything about this. Don't do anything.

And Ronald Reagan looked at his adviserss and said, "Actually, no. I'm going to do something on this because Brian needs it."

And the relationship between the president and the prime minister was so good that the fact that Brian Mun needed a political win was enough for Ronald Reagan to actually end up spending billions of dollars encouraging a cleaning up of the environment near the border, which helped Canada.

It's impossible to imagine that happening today because there's just a different cat in the White House today who kind of has jettisoned Republican policy for the last 80 years.

And um here we are.

I I will add, you know, I I almost don't even want to raise this because like responding to arguments on social media is a waste of everybody's time.

But there is a criticism of the ad that it was deceptively edited that in fact in the speech that we've been talking about for however many weeks now uh that Ronald Reagan in fact endorses tariffs.

There's a very specific historical event that Reagan is referring to uh where there was a dispute.

I mean there were lots of trade disputes between the US and Japan uh during the 1980s and in that particular instance uh Reagan had uh just imposed uh tariffs on semiconductors uh against uh Japan.

And even in the context of that speech uh Ronald Reagan is saying that he was loathed to do it that it was an exception to his generally uh held belief uh in uh low tariffs or no tariffs in free trade.

And uh certainly Nothing in that speech right in its whole context uh endorses anything like the policies of the current American government.

Quite true. And with that, we're on to issue two.

Doug Ford has always had a smoother relationship with homeowners and developers than with tenants.

So perhaps it was no surprise that the premier announced his government intended to implement a policy that developers would like and tenants really would not.

JMM, what was the follow from all of that?

So, this was a proposal that was revealed during a technical briefing as part of a larger package of housing reforms that the government um had announced, including a new bill that was introduced by uh Municipal Affairs Minister Rob Flack uh last week.

Uh aside from the legislative changes that they introduced, which we'll get back to in a bit, uh the government also wanted to start a round of consultations about changing the rules regarding fixedterm leases.

So, currently in Ontario, if you sign a monthly lease on an apartment, let's say it's it's for a one-year term, uh, when that lease is up, that is not on its own grounds for an eviction, uh, or or for a renegotiation of any of the terms, right?

The the terms of the existing lease continue.

And uh so long as you are otherwise a tenant in good standing, you you know, you continue to uh pay your rent on time and you're not disruptive or whatever, you continue to enjoy all of the uh protections of uh Ontario rental law for what that is worth.

Um the government was proposing to um start consultations that could have given landlords more power to evict tenants when the term of a fixedterm lease expires.

Now, why would the province want to do that?

So the government's position is that, you know, Ontario's existing rental laws make it harder than it should be to be a landlord and that by making the rules more favorable, more cenial for landlords, they can bring more investment into the rental space and into uh rental homes and ease that crunch.

So, you know, this is one of those cases where, you know, taken uh uh at face value, the argument is that it might not be directly good for existing renters, but it would be good for the rental market and that would have the effect of being good for renters overall.

And the reaction was when this idea was unveiled, you're laughing already.

Yeah. Um predictable and understandable outrage on the parts of uh tenant advocates.

Um, you know, before I get into this, I want to stress that like all we ever got from the government was a a a idea that they were going to start consultations.

So, it's not really possible for us to comment on any kind of detailed policy because that never emerged.

Um, but it is hard to imagine a change to the status quo that would have been a net positive for current renters uh along the lines of what the government was even sort of sketching out in this uh technical briefing.

Right. The whole uh the whole point of considering this kind of a change is to give landlords more control over their property.

That was how it was phrased in the technical briefing.

If you're going to give landlords more control, you are going to be taking control away from uh tenants.

And so there was a lot of criticism, a lot of fear that this would uh functionally even further weaken Ontario's rent control laws.

um could have put tenants uh at the mercy of landlords who uh would, you know, really just have a a very a much freer hand to evict them or uh jack up their rents.

Um after several days of fierce criticism, the government uh announced via a Twitter post uh that they would not be proceeding with any changes to the fixedterm leases.

So, turns out that trial balloon was made of lead.

I guess if you look at the politics of this though, there's two ways of looking at it.

One is that they didn't think through the potential ramifications of this policy change and therefore they kind of got egg all over their faces.

or as you put it, they put up a trial balloon. They wanted to see whether or not it would fly.

Uh it clearly didn't and they changed their minds and kudos to them for changing their minds.

How do you see it?

You know, one of the political details here that is um intriguing is who specifically would have been uh most vulnerable to harm if uh these kinds of changes had gone through.

Right? Again, stressing that we don't know any kind of details because it never got that far.

If you want to sketch out the kind of person who would be uh most at the mercy of their landlords uh if they had made changes to these uh fixedterm leases, they would be the kind of tenant who uh had held their current home for a long time.

Uh probably has had some protection from Ontario's rent control laws.

So they are uh currently paying a much lower rent than that unit would command on the open market today, right?

uh that's going to be the person who a landlord has the most incentive to try and evict and turn over that unit.

Um I think it's fair to say this this hypothetical person I'm sketching out to you is also more likely to be an older person and

politics is complicated but I think it's still broadly true that older people are more likely to vote progressive conservative than uh other demographics

even tenants

uh even with tenants although as I say it gets complicated the more you slice and dice these these demographics.

So, you know, I can't prove to you that anybody pointed this out to the premier's office or members of cabinet.

Uh, but the uh the the climb down uh offers that intriguing possibility.

Okay. So, what's the status of the bill? This is bill 60 we're talking about.

Where's that at now?

Right. So, this is the bill that uh Minister Flack introduced and uh it's called the Fighting Delays Building Faster Act.

Um, and so as I think we're going to see a bunch of uh in the fall because the government has not given themselves a ton of legislative time.

This is a big omnibus bill that does a bunch of different things.

And I want to mention it specifically because even though the government has climbed down on uh what was potentially the most um I don't know inflammatory changes uh to rental rules. Uh they are making a bunch of other changes to Ontario's rental laws in this bill.

um that are very likely to become law unless of course uh the bill is amended at committee.

Uh the government is attempting to streamline the processes at the landlord and tenant board which handles disputes between as you might imagine landlords and tenants.

Um and uh there's a bunch of rule changes that I'm not going to go into the details of but broadly speaking u I think it's fair to say that they would give renters fewer procedural rights than uh they currently enjoy when they are challenging uh their evictions or challenging behavior by uh landlords.

uh so uh they would not have all the same alternatives they have for uh uh delaying the process or introducing new uh uh new issues in their hearing that kind of thing.

So while renters um dodged a bullet in the last week there are still uh other bullets. That's a bad there are more.

Yeah.

Um there are more changes coming that renters might not necessarily love.

I feel an obligation to check a box here. Are you ready?

Let's do who brought in rent review 50 years ago and uh one month 50 years and one month ago.

Uh I mean we already did our Bill Davis check but I'm going to say Bill Davis.

I believe you are correct. Yes. Yeah.

In an attempt to save uh what was a um terrible election campaign for the progressive conservative party and the one-term premier at that point, Bill Davis.

Uh there were stories in the newspapers every day about seniors getting evicted from their apartments because they couldn't afford never mind double but tripledigit rent increases.

And as a result he brought in rent review during the course of the campaign and that saved his campaign and Mr. Davis hung on with the minority government in 75 another minority in 77 and then got the majority back in 81.

50 years ago this year that rent review came in.

I'll just add that, you know, historically that was when governments brought in uh rent control rules, you know, World War I, World War II, and then in the 70s with periods of high inflation, governments brought in uh rent control rules.

And then at some point in the 70s, we sort of just decided to leave the rent control in place.

And there are all sorts of nuances to that, but a lot of those housing policies have been held over uh since the 1970s.

And so when people if people ever doubt why for example uh Bill Davis is important and relevant in today's politics like a lot of stuff that we did uh in housing politics still affects us today.

In fact I think there was a guy who wrote a 600page book about Bill Davis and the premise of the book was we're still living in Bill Davis's Ontario.

Never heard of it.

No, me neither. And with that we're off to issue three.

For most of Ontario's history, premers called elections pretty much whenever they wanted to during their 5-year term.

Obviously, with a view to picking a date that they thought best for their re-election prospects.

But two decades ago, Premier Daltton McGinty tried to level the playing field by passing a fixed election date law.

The idea was everyone would know the date of the next election, making it fairer for all the parties.

Well, of course, earlier this year, Premier Doug Ford disregarded the spirit of that law by calling an election on his own timing only two and a half years into his mandate.

And so, he's decided, let's get rid of this law altogether. JMM, what's the story?

Right. So, uh, this was announced via a press release.

Um, and I want to clarify that we haven't actually seen the law yet.

It's coming next week with the fall economic statement we are told.

But the government of Ontario is proposing a number of updates to the election act including uh as you have alluded to removing uh fixed election dates.

Uh in a press release the attorney general Doug Downey is quoted as saying this will move Ontario away from Americanstyle elections.

Uh I suspect they are uh hoping to ride some of the current um animosity that Canadians have for our neighbors to the south of the border.

never never that bad a bet in Canadian politics to to rail against something as American style.

Um but you know at this point in 2025 and at least for a little bit longer right most provinces and territories and the federal government at least nominally uh has uh or have fixed election date laws on the books.

So it is not uh purely an American thing and as we say you know Ontario's law is more than 20 years old.

It would be easy to poke the attorney general for his trying to make this a kind of an American thing.

But the reality is the notion of fixed election dates is not part of our tradition.

It was an American imported idea if you like because of course they do have fixed election dates down there that they do not divert from at all.

And and the fact of the matter is that I understood what Mr. McGinty was trying to do 20 years ago with a fixed election date in in as much as you know it really was in some respects democratizing to take that power away from the premier and basically say we're going to have you know even Steven fair and square everybody knows when the election's coming.

Um on the other hand there was a kind of an out clause in the fixed election date law which basically said you know

the election will take place on such and such a date four years from now unless in the wisdom of the first minister of the day he thinks we need to go earlier or she thinks we need to go earlier.

So when Doug Ford called this a fake law which the word fake is never advisable to use in in the era of Trump.

Yeah.

Having said that he's not totally wrong about that is he?

No. And it it it was an American import into the sort of Canadian and and you know uh before that the you know British parliamentary tradition and it never sat really well with the rest of our institutions, right?

Um I' I've been a skeptic of these fixed election state laws for a long time in the same way that I'm skeptical of we've talked before about like balanced budget laws or you know this government um uh trying to pass laws prohibiting road tolls, right?

None of these laws can tie the hand of a future government fundamentally.

Um, and you know, Doug Ford is not alone in uh breaking fixed election term laws, right? Justin Trudeau did so in 2021.

Uh, now neither man profited terribly from uh the the political decision to do that, right?

They both got returned uh to their respective assemblies with roughly the same number of seats as they had going into them.

So, u you know, voters don't seem to have rewarded that behavior.

Uh but you know, again, ultimately these laws just can't do what the the marketing uh claims, which isn't to say that these laws don't have their defenders, of course.

Uh back in 2015, a lawyer named Tom Engel tried to get an injunction to stop Jim Apprentice, who was then the premier of Alberta, from calling an early election.

Uh at the time, Angel said calling a snap election was illegal and a waste of taxpayer money.

Uh it was u an interesting test of Alberta's law but it didn't uh work out uh for Engle uh or for that matter for Apprentice who did call the early election and then promptly uh lost it.

Uh and we saw the first NDP government in Alberta uh with Rachel Notley becoming the premier.

Uh and we saw the first NDP government in Alberta uh with Rachel Notley becoming the premier.

Right. Uh there is one other change that the government is going to propose as well which is that once this bill becomes law campaign contributions are going to get almost 50% bigger under what's currently permitted.

I think up to $5,000 in contributions and I guess we should talk a little bit about the implications of that.

What do you see?

Right. So I think the the common intuition is that this will be good for the government.

Uh we don't have corporate or union donations to Ontario elections.

So uh functionally all donations are individual ones and the individual cap on donations ends up being the real limit on how much parties can raise.

The Tories raise the most money as governing parties usually do.

Uh but uh current liberal lead I guess he's not the liberal leader.

Bonnie Crombie is still the liberal leader but uh John Fraser uh the parliamentary leader parliamentary leader um has been pointing out to reporters this week with a bit of a a smile uh that he says you know

the Tories may raise the most money but they're also spending the most money.

And he says that like you know they're if you look at their numbers the the burn rate for the progressive conservative party is is extremely high. So his theory uh is that this is this change is largely about the Tories finding new ways to raise money for uh to feed their party's spending habits.

Um but speaking of money uh there is one other change that uh is going to continue benefiting the government uh most of all uh that is the announcement that uh after I think we could call it several years of uh will they won't they uh the tries are keeping the pervote subsidy.

They had originally pledged I think back in 2018 to scrap it and then when co hit they decided that oh no we'll keep the the the pervote subsidy around a little bit longer and they kept extending it and so now they've Yes, we're keeping the per vote subsidy.

This al this directly benefits the government most of all the tries and it's fair, right?

Like the tries got the most votes in the last election. The subsidy is, you know, a certain dollar figure per vote you get.

I think it's a couple of bucks. You get something like two and a quarter per every vote you get.

Yeah. And so the Tories will get the uh largest benefit from this decision.

Um, but it is a bit more interesting in the opposition benches where uh the Liberals stand to get almost twice as much money despite getting about half as many seats in the legislature.

Uh we we've explained this several times on the podcast, but I will just remind our our listeners and viewers that the Liberals got a larger share of the vote, but were not rewarded for it because of the first pass the post electoral system that we have in the province.

So, um, some interesting mischief potentially there between the Liberals and the NDP where, uh, the NDP will continue to be the largest party, sorry, largest of the opposition parties, but they will not see the largest benefit from the provoke subsidy.

Indeed. And with that, we're off to your column, my column.

Okay, it's time now for our regular feature, your column, my column, in which JMM and I reminisce about what we wrote for the TVO website over the past week.

We love it when you go on to the tvO.org website and look for the stuff that we wrote.

We tease about it here, but we write about it there. What do you got for us this week?

So, tying a few things that we've already spoken about today in the podcast.

Um, you know, we mentioned the uh Quebec referendum and that that era of, you know, the late ' 80s, early 90s uh, you know, constitutional revisions that all of them uh failed and uh, but they they left lasting scars on our political class.

who uh, for basically all of my adult life uh, everybody has been absolutely terrified of the idea of revising the constitution.

And uh, with the news that the government is uh, you know, removing the fixedterm uh election date law. I would just like to urge reformers, whatever your the reform you have in mind is, if you want it to stick, it's probably going to need uh amending the constitution if you don't want it to just leave it up to the next government to undo at their whim.

Uh that's what the constitution is there for. It's when we want to make uh some uh changes that we want them to stick around, right?

Um, and we have to get over this this terror of amending the constitution.

We haven't gotten over it yet.

Well, you know, 1995 was 30 years ago and the world belongs to the living, you know.

Um and so you know I I whatever your issue is whether it is um you know the relationship between the province and municipalities uh school boards.

We have a minister of education right now who is saying that he might disestablish the public English language school boards but he would leave the Catholic schoolboard system alone because of its constitutional protections.

Well that section of the constitution can be amended relatively easily.

There's, you know, section 43 of of the the 1982 constitution allows Ontario to make Ontario specific amendments in a pretty straightforward manner.

Other provinces have done this.

There have been eight amendments to the constitution using that section.

Um, we we can make changes if we want to.

It will just require us to uh screw up the courage and and get over some of the bad memories of the 1990s.

Um, on the specific issue of the fixedterm election data, I say this in the column, I will reiterate it here.

There are good reasons why we might not want to do that. We might not want to proceed with that.

We might not want to uh entrench that in the constitution.

Uh certainly if you look at the um the last few years of the uh Brexit parliament uh in the UK uh when it was uh the the the Conservative party was dealing with all sorts of crazy politics internally at the same time as they they were still governing under a fixedterm election law.

It was really really bad and really really chaotic.

And I and I think there's a a very genuine serious argument for why we would not want to entrench a fixedterm election date law in uh the Constitution.

But there are lots of other reforms that we might want to make whether it's electoral reform again some of the other ones I've mentioned.

Um and we just we gota we got to get over our fears.

What what a chair say in the movie Moonruck when she slapped Nick Cage on the face.

Snap out of it. Let's go. We can do this if we want.

Well, I'll tell you what, JMM. Okay.

This was a great week for column writing, for yours truly, because I got to write about the two things that I really love following the most in life, and that is sports and politics in that order.

Okay. Uh, okay. We're going to game six in the World Series this year.

And I hearken back to the early 1990s when in 1992 the Jays won the World Series in six games.

And then in 1993, the Jays won the World Series in six games.

And of course, it was the Joe Carter home run game uh that I wrote about this past week because I was at that game sitting in left field.

The designated hitter for the Jays that night was a guy named Paul Moler and his in-laws were sitting behind me.

And I spent a disturbing amount of time during that game talking about everything under the sun except baseball with the Muller in-laws.

I don't know why. We even talked about education policy in the province of Ontario.

I I can't quite remember how this came up. I just do remember that it happened.

And then when Joe hit the home run, only the second time in World Series history that a walk-off home run had been hit, meaning you hit the ball out of the park, game over.

Um, I remember exactly what went through my head.

And if you want to know, you got to read the column.

So go to the website, put put go to the Google machine, put Steve Pacin, Joe Carter, game six, uh, in there, and you'll find out what I had to write about.

Now, I wrote a second column this week about a guy who look at I'm sure nobody who's watching us right now has heard of this guy, which is all the more reason why I wanted to write about him because he's one of the most fascinating, interesting, accomplished, and educated men I've ever met in my life.

His name is Tim Reid.

Tim was a one-term, one-term only, MPP for Scarra East, 1967 to 1971.

He was a liberal. He sat in opposition.

John Roberts was the premier of the day.

He only won by a couple of hundred votes. It was very narrow.

And then in 1971 when they had the subsequent election, he only lost by a very narrow margin as well.

Actually lost to Margaret Burch who would become the first ever female cabinet minister in Ontario history.

You think Tim might be broken up about losing that election except that he got a job offer from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris immediately thereafter.

And I think he said he took his wife about a half a second to decide, do we stay in Scarbor or do we move to Paris and work for the OECD?

That was not a tough one.

Another reason to love Tim, he played in the CFL.

He played for the Hamilton Tiger Cats in the 1960s.

Oh, that's why we're talking about this.

Well, that might have a little bit to do with it.

But you know what? He played in probably the most historic Gay Cup game ever, 1962.

It was called the Fog Bowl because it was this was, you know, obviously well before the Dome, well before Bimo Field.

Uh they played gay cups at and the Argos played at CN Stadium, Exhibition Stadium.

And that day the fog came off Lake Ontario and completely enveloped the stadium.

You couldn't see a thing. It was so foggy they actually had to call the game and finish it the next day.

And the game was im uh excuse me uh immortalized on a Canada Post stamp.

Oh, lovely. And you can see there's Tim Reed trying to tackle a running back for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers on the stamp.

The quarterback of the Bombers, Kenny Plane, is in the foreground, but you see Tim make trying to make a tackle in the background.

So he's there for all time.

JMM, if you can imagine this, this guy had degrees from Yale, from Oxford, from Harvard.

He went to all of those post-secondary institutions. when he was at Queens Park, he loved education, really cared a lot about education policy,

and it used to grind his gears that the textbooks that Canadian and Ontario kids used in classes were published in the United States, had American values, had no understanding of Canadian/Ontario nuances, culturally, politically, um,

and he railed against that and and took efforts to ensure that our textbooks would be printed here in Ontario with some understanding of how we did

I'll say a few more things about him.

He helped establish York University.

He taught at York University.

He taught at the business school.

I think he was the dean actually at the business school of what was then called Ryerson, now Toronto Metropolitan University.

He worked in the public service in Ottawa, working his way up to becoming an assistant deputy minister.

He was president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

He was on governing council at the University of Toronto.

He was the chair of Ontario Lottery and Gaming.

This guy was a complete Renaissance man and a lovely guy.

And he just died earlier this month, four months shy of 90 years old, having lived an absolutely superlative life.

Tim Reid, a one-term MPP and a guy who left footprints.

A wonderful man. With that, let's go to the mailbag.

If you've got a burning question or insightful comment, you know, we love to hear from you at onpolitics tvo.org.

or JMM, take us through this week's note.

Uh, this week we have physical mail from listener Paul Vanderham from Missaga.

Now, uh, audience might remember that name.

He emailed us back in December 2024 about the Ontario official road map and asked if we could find out if there would be a new edition printed

and now there has been a new edition and he has sent us those uh, printed maps.

Look at this. Fantastic. Okay, there we go. Right there.

There we go. We have actual Now, of course, everybody uses GPS nowadays, but we have actual maps.

Now, of course, everybody uses GPS nowadays, but we have actual maps. Yes,

this is exciting.

I I mean, I don't own a car, but I will keep this in my go bag.

Um, thank you, Paul. Uh, now Paul mentioned in his note that the Bradford bypass is shown on the map as being under construction, while Highway 413 is not.

So, uh, people reading the tea leaves, uh, can enjoy that.

Um, if you are looking to purchase a copy of the map, you can do so at the Ontario Publication Site for $4.95.

I want to tell you before GPS how we used to drive.

This is not a word of a lie. You would get into your car. You would open up the map like this and you would spllay it right.

Yes.

On the steering wheel while you were driving and you'd have one hand on your map and you would have another hand as you were driving your car and you would watch.

I mean this is really a fantastic detailed map of the highway system in the province of Ontario.

This was the very safe way that we used to drive before GPS.

And then of course

with open bourbon and cigarettes.

Well, I won't go that far.

But then if you were really talented and oh boy, the pressure's on. I don't know if I can do it here.

You would absolutely when you got to your destination be able to fold the map back up.

Can I do it here? Can I do it? And it would be good as new and ready for next time.

There we go. Oh, I still got it. Look at that. That's great.

These were beautiful, these maps. Ah, fantastic.

I I I love a good road map. I love maps in general, but GPS is truly a miraculous technology.

GP, I have to admit GPS is a little more high-tech than this is, but uh there's something sweet about the good old highway highway road maps from back in the day.

Yes, indeed.

Uh again, if you'd like to ask about any uh content on the show or send us road maps from your jurisdiction, uh please email us at onpolitics@tvo.org.

And that is the OnPy podcast for this Friday, October 31st, 2025. Happy Halloween everyone.

You can follow our show on Apple Podcast so that you get notified each time a new podcast is available.

And you can see the video version of the podcast on the TV today YouTube channel.

Any feedback you have, we're always happy to hear it, good, bad, or indifferent.

You know the email address. It's on politics at tvo.org.

Please include your first and last name and where you're located.

This week's episode was produced by Matthew Omera.

Editing by Colin Kish.

Production support from Jonathan Hallowell and TVO's digital media services team.

Lori F is the executive producer of digital.

John Ferry is vice president programming and content.

Well, we want to give two shout outs here.

Number one, of course, to our studio crew for making the place look so great and organized.

And number two, JMM.

Okay, Blue Jays, let's play ball.

Until next Friday, everybody. Byebye.

We're going to have to pay Roger's royalties for that.

I hope not.