Neoliberal Populism in Ontario: Premier Doug Ford’s Strategic Politics
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 2018 election of Premier Doug Ford and the Progressive Conservative (PC) government ushered in a new era of neoliberal populism in Ontario, Canada. Ford’s election platform, titled a “Plan for the People,” resonated with the business elite who supported his free-market reforms but also with middle-class and blue-collar workers living in suburban and northern areas of the province. The article examines how Ford positioned his rivals as “out of touch” members of the political and cultural urban elite, responsible for a spiralling deficit that would economi-cally burden hard-working people. Unlike many other right-wing populist leaders, who have relied on xenophobic or anti-immigrant narratives, we argue that Ford’s populist stance is dema-gogic and pragmatic. This enabled him to pivot and shift his political strategy to amass support from a diverse range of economic, racial, ethnic, and religious groups, including new immigrants. We draw on newspaper articles, public documents and reports, as well as thirteen interviews with politicians, teachers and civil servants. The article highlights how Ford’s government operated to weaken democratic institutions through measures such as “strong mayor powers,” invoking the notwithstanding clause, as well as undermining the public sector. We trace how Ford’s populism undermined public education through overt and subtle measures that weaken school boards and unions while advancing privatization. We show how Ford bypassed intermediaries, in this case, school boards and teachers’ unions, and appealed directly to “the parents” through the media and employed cli-entelist strategies such as cash transfers under the guise of “parental choice” to hollow out public education. The analysis demonstrates how Ontario stands out as a unique case study for exam-ining neoliberal populism in Canada and North America.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it