One of the most power advantages in sports is the serve in Tennis. When it is your turn to serve to your opponent (service game), you set the pace of the game, you power the ball over the net to your opponent. When you serve it is incumbent on the opponent to respond to your serve, to be able to counter it and return it. If they cannot, then you win the point, which gives the serve such an advantage. By serving, you force your opponent to do something, if not, they lose. However, if you lose your service game, then suddenly the opponent has the advantage, and all those advantages are suddenly flipped.
In Ontario, until March of 2020, it looked like Doug Ford was about to lose his service game. By a ton. From countless government scandals, to corruption, to just unpopular policy, his polling numbers were cratering to a three-way tie. Then, the coronavirus happened, and Doug Ford did something he had not done up until that point: he listened to experts. Gone was his shoot from the hip, do the first thing you can think of that sounds populist, style Ontario came to recognize since 2018. Instead, he listened to medical and scientific experts, and followed the lead of the Federal government, to stop the spread of the infection.
Then something miraculous happened: Ford’s polling numbers improved. First just the favourables, but soon his actual electoral polling jumped up too. Suddenly, Ford is at levels of support not seen since his 2018 election, with the NDP and Liberals fighting it out to come in second place. Now, Ford looks back in control again, and favoured to win his service game.
You can start to see the moment they got their arrogance back and abandoned sound medical advice for their brand of populism. Once the pandemic was under control, and the hospitals were well under capacity, they started doing things they thought people wanted. Opening bars, and night clubs. Forcing teachers (and students) back to school in an attempt to placate imagined sub-urban voter rage of parents that were having to take care of their children through the usual school day, an unable to go back to work in the economy. In a government that fought for months with all of the teachers unions about pay and class sizes, there must have been much dislike about having those supposedly too highly paid teachers working from the comforts of their own home while everybody else had to go into work, in many places where social distancing would be impossible.
However, it turns out that you cannot fully stop the spread of a contagious virus. It turns out that people will ignore social distancing guidelines, even when you threaten them not to. That no matter how hard you try, you cannot will a population of nearly 15 million to completely change their way of life in the hope of being able to facilitate your priorities. People make mistakes. Some people actively think that the virus is a lie or caused by 5G cellphone towers (some people think Bell is an awful company, but they generally stop short of bioterrorism).
The troubling part is that they knew all of this. Those medical professionals that advised them early in the pandemic advised against wider reopening, specifically of schools and bars, but they were overruled in order to help the economy, or to accomplish Conservative populist goals. Now, with cases rapidly rising in the province, Ford has a very important choice. He can choose to follow the medical advice again, which would likely result in another lockdown, and the shutting of schools, bars and most restaurants. Or he can make the calculation that if he continues to try to bully people from press conferences to follow social distancing guidelines that the trade-off would be better with his base.
The problem for Ford is we already know the answer to this question. We found out the answer months ago. When a Premier went from being so widely disapproved of, to suddenly one of the most popular figures in the province, it is very clearly because he followed scientific advice, to do his best to keep the province and it’s people safe from the coronavirus. Then, when things started to re-open, people were approving, because suddenly the hardship of the lockdowns was paying off. But now there are large problems on the horizon. With cases spiking, outbreaks in schools, and testing backlogs in major cities, it is only a matter of time before Ontario hits a new daily high of cases larger than at the height of the pandemic. At that point, what will the Premier do? Will he continue to complain about people having backyard parties of more than 20 people? To blame fringe outlier cases for the massive caseload in the province? The reality is that there are so many cases in circulation that although obviously larger social gathers do not help the problem, we are already on a collision course with a second lockdown. The only thing that can stop the spread at this point is very likely another lockdown, or possibly the immediate scaling back of businesses and schools to the state they were just after the first wave of lockdowns.
The question just becomes when will Ford pull the plug? When will he abandon his current plans, and shut down large parts of the province? Will it be at 600 daily cases (roughly the peak daily case load in Ontario)? 800? 1000? The timing of the shutdown has huge significance, as generally the more cases before the lockdown, the longer the lockdown will have to occur for.
And just like that, Ford finds himself in a dangerous position again. Although he was able to win many points with his serve in 2020 from his handling of the coronavirus, suddenly his serve is threatened again by a second wave. If he can handle the second wave well, with large approval ratings from the electorate, then he will be in a very good position in 2022 and could have an almost insurmountable lead. No longer would he be the deeply unpopular Premier from 2018 and 2019, he would be the Premier that lead Ontario successfully through the coronavirus pandemic. However, if cases spin out of control, and the province has to lockdown for months, with thousands of deaths, then suddenly that is a much worse message to run on. Suddenly the talking point about the handling of the virus brings back memories of a longer second lockdown in winter, of sending the kids to school in September, only to then having to bring them home a month later to keep them safe, of long lines at coronavirus testing centres.
If Ford can serve out a strong performance in the second wave, then his popularity will likely hold, and he might have a very easy re-election. If things go badly, his opponents will get a huge break, and the winner of the left primary between Del Duca and Horwath will produce the next Premier of Ontario with a staggering majority.