The arrogance of power takes flight in Ontario

Editor’s Note: We are thankful for journalists who are not afraid to speak to the truths that they are seeing, especially when these truths affect our communities around Canada. We had to repost this article to remind our community to keep an eye on our government.

Last week, Doug Ford’s government confirmed it had bought a used Bombardier Challenger 650 for about $28.9 million for government travel around Ontario, across Canada, and into the United States. Within days, after the backlash hit hard, Ford reversed course, and the government sold the aircraft back to Bombardier for the same price. Ford later insisted the real mistake was not the purchase itself, but how it was handled and explained. That distinction is exactly what makes this story worth examining.

The easy argument is that no government should ever buy a plane, but that is the weaker argument. A serious case could be made that the Premier of Ontario, governing a vast province and travelling constantly for intergovernmental meetings, trade matters, and cross border negotiations, may at times need more flexibility and security than commercial or chartered flights can offer. If that were the argument, the government should have made it clearly, carefully, and immediately. It should have produced the business case, laid out the cost comparisons, and explained why this was necessary now. Instead, it made the purchase first and began searching for the explanation only after public anger forced the issue.

That is why the jet became more than a transportation story. It became a story about governing temperament. The problem was the flippant posture behind it, the sense that those in power no longer felt any duty to persuade the public before spending public money on something this expensive and this symbolic. When a government starts acting first and explaining later, it is revealing. It has grown too comfortable with power and too casual about accountability.

Long governments often develop that habit. They begin by earning trust and end by assuming it. They begin by explaining themselves carefully and end by acting as though explanation is optional. What starts as confidence slowly hardens into entitlement. That is one of the oldest corruptions in democratic life. Arrogance rarely announces itself with grand language. More often it appears in small but telling decisions, in the quiet assumption that the public will swallow whatever it is given, and that justification can always be stitched together afterward.

What made the whole episode worse was the timing. As the government was stumbling through the fallout over the plane, it was also moving ahead with Bill 97. Schedule 7 limits public access to records held by the Premier, ministers, parliamentary assistants, and political staff. Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner warned that these changes would significantly reduce transparency, create new privacy risks, and undermine independent oversight. In plain terms, while this government was fumbling a major public purchase, it was also advancing a law that makes it harder for the public to examine how power is used at the top.

Taken together, the message was hard to miss. On one side was a major purchase rolled out without a persuasive public case. On the other was a transparency rollback that shields political offices from scrutiny. That is why this story hit so hard. It suggested not merely poor judgment, but a government that has been in office long enough to treat accountability as an irritation instead of a discipline. Long stretches of power can convince leaders that governing is a matter of issuing decisions and cleaning up the optics later.

Ontario does not need government by impulse followed by damage control. It does not need leaders who spend first, explain later, and close the blinds when the questions get sharper. It needs a government that remembers public office is held on trust, not by right. The deeper lesson of this fiasco is that this government increasingly behaves as though justification itself is no longer necessary. That is the real arrogance now on display at Queen’s Park, and a return to humility, sincerity, and accountable government is long overdue.