So says Doug Ford, who will be the first Ontario premier to override the Charter’s freedom of expression protections. What could be so important that he is disrupting a municipal election in midcampaign, disrespecting the judiciary as biased, denouncing Mayor John Tory as complicit, and dismissing city hall as dysfunctional? It’s an issue so supposedly critical that Ford completely forgot to mention it during his own provincial campaign — the one he claims as a mandate for constitutional carte blanche. As Ford keeps raging and repeating, cities are the constitutional creation of the provinces — a legislative anachronism that gives licence to the premier’s diktats. By invoking it now, on such a stunningly transient issue, Ford has diluted the currency of the constitution, opening the door to future overrides whenever his opponents get a rise out of him.

Source: thestar September 10, 2018 22:30 UTC