Going Off The Rails With A Gravy Plane!

Crazy, but that's how it goes.

Ontario threw a smaller version of a No Kings protest yesterday across Canada’s most populated province for people to vent over the cartoonish rule of Premier Doug Ford, who somehow won his third consecutive majority government last year. The stakes aren’t as high but the sentiment remains.

There’s no shortage of reasons to be unhappy with the oxymoronic Progressive Conservative government he leads — including gutting student aid grants, a real estate scandal still under police investigation where he tried to hand protected greenspace over to his generous developer pals, and bringing in retroactive new laws to protect him and his cabinet from freedom-of-information scrutiny — and the turnout likely got a boost from the surprise announcement that taxpayers had just bought him a $30 million plane to swan around in.

Dougie, who built his entire brand on being just a regular Joe who wants to “stop the gravy train” of wasteful government spending going back to his days as a Toronto city councillor and sidekick to his younger brother Rob, hit the eject button less than 48 hours after being bombarded with “Gravy Plane” jokes about the gently used Bombardier Challenger 650.

He and the missus never even got the chance to join the Mile High Club! The preem’s office claimed he needed “flexible, secure, and confidential travel” to get around in a province more than double the size of California as well the occasional trip to the US to try to convince the Trump regime to knock it off with the frickin tariffs already and maybe also buy some more Ontario-made Nazimobiles for ICE.

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Apparently you can’t save the Ontario auto industry sitting in 13B on Air Canada next to a screaming toddler or someone watching Tiktok videos without headphones. You need privacy. You need mahogany. Although the argument he needs the plane to access remote regions of northern Ontario fell apart with the news only 10 percent of the province’s airports have runways long enough for the thing to land, meaning fine communities such as as Emo, Swastika, and even Moose Factory would be out of luck if they ever need Douglas Robert Ford Jr. in a hurry.

“I make mistakes, every premier makes mistakes,” he told reporters while looking like a kid caught elbow-deep in the cookie jar. “I hear loud and clear from the people that this was not the right time.”

When the right time might actually be remains unclear, but the backlash came from pretty much every direction that isn’t a private aviation showroom. People questioned why the province needed its own jet at all seeing as how all the other Canadian premiers mostly make do with flying commerical, whether cheaper options were available, and why this seemed urgent enough to drop tens of millions without, say, a transparent consultation process. Little is known of the 10-year-old plane’s previous South American owner, so it’s fun to imagine it belonged to a Colombian cartel boss or former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro now that he’s no longer in a position to use it.

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How does something this big get approved so quickly, only to be walked back just as fast? Did he really not think financially strapped voters wouldn’t notice a luxury purchase roughly equivalent to several thousand trips to Loblaws?

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But Ford couldn’t just take the L and had to point fingers. He spent the press conference whining about an unfair “double standard” and that the media didn’t yell at Quebec for spending $107 million on three other jets. Which is probably because they were purchased primarily for medical evacuations in remote regions rather than the personal use of new unelected premier Christine Fréchette, who only replaced François Legault as CAQ leader two weeks ago and doesn’t want to get dragged into this merde.

Private planes have caused lots of turbulence for politicians lately. Kristi Noem lost her gig over the optics of the flying fuck den as much as for the murders, while reports of Krazy-Eyes K$sh using FBI planes for personal party time are as good an excuse for his teetotalling boss to fire him as his habit of being shitfaced on the job. And no doubt Qataris are experiencing briber’s remorse after they gave Dear Leader a $400 million sky palace and all they got in return was Iranian drone strikes.

The province is now “working with Bombardier” to offload the Challenger as quickly as possible but the challenge will be to resell it at a similar price. And any potential buyer will be holding the cards when negotiating with a guy openly desperate to get rid of a politically radioactive asset before his next polling numbers come out.

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[Eyeopener / Now Toronto / CBC / The Atlantic / Blueskies]