The back story to the government of Ontario Premier Doug Ford's recent, brief debacle over purchasing an executive jet offers a caution for people in other walks of life. One thing is certain — the business of moving people around the vast terrain of Canada can get a little complicated.
Given a choice between driving and flying, I'll take driving every time. But driving has limitations. If you're going any distance, driving is more expensive. And, while airports do everything humanly possible to make travel annoying and time-consuming, air travel is faster.
The travel equation got a little complicated when I arrived at Queen's Park. Spending public money should be harder than spending private cash and the public has little patience with politicians travelling in any kind of luxury. Commercial flights or driving aren't viable options when you need to access many of the communities in this enormous province.
The good news was, in those halcyon days, that the province had two King Air turboprop planes that could get you to remote places in a decent time. The bad news was that those planes ferried a lot of people who worked for the province. Time is important to a cadre of folks who need to traverse Ontario, so getting access to a King Air was always predicated on having no other viable alternative.
The rule of the day was to drive or take a commercial flight if either option worked. King Air or charter options were only used if circumstances demanded a quick turnaround to a remote corner of the province. This all made sense to me. Politicians should travel the same way they would if they were footing the bill. There is a stigma for private flights that isn't entirely rational. When the government replaced the two turboprops with identical units back in the early 2000s, reporters quipped that they should be called Air Florida one and two, a reference, I assumed, to a premier who enjoyed a round of golf.
When I was scrummed on this hot topic, a reporter demanded that I come clean. Could these planes make it to Florida? I told him they could go further than Florida; they could get all the way to Kenora.
That storm blew over and I assume the planes did a good job of getting people to some of the more distant parts of Ontario. At least they did until Doug Ford got elected.
Back in 2018, the newly elected Ford government did a few things to hammer home the notion of heeding the taxpayer's message, including selling the King Airs. It was good political theatre and bad management.
Ontario didn't suddenly shrink and government still needed to get people around, so those planes were replaced by private charters. The business case for plane ownership versus chartering is complicated, but, as Ford recently discovered, this ain't about the numbers.
If those turboprop workhorses were too glamorous for the Ford government in 2018, it was impossible to convince the public that buying an executive jet in 2026 was prudent.
Turns out the theatrical selling of the turboprops was an act of arrogance by an inexperienced government. It would have been much wiser to keep the planes that had served the needs of many Ontario governments of every political stripe. This is a caution for new crusaders in every walk of life. Sometimes it's wise to remember that the people who served before you weren't complete idiots.
