The Old Guardian — Special Report | August 19, 2026
In September 2018, on the last day of candidate registration for Toronto’s municipal election, Premier Doug Ford introduced legislation cutting Toronto City Council nearly in half — from 47 seats to 25 — mid-campaign, without warning, without public consultation.
It went to court. Ford invoked the notwithstanding clause to override the ruling. The cuts stood.
Most people filed it as a political fight about Toronto. A power grab, sure — but a local one. Move on.
That was 2018. It is now August 2026. And when you lay out everything that has happened since, the Toronto council cuts don’t look like a one-off anymore. They look like the opening move.
The full list. Read it slowly.
2018 — Municipal democracy Toronto City Council cut from 47 to 25 seats mid-election, without public input. Regional municipality chairs in Peel, York, Niagara, and Muskoka converted from elected to appointed — by the province. Democratic representation at the local level, reduced by provincial decree.
2022–2023 — The Greenbelt 7,400 acres of protected Greenbelt land quietly removed from environmental protection — in ways the Auditor General found would increase connected developers’ land values by $8.3 billion. The Auditor General also found government officials used code words in communications about the Greenbelt plan, violating legal record-keeping obligations. Ethics violations found. Two cabinet ministers resigned. Ford reversed under public pressure. The RCMP opened a criminal investigation in October 2023 that remains active. The mandatory decade review of the Greenbelt, required by law, is now more than a year overdue. Asked for an update at Queen’s Park in March 2026, the responsible minister said “No, thanks” and walked away.
2022 — Strong mayor powers Ford granted strong mayor powers to Toronto and designated municipalities — allowing mayors to pass bylaws with one-third of council support and override local planning decisions. Local democratic councils weakened further by provincial legislation.
2025 — Fixed election dates eliminated Ontario repealed its fixed election date legislation on November 27, 2025. Elections must now be held within the constitutional five-year maximum — but the Premier controls the timing. The mechanism introduced specifically to remove political considerations from election timing was removed by the politician who benefits most from controlling it.
November 2025 — Public water The Water and Wastewater Public Corporations Act, buried in omnibus Bill 60, was rushed through the legislature without public consultation — debate held at night, committee comment bypassed. The legislation authorizes the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing to remove water and wastewater services from local governments and transfer them to arm’s-length corporations structured under the Business Corporations Act — the same legal framework as private, for-profit companies. The government insists private ownership is prohibited. A UBC law professor commissioned to review the legislation called it “stealth privatization,” noting the “agent” loophole could enable private investment through entities like the Canada Infrastructure Bank. The financial structure is the tell: infrastructure built over decades with public funds transfers to the new corporation. The municipal debt stays behind. Assets move. Liabilities don’t. Ontarians have seen this before. In 2000, the privatization of water testing in Walkerton killed seven people and left over 2,300 ill. Many survivors still live with permanent health consequences.
2025–2026 — School boards: phase one Provincial supervisors appointed to take over eight Ontario school boards. Bill 33 expanded ministry power over boards directly. Follow-up legislation reduced the number of elected trustees, changed their responsibilities, and created a new CEO position appointed above the elected board. The most grassroots form of democratic representation in Ontario subordinated to a provincial appointee. Supervisors — with no educational background required — earn up to $350,000 a year. Surprise cuts made by supervisors that would normally have been debated in open school board meetings began happening without public notice.
April 2026 — Freedom of information, retroactively eliminated Bill 97 passed April 23, 2026 — 57 to 33, no public hearings, buried in an omnibus budget bill. The Premier, all cabinet ministers, parliamentary assistants, and their staff are permanently exempt from FOI requests — retroactively to 1988. Dozens of active requests wiped out. Multiple court orders voided — including the order for Ford’s November 2022 phone records, the month his government announced the Greenbelt removals. Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner urged the government not to pass it. She was ignored. Google Docs used for government business were simultaneously declared outside the law entirely. The doubling of FOI processing times for all other requests was buried in the same bill.
May 19, 2026 — Three courts. One IPC order. Zero records. The Ontario Court of Appeal dismissed the government’s final appeal on Ford’s personal phone records — records a court had ordered produced, records the IPC had ordered released, records three levels of court had now upheld. Ford’s office said it was “reviewing next steps.” The records have not been produced. Bill 97’s retroactive shield is still in effect. The sequence: IPC orders records released. Ford refuses. Court sides with IPC. Ford appeals. Court dismisses. Ford appeals again. Court dismisses again. Ford passes Bill 97 retroactively shielding records. Court orders records again. Ford’s office says “reviewing next steps.” Three courts. One IPC order. One retroactive law. Zero records. That is not a legal strategy. That is a documented, sequential dismantling of judicial accountability in real time.
2026 — Regional governments The Better Regional Governance Act 2026 gives the province power to appoint chairs and wardens in Peel Region, Durham, Waterloo, and York. More elected regional leadership positions converted to provincial appointments.
May 14, 2026 — The TTC Bill 98 passed May 14, 2026. The Fare Alignment and Seamless Transit Act gives the Minister of Transportation total control over TTC fares, service levels, route designations, and revenue distribution by regulation — with no input required from Toronto residents or the elected TTC board. For the first time in over a century, TTC riders may be required to pay to transfer within the system. TTC fare revenue can now be redirected to subsidize transit systems elsewhere in the province. Distance and zone-based fares — which would fall hardest on riders in Scarborough, Etobicoke, North York, and Rexdale who take the longest trips because they cannot afford to live beside work — are now legally available to the minister by regulation, with no vote required. The TTC Board, the City of Toronto, transit unions, and rider advocacy groups all opposed the bill. It passed anyway.
2026 — Billy Bishop and the Toronto Islands Legislation passed to expropriate the City of Toronto’s 20% stake in Billy Bishop Airport and override the tripartite agreement banning jet traffic. Ford declared the area a special economic zone where provincial and municipal laws can be suspended. The legislation’s property identification numbers cover not just the airport — but almost all city-owned land on the Toronto Islands, including beaches and parkland. The terminal is owned by Nieuport Aviation, controlled by J.P. Morgan Asset Management since 2019. Nieuport’s registered Ontario lobbyist is Mark Lawson of Anthem Advisory — a former PC government chief of staff who also lobbied for the Therme Ontario Place spa. No business case, no environmental assessment, and no capital cost estimate has been made public. The Toronto Port Authority estimates expansion costs at up to $5 billion. Ford said “one way or another, jets are coming.” The city has no legal recourse. The federal government launched a public consultation on June 8, 2026 — deadline July 24.
August 2026 — School boards: phase two At the Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference on August 19, 2026, Education Minister Paul Calandra told hundreds of municipal politicians that elected school trustees are “outdated” and confirmed he is open to eliminating them entirely. “If the province determines they can deliver a better product without trustees, they will,” he said. Public school trustees have no constitutional protection — Calandra has confirmed this explicitly. Catholic and French trustees have limited protection. English public school trustees have none. Municipal elections are scheduled for October 2026. Ford has refused to say whether trustee elections will be on the ballot. Municipal clerks responsible for running those elections have formally written to Calandra asking whether to include trustees. He has not answered. Calandra has disabled public comments on his Facebook page. He cannot be FOI’d. His AMO delegation meeting notes are not public record.
The privatization receipt
This pattern has been tested before at smaller scale — and the results are documented.
In 2011, the Rob Ford administration privatized garbage collection west of Yonge Street. Projected savings: $10 million annually. The savings were real — initially. Toronto’s own Auditor General eventually found that in-house collection east of Yonge is now roughly the same cost per household as the privatized west-end service. The promised savings evaporated over time as the private operator — GFL — became too embedded to replace without significant disruption, and competition disappeared.
In January 2026, GFL — the same company, now with the province-wide recycling contract — failed to collect post-holiday recycling across two entire Toronto districts within days of the new privatized system launching. Days. Not months.
This is the documented cycle: initial savings produced by wage suppression and underbidding, followed by embedded monopoly, eroding service, rising costs at renewal, and no viable path back to public delivery because the institutional capacity to do it has been dismantled. The evidence existed before the water legislation. Before Bill 98. Before the school board supervisors. The decision-makers had access to it. They proceeded anyway.
The savings argument is the packaging. Revenue access and embedded private operators are the product.
What this pattern actually means
Each item on that list was reported as a separate story. A budget bill here. A transit policy there. A school board supervisor nobody noticed. Water corporations buried on page 47 of an omnibus bill debated at night.
Look at the full list and ask one question: what do all of these have in common?
Every single one transfers power away from an elected, accountable body — and toward the Premier’s office or a corporate structure insulated from public accountability. Every single one removes or weakens a mechanism that existed to check what the provincial government does with your money, your land, your transit, your children’s schools, your water, and your right to ask questions.
Municipal councillors. Regional chairs. School trustees. TTC boards. Conservation authorities. The Information and Privacy Commissioner. The courts. Fixed election dates. The Freedom of Information system that exposed the Greenbelt. And now the pipes that bring water to your tap, and potentially the last elected school trustees in Ontario’s English public system. All of it. Systematically. Over eight years.
This is not what conservatism means
There is a version of conservatism with a coherent philosophical core. Reagan and Thatcher didn’t agree on everything, but they shared a foundational conviction: that concentrated state power is the enemy of individual freedom, that markets distribute decision-making better than governments do, and that the role of the executive is to govern within constraints — not to dismantle them.
Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, built his entire political philosophy around one idea: that institutions, traditions, and distributed power structures protect ordinary people from the overreach of any single authority. Classical conservatism is, at its root, a doctrine of restraint. Restraint of government. Restraint of executive power. Restraint of the state’s reach into local communities.
A genuine fiscal conservative would be downloading power to municipalities, not uploading it to Queen’s Park. A genuine conservative would be strengthening accountability mechanisms, not retroactively legislating them away. A genuine conservative would not run Ontario’s debt from $337 billion to $485 billion, spend $112 million on taxpayer-funded government advertising, appoint provincial loyalists above every elected local body in the province, or buy a $28.9 million private jet and refuse to release the procurement documents.
What Ford practices is not conservatism. It is populist nationalism with clientelist economics. He uses conservative cultural signalling — the common man, cutting red tape, stopping the gravy train — while practicing the structural opposite. Power flows up, not down. Money flows to connected interests, not taxpayers. Accountability mechanisms are removed, not strengthened.
A genuine Thatcherite looking at Ford’s Ontario would see exactly what Thatcher spent her career fighting: an overreaching executive using state power to pick winners, eliminate institutional competition, and insulate itself from accountability.
You don’t have to rig an election to make one matter less
Let’s be precise, because precision matters here. Ontario is not a one-party state. Elections still happen. Opposition parties still win seats. Doug Ford does not have 80% of the vote.
What he has is 43% of the vote — and 80 of 124 seats. That’s not a supermajority of Ontarians. That’s a supermajority of seats produced by a first-past-the-post system splitting the opposition vote between two parties that collectively outpoll him but can’t coordinate.
But here is what he has built around that electoral system. He controls when elections happen. He has shielded his government’s records so opponents can’t build a paper-trail case against him between elections. He has weakened every layer of local democratic accountability that might generate alternative power centres. He has moved to control Toronto’s transit system, restructure public water delivery, and seize an airport through a special economic zone that can suspend the law itself. He raised the personal donation cap to political parties. He has placed loyalists on the judicial appointments committee. And he governs a province where the opposition has been structurally divided for nearly a decade.
You don’t need to rig an election if you control when it’s called, what records your opponents can access, and which institutions are capable of challenging you in the years between votes.
Political scientists have a name for this. It’s called executive aggrandizement — a documented global phenomenon where democratically elected leaders use legal mechanisms to concentrate power in the executive while leaving the formal architecture of democracy superficially intact. Hungary under Orbán is the textbook case. Ontario is not Hungary. But the pattern of behaviour belongs to the same documented category. That is not an accusation. It is a classification.
Ford told the Star the Greenbelt is something people don’t give two hoots about. He may be right that most people aren’t following the details. That’s exactly how this works. The details are boring. The pattern is not.
Could a future government undo this?
Some of it, yes. Fixed election dates, donation limits, strong mayor powers, regional chair appointments — all reversible by legislation. A new government could restore them in a single term with sufficient political will.
Some of it is harder. Water infrastructure transferred to new corporate structures before a reversal would require unwinding corporate transactions, not just repealing laws. TTC revenue redistributed under the new framework leaves gaps that need filling. School board governance restructured around provincial appointees takes time to restore through election cycles — assuming trustee elections happen at all in October 2026.
And some of it is effectively permanent. The FOI retroactivity is the most consequential. A new government could re-extend FIPPA coverage going forward. But the records that were never produced under existing court orders are gone. Ford’s November 2022 phone records — the ones three courts ordered him to produce, the ones Bill 97 retroactively shielded — are almost certainly lost as an evidentiary matter regardless of what any future legislature does. The Greenbelt-era communications conducted on personal devices and deleted or wiped are gone. The legal proceedings those records would have supported don’t automatically revive.
The most important permanent damage isn’t any single law. It’s the evidentiary record that was suppressed while those laws were being passed. A future government trying to hold Ford accountable would find the doors already locked and the keys already destroyed.
That’s not an accident either.
The one accountability mechanism left
The Provincial Auditor General retains independent authority to access government records — including ministerial records — for audit purposes under the Auditor General Act. Bill 97 didn’t touch it. The Opposition has already filed an audit request on the jet procurement. That mandate needs to be protected in every future budget — and expanded to cover what is documented above.
The next election must be held by March 2030. Ford controls when it happens. He has eliminated fixed dates, shielded his records, placed loyalists above elected bodies at every level of government, and may eliminate the last directly elected education representatives in Ontario’s English public school system before October’s municipal vote. The template for what comes next is already written in the bills already passed. The only question is whether enough Ontarians are paying attention before the next window closes.
What you can do right now
Contact your MPP — government and opposition alike. Demand the Auditor General’s mandate be protected in the next budget. Demand the Greenbelt review that is legally overdue be completed and made public. Demand an answer on whether trustee elections will be on the October ballot — before it’s too late to run. Ask your MPP where they stand on public water, on TTC accountability, and on restoring FOI coverage to ministerial offices.
Find your MPP at ola.org/en/members
These institutions belong to you. They are being taken, one bill at a time, in language designed to make you look away. Don’t.
The Old Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet covering Ontario provincial and municipal governance. We follow money, power, and the public record — not party lines. If this piece matters to you, share it.