Doug and Kathleen: a match made in heaven.

• Author: Atkins, Michael
• Position: President's Note

If you are Doug Ford could you find anyone better to run against than Kathleen Wynne?

She's a big spender and runs extraordinary deficits without a care in the world.

A chief of staff to her mentor Dalton McGuinty is going to jail for erasing potential evidence in the gas plant scandal. She just put up the minimum wage, precipitously hobbling many small businesses in the service and small manufacturing sector. She is losing cabinet ministers at a rate so accelerated she is not even replacing them before the election. She sold half of Ontario Hydro to try to pay for a deficit she still can't control and of course her government has been in power for 15 years, which is well beyond the best-before date for Rice Krispies and politics.

Now if you're Kathleen Wynne could you find anyone more qualified to help you to change the channel on your own failing election prospects than Doug Ford who was a loyal soldier for his brother Rob who was, to be charitable, an unusual mayoral presence in the halls of Toronto, hanging out as he did with a variety of drug dealers and gang members and doing drugs by night as he allegedly fought for taxpayers by day

So far, Doug has said he will eliminate the carbon tax and, yes, although he doesn't promise to buy back Ontario Hydro, he most certainly promises to fire the president and/or the board of the company, which seems a tad interventionalist for a fellow that wants to set the private sector free.

If you want to fire the board for political theatre, it seems only fair you should buy it. No doubt this talk will keep share values suppressed for years for investors.

Although, no doubt, much will change before election day, Doug has said he can easily erase $6 billion of provincial expenditures in Ontario without laying anybody off.

This, of course, is absurd and everyone knows it.

It probably won't hurt him much because the Tory leader is just channelling the anger many people feel about the Liberals buying us off with our own money. He will not suffer for making promises that cannot be kept. It's more a grossly overestimated statement of intent than a plan. This is called newspeak for the Orwellians among us.

My guess is the Tories will do well in Northern Ontario.

It's hard to know how many seats will change hands because this result has more...