The U.S.-Canada trade situation is so bleak (as I’ve been discussing in these three posts: 1, 2 and 3) that I guess it could use a bit of comic relief-cum-TPM lore. The current Premier of Ontario (their analog to the governor of state) is Doug Ford. He’s the brother of the late Rob Ford, who you’ll remember was the rotund, buffoonish, crack-smoking mayor of Toronto from 2010 to 2014. In December 2013, Rob Ford won a Golden Duke award and we sent Hunter Walker, then in his first stint at TPM, to personally bestow the Golden Duke statuette to Mayor Ford. Hunter and then-TPM intern Yumi Araki hunted around Toronto to find Ford but finally had to settle on giving it to Ford’s brother Doug. (We’ll come back to their quest in a moment. You can read Nicole LaFond’s recollection of the story for our 20th Anniversary celebration here.)
As you may recall, Rob Ford’s story went from consistently hilarious to deeply tragic later in 2014 when he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer which took his life 18 months later at the age of 46.
Ford was in many ways a proto-Trump, a similar brand of populist right-wing politics (he and his brother were and are members of the Conservative Party), the clown-show behavior, the mix of corruption and stupidity but also that ability to win the attention economy that is Trump’s hallmark. (Substance abuse was the only thing the two didn’t share.) Doug Ford, who is actually Rob’s older brother though he followed him into politics, picked up Rob’s political mantle and is now Premier of Ontario. He’s also quite Trumpy, visually, characterologically, politically. But in current Canadian politics, you may be Trumpy but that’s only okay if you are absolutely, positively against the actual Donald Trump. (It was Conservative standard-bearer Pierre Poilievre’s inability to manage that pivot which doomed what was supposed to be the Conservatives’ relatively straightforward return to power in April 2025.) And Doug Ford is very much in that lane. In fact, Ford has been threatening explicitly what has remained implicit in the statements of the more measured and technocratic Prime Minister Carney: that Canada should at least seriously consider cutting off critical supplies of oil, lumber and electricity to the United States. (I discussed this possibility here.)
Ford went off on Trump in a series of appearances today — again, threatening critical supply cut offs, telling Trump to “kiss his ass” and mocking Trump’s expected drubbing in the November midterms. Indeed, he said at a press conference this afternoon that “if I was allowed to, I’d be there door-knocking.” I’m pretty sure there’s actually no bar on Doug coming down here to canvass, though it would look a bit unseemly, I guess.
This final part is going well beyond my knowledge of Canadian politics. But though I doubt Ford needs any encouragement, I’m not sure Carney minds having Ford playing a kind of good cop, bad cop routine with him. Or perhaps better to say, stern cop, edgelord, trash-talk cop, as it might be. To remind you of what I said above, Ford is the equivalent of an American governor. So little of this is really up to him. But Ontario is far and away the most populous Canadian province (home to nearly 40% of the whole country) and has a comparably sized economy. So he’s not just any provincial leader.
In any case, in line with keeping to a lighter tone, here, from 13 years ago, is a brief travelogue from Hunter’s visit to Toronto …
And a short time later his attempt to present Mayor Ford with the statuette …
