Ontario premier Doug Ford is now taking flak for promoting an Ontario winery after his party accepted what some Toronto media reports characterized as a “generous” donation from the winery’s owner. How generous? Are we talking millions? Tens of millions? A thousand dollars. Toronto media considers $1,000 to be enough money to sway the provincial government and at least one local media outlet encouraged its readers to boycott the winery. But that turned out to be only the tip of the iceberg from a media investigation point of view: Ford’s ultra-cheesy “Ontario News Now” party propaganda channel had given Ford’s endorsement to at least four other mega-corporations whose political contributions may have gone as eye-wateringly high as $2,000! Torontonians may never have heard of these corporate puppet-masters who clearly now control Premier Ford’s every waking moment, but as Canadians have never seen corruption on this scale before — nearly ten thousand dollars in political contributions!! — they’re demanding all the usual things that media-ginned-up protests tend to demand.
“Pelee Island winery”by John Kannenberg is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
At the National Post, Chris Selley wonders why the Ontario Progressive Conservatives are acting just as badly as the Liberals they replaced:
When it comes to Canadian politicians and money, it might be difficult to explain to a foreign visitor exactly what’s kosher and what’s not. Ontario Premier Doug Ford got some bad press this week for having promoted the Pelee Island Winery in one of his impossibly cheesy “Ontario News Now” propaganda videos, just weeks after the winery’s owner, Walter Schmoranz, donated $1,000 to Ford’s Progressive Conservatives. In isolation, it didn’t look great. If it’s a coincidence, as the premier claims, then it’s the sort of coincidence a government wishing to claim moral rectitude should endeavour to avoid.
Viewed in the broad landscape of Canadian politics, however, it all seems rather overblown. Politicians regularly stump for certain products and businesses, after all, implicitly at the expense of others. More to the point they routinely give businesses free money without asking us, and not out of the goodness of their hearts.
According to David Akin’s indispensable @ottawaspends Twitter feed, the federal government doled out $723,000 to wineries and winery associations this year and last. The Nova Scotia Winery Association hoovered up $522,000 of the total, plus another $175,000 back in 2012. Perhaps it would be cynical to observe that the riding of West Nova, home to the Annapolis Valley wineries, is notorious for changing hands between the Liberals and Conservatives. Whoops — too late.
Here in Ontario, meanwhile, between 2013 and 2018, the province and feds collectively gave away at least $1.1 million to wineries and $1.5 million to breweries, plus $140-odd million more to an endless queue of cap-in-hand distillers, mushroom farmers, meat processers, goat dairies, sugarmakers and bakeries. Pelee Island Winery isn’t on that list, incidentally, which might put the premier’s non-financial contribution — quid pro quo or not — in perspective.
All that taxpayer dough got handed out under a program called Growing Forward 2, which was an “initiative that encouraged innovation, competitiveness and market development, adaptability and industry sustainability in Canada’s agri-food and agri products sector.” That’s a fancy way of saying “corporate welfare,” which can be unpopular in Canada when it comes to bailing Bombardier out of its latest fiasco or buying the Weston clan new freezers, but which is entirely uncontroversial when it comes to smaller, less obviously villainous businesses — especially if they happen to be farms.
