This summary was produced using artificial intelligence and reviewed by an editor for accuracy and clarity.
This is a love story.
In May, Ontario Premier Doug Ford implored his ally, Prime Minister Mark Carney, to show the west “some love.”
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With so much at stake for Canadians, it is the most important political alliance in the country.
Ford reasoned that, after a decade of prime minister Justin Trudeau’s fractious relations with some western provinces over environmental and energy policies, it was time for a change in tone from Ottawa.
“I was pretty blunt. I said, ‘You know, it’s time that your government starts showing some love to Saskatchewan and Alberta, because … the last prime minister showed no love, matter of fact, to the contrary,” he said at the time.
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Carney did so a few weeks later, hosting a first ministers meeting in Saskatchewan, something that hadn’t happened in the prairie province since 1985.
Federal Politics Mark Carney to meet with premiers in Saskatchewan as Doug Ford tells him to show the West ‘some love’
Carney is in Saskatoon June 1-2 against the backdrop of a U.S. trade war and a potential
At the Saskatoon confab, Ford serenaded reporters with a rendition of the 1977 disco hit “Love is in the Air” as he sauntered into the conference side by side with his sometime frenemy, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.
As the beaming Ontarian crooned for the cameras, she laughed and gave him a friendly pat on the back.
Five and a half months later in Calgary, Smith was smiling again when she and Carney reached a landmark memorandum of understanding for a proposed bitumen pipeline to the Pacific to take Alberta oil to Asian markets.
Federal Politics Danielle Smith talks up Alberta separation as Mark Carney and Doug Ford push for unity
Smith — who stressed she does not personally support separation — maintained she will hold a
Some 3,000 km away in Toronto, Ford was gleeful at the “great news” he contended would boost the economic prospects of the entire country and help an Ontario steel industry battered by U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
“I’m really excited that we’re going to start building pipelines,” the premier enthused Thursday at Queen’s Park.
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“We need them west; we need them north; we need them south; and we need them east. And as long as they’re using Ontario steel, that’s what I’m looking forward to: creating more opportunities, more jobs,” he said.
His comments came one day after the Financial Accountability Office reported that manufacturing has plunged to its lowest share of employment in Ontario — below 10 per cent — since such data was first compiled in 1976.
The fiscal watchdog’s warning about the dwindling number of industrial jobs in the province, which accounted for 17 per cent of employment in 2005, underscored the desperate need for new megaprojects to boost manufacturing here.
Provincial Politics Ontario’s percentage of manufacturing jobs plunging, watchdog says
The fiscal watchdog warned the province continues to face economic uncertainty as workers in
“With Trump attacking our economy, attacking our country … (Canada must) get things done immediately,” argued Ford.
“We can’t fall behind, and we can’t get caught up in red tape and regulations with the federal government and provincial government and municipalities,” he said.
But Ford was uncharacteristically circumspect about Ottawa’s burgeoning dispute with British Columbia over the federal government forcing a pipeline to the west coast.
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B.C. Premier David Eby, who opposes the project and any moves to lift a Trudeau-era oil tanker ban on the northwest coast of his province, called the scheme “an energy vampire” that distracts from other initiatives.
Eby noted the Carney-Smith proposal has “no proponent, no money, no (Coastal) First Nation support” and merely drains resources from the planned expansion of the liquified natural gas (LNG) export facility at Kitimat, B.C., which is already on Ottawa’s major project list.
Ford, for his part, was careful not to weigh in.
“I don’t get involved in ‘out west’ politics — that’s up to Premier Eby and Premier Smith and the prime minister to work their issues out,” he said diplomatically.
Still, there was an added bonus for Ford from the Ottawa-Alberta MOU — it triggered the resignation from Carney’s cabinet of Steven Guilbeault, who quit as heritage minister in protest.
Federal Politics Steven Guilbeault resigns from Mark Carney’s cabinet
Before entering elected politics, the Liberal MP worked as a famed environmentalist.
Guilbeault — a former Greenpeace activist arrested and charged with mischief in 2001 after scaling the CN Tower to demonstrate against the Canadian government’s stance on climate change — was a thorn in the premier’s side when he was Trudeau’s environment minister.
Two years ago, Ford derided him as an “extremist” who “handcuffs himself to trains” after accusing the minister of stalling federal environmental approvals for construction of Highway 413, the planned 52 km freeway between Milton and Vaughan.
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“Oh boy, that guy’s a real piece of work, isn’t he,” he said in 2023.
While there was no love lost between Ford and Guilbeault, there’s a whole lotta love being shown to the west by Carney.
And Ford loves that just fine.
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