Diagnosing Doug Ford’s Durability: The Discourse and Political Economy of Right-Wing Populist Environmental Politics in Ontario

As we approach the 2022 Ontario provincial election, political observers are apt to be somewhat confused. To most, it would seem that the current Ontario government, facing increasingly low popularity and widespread dissatisfaction with its management of the COVID-19 pandemic, has been ‘mugged by reality.’ However, as of yet polls show the Conservative Party of Ontario, (though with a dented reputation), very likely to retain power if an election were called today. This poses something of a theoretical dilemma. How do we make sense of an approach to governance that seems to have been discredited by reality, but shambles on relatively undisturbed in the discursive/political realm? With the goal of answering that question, this paper forwards a theory of the Ford government’s discursive strategy in general, and then examines how that style has persisted. It approaches this investigation using through discourse analysis, political-economic analysis, and a Gramscian analysis of hegemony. It proposes that the Ford government’s resilience can be attributed to the ability of its populistneoliberal and promethean-populist discourses to absorb and explain challenges accompanying COVID-19, changes in environmental politics, and labor market polarization in Ontario, as well as the inability of institutional discursive alternatives to provide a compelling counterhegemonic discourse that moves beyond the facilitative-managerial discourse the Ford government displaced in 2018. It concludes by suggesting that a revision of the ‘Green New Deal’ discourse that incorporates elements of deliberative democracy and a ‘green economic survivalism’ discourse might prove to be a more successful counter-hegemonic discourse.