Premier Doug Ford’s 2018 mandate letter promised to hold cabinet ministers accountable
After Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives were swept into office in June 2018, ending 15 years of Liberal rule, newly minted Premier Doug Ford provided his cabinet ministers a new north star. He would run a government defined by ethics, accountability and a province that was strictly “for the people.”
In a series of mandate letters given to newly appointed cabinet ministers in 2018, Ford laid out in painstaking detail exactly what he meant by “for the people” — words that would eventually clash with the premier’s actions six years later with his government embroiled in the Greenbelt land swap scandal.
The content of Ford’s mandate letters have been closely and fiercely guarded since CBC News attempted to obtain them using freedom of information laws in 2018. In an attempt to keep the letters confidential, the Ford government fought the CBC all the way to Canada’s Supreme Court, arguing the letters should be considered cabinet records and therefore exempt from disclosure.
The Supreme Court has been deliberating since April whether the letters should be publicly released — a potentially precedent-setting decision for future governments across the country on whether private instructions to publicly paid ministers can be kept confidential.
In early September, however, Global News obtained the letters from a source not authorized to release them publicly, and then independently verified their authenticity.
For the first time since Premier Doug Ford’s election in 2018, his secretive letters to cabinet ministers can be made public in full.
Shortly after being sworn into their new roles, in 2018, Doug Ford’s cabinet ministers would have received a letter that contained both ideological and practical instructions to be carried
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