RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, JUNE 12, 2026. It seems likely enough that Doug Ford, Premier of Canada’ most populous province of Ontario , is not too popular with US President Donald Trump these days.

See eg : “U.S. Chamber of Commerce event with Doug Ford cancelled after White House complaints, sources say” (June 9, 2026).

President Trump has also on occasion had a few kinder words to say about Ontario’s premier : Eg “Trump says he respects ‘very strong man’ Ford after Ontario premier suspends electricity surcharge” (from March 11, 2025 — more than a year ago now!).

Other US politicians and political observers have lately expressed more positive views on Doug Ford. CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, who “grew up in Western New York on the border with Ontario” and is happy to confess “I love Canada,” had Premier Ford on his TV show this week.

And then Pennsylvania’s (Democratic) Governor Josh Shapiro visited Premier Ford at Queen’s Park in Toronto the day before yesterday. While in town Governor Shapiro slammed President Trump’s latest 51st state Canadian imaginings as “Reckless and disrespectful.”

More than a few actual Ontario residents have lately been expressing less optimistic views of their premier. On June 11, 2026 John Smith “(son of Harry Leslie Smith)” posted./tweeted on Twiitter/X : “In Ontario Donald Trump is pronounced Doug Ford.”

(And this is a view I have sympathy with myself, even if President Trump himself might not like the idea that Doug Ford is just a Canadian regional variation on the Donald Trump syndrome, that is doing so much damage to the USA as historic homeland of Democracy in America. At the same time, Trump’s occasional kind words for Ford could be viewed as evidence that Trump does at bottom at least like something about the ‘very strong man’ Ford )

Still more significantly the latest (June 2026) Angus Reid poll of Canadian provincial premier approval numbers puts Doug Ford at the very bottom of the list. Only 21% of Ontarians currently approve of the job he is doing as premier.

(At the top of the list 62% of Manitobans currently approve of Premier Wab Kinew. Premier Kinew is among other happy things an Indigenous Canadian — a particular attraction in Manitoba, which has the largest Indigenous population share [18%] of all 10 provinces — though not of the three far northern territories : the Inuit homeland in Nunavut eg is 85% Indigenous.)

I share the view of many Ontarians at the moment that Doug Ford is almost certainly the worst Premier of Ontario in living memory. And as the author of a few published books and articles on Ontario political (and economic) history I would even say he is arguably the worst premier in all of Ontario’s history since its birth in 1867.

I won’t go on, for the moment at any rate. Except to underline that Premier Ford richly deserves his record low approval rating of 21% (all diehard Conservatives no doubt) in the latest Angus Reid poll on the subject. (And as a bit of concluding evidene I’d note Toronto Star Queen’s Park bureau chief Robert Benzie’s recent tweet/Xpost on how “The Garage Mahal at Ontario Place will cost $198MN.”)

All this having been said and duly recognized, Premier Ford in my view does have two somewhat compensating lower-order but effective talents — that have already kept him in office since 2018, over three elections in seven years.

The first is that he has largely (and wisely) left the running or at least government management of the provincial economy to the talented, tested, and well informed people in the Ontario Ministry of Finance. This has given Premier Ford the kind of (well at least relative) recurrent economic success story reflected in the 41,800 new jobs in Canada’s most populous province in May 2026.

The second is the premier’s raw and instinctual endowment of serious political smarts — again lower-order but effective.

In trying to illustrate this last political talent I think I can do no better at the moment than to quote the TwitterX response of my fellow counterweights editors to the June 2026 Angus Reid poll of approval ratings for provincial premiers :

“Ontario Premier Ford at bottom of this list … But tks to leg passed by his strong leg majority this past November 2025 (won w less than half pop vote in low turnout election) he can apparently remain in office until April 2030 … and govern with only short sittings of the Legislative Assembly.” (The real power of which in any case resides in Premier Ford’s large governing majority — currently 79 seats in a house of 124. Won in a 2025 snap election whose only necessity lay in the schemes of Doug Ford to get re-elected before being faced with the kind of abysmal approval numbers that can’t be making him very happy now, despite his most recent somewhat rigged snap election victory on February 27, 2025.)