He’s not the only politician to have achieved this during the pandemic but he’s the one whose energy and education policies offend me just as much now as they did when he was first elected.
On the other hand, he has a dreadful, beautiful cheesecake recipe his late mother got from her sister Wendy, he learned to make it when he was 10, and the result has clogged my heart with sweet, sweet love.
He sent out a video of himself making the cheesecake in the kitchen of his mom’s house and I cannot stop watching the thing. It’s so Ontario it’s practically the Canadian Shield in a 9-inch Pyrex dish.
First of all, Adorable Doug had all his ingredients lined up and ready for action, which is what all terrible cooks do — I am one — because we have a tendency to panic. “My god, we’re out of cream of tartar?” “The eggs aren’t room temperature, does that matter?” We don’t pre-heat the oven because we never think we’ll actually get there.
But Doug was at his best in blue latex gloves, very au courant, and a black T-shirt declaring “We’re all in this together.” I don’t think we are, I don’t wear clothes with writing on them, I don’t like folksy, and I want that shirt.
Ford assembled his packages: graham cracker crumbs, Philadelphia cream cheese, Redpath icing sugar, Lactantia milk and butter, Dream Whip topping and two cans of cherry filling. I disagree with the Dream Whip, made as it is of sugar, palm oil, modified milk, corn syrup and chemicals, much preferring 35 per cent cream with icing sugar and almond flavour.
Ford Nation would call me elitist but I’m ordering Dream Whip on Instacart as I write this. This is a tween recipe, basically a jigsaw puzzle with seven pieces, and it takes me back to the frighteningly awful recipes of my childhood, Mad Men dishes with three-layer Jello salads and wooden salad bowls filled with iceberg lettuce and Heinz dressing.
Ford has a cool hand mixer, which we were never allowed because frivolous, because splattery. We had a huge, heavy Kenwood Chef. Oh, I have since run the gamut of fragile Brauns and ill-designed KitchenAids, and still I dream of Premier Doug’s mixer.
The cherries are the only thing wrong with Ford’s recipe. Yet Ford, often uncomfortable when unscripted on camera, sensed that and stepped easily into our troubled minds. “If you don’t like cherries, use blueberries!” I feel seen.
He gave seniors a break on prescription fees. He opened up nurseries and garden centres. He works closely with the feds. But that little white mixer sealed the deal: 9/10 for domestic arts.
Other politicians harden my heart. Former soldier Erin O’Toole, running for leadership of the federal Conservative Party, wins Ford-level points for pronouncing today as “tidday” in his videos, but he seems friendless and unfriendly, military in fact: 4/10 if you’re a dude. Contender Peter “Do you like guns? I do” MacKay will never survive wearing that Christmas sweater with a semi-automatic rifle on it. It’s not his fault he looks like a statue on Easter Island: 2/10 for participation only.
Then there’s Prime Minister Trudeau, whose beard is getting whiter and hair teenage-level argumentative. It falls in his face when he speaks outside Rideau Cottage, the no-frills house where the family lives because he dare not repair the PM’s actual residence because, who does he think he is?
Former PM Stephen Harper didn’t mind living with asbestos and rot at 24 Sussex but we should have fixed it for him. Trudeau, more cautious about his family’s health, recently had a guest house rebuilt at the PM’s Harrington Lake retreat.
In the midst of the pandemic, petty Ottawa journalists leaped on Trudeau, saying he had tried to conceal the reno. It was done so guests would have somewhere non-embarrassing, pleasant even, to stay so they wouldn’t talk amongst themselves — “Is Canada poor?”— the way your Aunt Moira gets at Christmas.
So Trudeau daily steps out of what is a well-appointed shack for any nation in the G7 and soothes parents and children, then reporters. I give him 10/10 for survival, always Canada’s great theme.
