The Fifth Annual(ish) Douggie Awards

July 17, 2024·37 min·2 clips

The premier who ran against the 'gravy train' now runs the highest-paid premier's office in Ontario history, including $230,000 paid to a former aide who had already left to run a lobbying firm.

Spin is the category here. The political segment lands on a nomination for best spin, starting with the government treating its own Greenbelt loophole cleanup as proof of renewed protection. Quite a move. The dry praise is not really praise. It is a pause before the show turns to the Ontario Science Centre, where the official story gets held up against the engineering report as the hosts describe it. The building closed fast. The host says the Science Centre shut on a Friday afternoon while people were still inside, with fencing going up around it soon after. Nobody was trapped inside. Infrastructure Ontario's argument, as summarized here, was that the roof problem created an urgent safety reason to clear everyone out. Then people read the report. Once there was time to look at it, the idea that the building simply could not stay open sounded less solid than the briefing had made it seem. A smaller repair figure enters the conversation. The host says the broken roof sections might have cost about five hundred thousand dollars to fix, possibly with only a limited closure while the Science Centre stayed open. That punctures the drama nicely. A later peer reviewed version, in this telling, still did not say the building had to be closed forever. It said vacate the building to fix the roof. The nomination sits in that gap between a narrower instruction and a sweeping public closure, which is exactly the kind of bureaucratic daylight this show enjoys. The tone stays dry. Even the applause for spin works like a backhanded compliment, letting the paperwork make the talking points look silly. The excerpt is messy at the edges too. A Canadaland crowdfunding appeal opens the audio, and the closing beat moves into ads, so the politics sits between podcast-business furniture.

As heard by us

An Ontario politics awards-show roast about official spin around the Greenbelt and Ontario Science Centre.

The Fifth Annual(ish) Douggie Awards treats Ontario politics as a year-end prize show for government spin. The segment lands hardest when it compares two familiar Ford-government reversals: the Greenbelt backtrack, framed as a renewed commitment to protection after the province…

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Why you'd press play

For when you want Ontario political spin judged with receipts and a raised eyebrow.

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