Doug Ford crashes his Gravy Plane into the runway
The public needs to keep an eye on where this plane actually lands.
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Premier Doug Ford has been on a rather turbulent flight these past few days! After boasting years ago that he refuses to use a private jet to fly, claiming the cost to taxpayers is too high, and after making a point for years of flying commercially in Economy Class so that he could be seen travelling with normal Ontarians, Doug Ford has radio’d air traffic control to alter his flight plan!
Earlier this week, Ford’s office confirmed that they had purchased a pre-owned Bombardier Challenger 650 from the 2016 model year for the Premier’s use. This expense was valued at CAD$28.9 million, and would replace Ford’s previous use of temporarily charted jets, rented in recent years only on the rare occasions where the Premier actually needs to travel far from Ontario.
Ford’s defence of the purchase is that Québec has purchased three Challenger 650s, and the Federal government has purchased six Bombardier Global 6500s. Yet unlike Ontario, who has arranged this jet for VIP travel, Québec and Canada are using their ordered jets for actually important work, like air ambulance service and military operations. There is no comparison between the value of a working jet and a VIP sky limo.
Needless to say, both the NDP and Liberal opposition in Ontario pounced on this private jet purchase without hesitation, dubbing it the “gravy plane”, a reference to the “stop the gravy train” slogan of Doug and his late brother Rob during their time in Toronto municipal politics as councillor and mayor respectively. Indeed, calling it the Gravy Plane is some of the best narrative-shaping that the opposition to Ford has accomplished during all three of his terms.
Even the staunchly right-wing Canadian Taxpayers Federation put Ford on blast for purchasing the Gravy Plane, with their Ontario Director Noah Jarvis claiming Ford wants to “cosplay the life of the rich and famous” while “ordinary taxpayers are struggling to make ends meet”. This criticism is very potent, as Ford’s government has instituted cuts so severe that our health system is now in crisis mode, and education will become inaccessible to a large swath of the province, all while Ford insists that Galen Weston has a right to gouge us to death on grocery prices.
Even worse, as the Challenger 650 has limitations regarding the runways it can land on, many of the remote airstrips in Northern Ontario, the most justifiable place for the Premier to fly regularly, will not be able to take the Gravy Plane. Considering all these factors, the public blowback against the Gravy Plane was intense enough that the Ford government has made a U-turn midair, and promised to sell the Challenger 650 he just purchased “as quickly as possible.” Thus, the situation is settled, the story wrapped in a nice little bow, nothing to worry about.
Except for one thing. One teeny, little thing. You see, it turns out the Government of Ontario has never been the legal owner of this jet. Contrary to reporting by the Toronto Star and the CBC and all the international media who cited them, the specific Challenger 650 in question is not the legal property of Ontario, and never has been!
On Twitter, Steffan Watkins, an expert in tracking plane registrations and movements, tracked down the exact Challenger 650 in Canada’s database of registered planes. Since the plane has been identified as being made in 2016, and having been previously registered in two specific places before Canada, Mr. Watkins has identified exactly one Challenger 650 in Canada which matches the profile of the Challenger 650 which Ontario allegedly “purchased”.
In truth, the Gravy Plane has never been registered to the Government of Ontario, but instead to a private aircraft management and chartering company known as ACASS Canada Limited. We do not know exactly what contract has been arranged between Ontario and ACASS, including the actual structure of the deal, because journalists didn’t bother to do the basic investigative work of seeing who actually owns the plane!
If the people of Ontario are to be the ultimate loser of this transaction, there must be a winner on the other side that we have not identified. Perhaps ACASS is simply managing the plane on behalf of Ontario, or perhaps the plane was never actually intended to go to Ontario in the first place. There is too much about this story that we do not know.
As such, the media cannot wash our hands of this story. There is further investigative work to be done before we can understand what Premier Ford is planning, and we must question the unfounded assumptions that mainstream reporters have run with in their coverage. Until we do, the truth will not be revealed to us.