Ladies and Gentlemen:

I write at the beginning of March 2022, almost two years after the Progressive Conservative government of Doug Ford declared a state of emergency and gave itself powers - that it has kept to this day - to lock-down businesses; to impose mask mandates, "stay at home orders", "social distancing" rules, and travel restrictions; and to impose all manner of coercive tactics to force people to take vaccines they did not want, and to make proof of vaccination the price of your freedom.

Facing an election that starts in approximately 8 weeks, the Ford government has now decided to attempt to convince everyone that "we're done" with measures such as masks. He does this even while simultaneously seizing the property of people who have participated in peaceful demonstrations against his government's Covid policies. He simply has no credibility anymore.

Everyone in the world would love to forget about what has happened over the last two years, and look forward to other, better things and brighter days. However, to know where an arrow is flying, one must know where it has been. Short of that, one is making a stab in the dark. We will not reach brighter days if we turn a blind eye to the past several years, ignoring mistakes and injustices, and letting them go unrecognized and unremedied.

This, the Freedom Party of Ontario 2022 Election Platform, is not a complete list of everything that a Freedom government is promising to achieve over the next four years leading to the 2026 election. However, it sets out four pillars for governance starting June 2, 2022: Truth, Rights, Justice, and Freedom. We must get a firm grasp on the who, what, where, why, and how of the Ford government's response to Covid, including who was harmed, and who took advantage. We must restore government's respect for every person as a thinking, choosing individual who is peacefully pursuing his or her own happiness. The newly-elected government must remedy the injustices that were committed against individuals in the name of a collectivist "greater good". And, most importantly of all, Ontario's next government must make the changes necessary to ensure that injustices of the kind committed by the Ford government are never repeated, no matter what the nature of an emergency.

There will, after all, be emergencies in the future, just as there have been in the past, whether they take the form of war, power outages, droughts, "climate emergency", or pandemics, etc.. We must gain a better respect for the fact that it is during a time of emergency that people most need the rule of law. In other words, when we are frightened by sudden, rapid and destructive changes, we need a stable, well-known, time-tested, set of laws that have already been dispassionately evaluated, debated and enacted by duly elected law-makers at a time of relative calm. To suspend such sober and mature laws, to suspend the legislature, and to give the government power to make off-the-cuff, unprecedented, fear-guided orders with unpredicable effects is to suspend the rule of law precisely when it is most needed. The force of government must never be used in reaction to political poll results, but that is especially the case during an emergency.

Doug Ford's PCs have shown how they - like the Liberals, NDP, and Greens - will respond to any emergency. They have put the entire province on life support. We cannot afford to let them finish the job. On June 2, 2022 exercise your power to be free: vote for your Freedom Party candidate.

Paul McKeever,
Leader of the Freedom Party of Ontario