When Dominic LeBlanc once confided to Doug Ford that he used to babysit Justin Trudeau as a child, the Ontario premier quipped: “Dom, you still do.”
LeBlanc — now, literally, the embattled Trudeau’s minister of everything with responsibilities for finance, intergovernmental affairs and border security — enjoys an especially warm rapport with Ford.
“Premier Ford, as chair of the Council of the Federation, will be a great ally for Canada, and for me,” the new omni-minister said after being sworn in at Rideau Hall on Monday eight hours after Chrystia Freeland’s shocking resignation plunged Ottawa into disarray.
The treasurer — whose father, Romeo LeBlanc, was press secretary to Trudeau’s father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, which led to the babysitting gig more than 40 years ago — has worked closely with Ford in recent years.
He is counting on doing so even more in the weeks ahead with U.S. president-elect Donald Trump set to impose 25 per cent tariffs on all Canadian and Mexican goods unless America’s neighbours tighten their borders to reduce illegal immigration and fentanyl smuggling.
“It’s been a privilege to work with him in the past,” LeBlanc said of Ford.
“I look forward to using the very effective advocacy (of) premiers like Doug Ford (and Alberta) Premier (Danielle) Smith … as we try and work together to convince the American administration that this isn’t the right way to proceed,” he said on the front steps of Rideau Hall, where his late father had resided as governor general from 1995 to 1999.
The existential threat posed by Trump’s tariffs, which would cripple the North American economy by sparking inflation and hindering trade, underscores the importance of a federal Liberal like LeBlanc and a provincial Progressive Conservative like Ford working with one another.
While Trump took to social media late Monday night to deride Freeland, whom he dealt with during a 2019 trade war, as a “totally toxic” person “who will not be missed,” Ford thinks the world of the Liberal MP for University-Rosedale.
As the Star’s Susan Delacourt reported in April 2020, theirs is a friendship forged during the darkest depths of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“He and I have actually come to describe one another as each other’s therapists,” Freeland said at the time. “Some of the daily struggles that we go through are quite similar and so sometimes when we talk we’ll just say, ‘This is our therapy session.’”
Ford told Delacourt his nightly hours-long conversations with the prime minister’s pandemic point person were therapeutic for them — and productive for a nation gripped by a health emergency.
“We’ll talk for God knows how long at nighttime, and discuss every issue you can possibly think of, and we laugh at the end. We just feel like a thousand pounds are off our shoulders,” he said at the time.
After the COVID-19 crisis was over, their closeness endured, a relationship that was instrumental in securing billions of dollars in federal and provincial subsidies for Ontario’s electric-vehicle manufacturing sector and a national deal on $10-a-day child care, among other initiatives.
Whenever there was an impasse between Ottawa and Queen’s Park over funding or policy differences, a phone call or text message between Ford and Freeland could resolve things without meddlesome officials or gatekeepers.
That informality was on display Monday when she phoned her friend during the closed-door Council of the Federation meeting at the Hilton Hotel near Pearson International Airport.
“She gave me a call. I did put it on speaker for the rest of the premiers. We have a good relationship with Chrystia over the years. I just want to wish her all the best,” Ford told reporters Monday afternoon following the confab.
But next to Freeland, LeBlanc, a Harvard-educated lawyer, has been the premier’s favourite minister in Trudeau’s cabinet.
The two men, both gregarious and outgoing, genuinely like one another and have spent private time together in each other’s homes even though they live 1,600 km apart.
It was on sunny day in August 2022 — as they puffed cigars on LeBlanc’s cottage porch in Grande-Digue, New Brunswick — that the pair began working toward a revamped health-care funding accord that would be unveiled seven months later.
LeBlanc was so appreciative of Ford’s instrumental role in securing the health deal that when the premier appealed for help in clearing federal hurdles to building Highway 413, the controversial 52-km Milton-to-Vaughan freeway, the minister assuaged project skeptics like Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault.
That mutual respect was again on display last Friday when LeBlanc praised Ford for his hawkish stance in dealing with Trump’s tariffs.
“I’ve gotten to know Doug Ford and like him over the last number of years,” he said in Fredericton when asked about the premier’s threat to withhold Ontario electricity exports to the U.S. in retaliation for any 25 per cent levies.
“He’s certainly able to speak for himself.”
Over the coming tumultuous weeks, the two men will be speaking a lot more to one another.
