Stan Cho booked the room. Now, Doug Ford owns the stay

The MPP is far from alone in pushing the boundaries. A parade of Progressive Conservatives has soaked the public for more than $120,000 in hotel bills over the past three years, writes Martin Regg Cohn.

Smart politicians can see around corners — including bed corners. Not so Stan Cho, the wayward Willowdale minister who wore blinders to bed, night after night, in posh Toronto hotels. Oblivious to the optics.

At what cost? More than $16,000 in taxpayer funds wasted on sumptuous rooms located so close to home. His Toronto home is a mere six kilometres from Cho’s Queen’s Park workplace.

Many Star readers who live in the GTA’s distant suburbs are surely wondering how he couldn’t handle the commute. Now Cho may pay a higher price if he loses his job. It would be a miracle — and a miscalculation — if Premier Doug Ford fails to take away his cabinet post and perks, which include a car and driver.

What motivated the mighty minister of tourism, culture and gaming to slip under the covers, under cover of darkness, on public business? One can only speculate about a politician who felt so entitled to his entitlement that his head swelled on the job. All that said — and spent — it’s too easy to eviscerate just Cho for his hubris.

A once-promising young politician brimming with ambition, and now contrition, he merely followed his leader’s example. The sky-high hypocrisy toward taxpayers starts at the top. And hasn’t stopped.

Campaigning for office in 2018, Doug Ford promised he’d stop the “gravy train.” His crusade went off the rails earlier this year when he splurged on an executive “gravy plane” at a cost of $28.9 million. That jet has been grounded and returned to sender, with Ford promising full cost recovery, if not quite political recovery.

Cho, too, has been grounded, promising to reimburse taxpayers for his excesses. Yet Cho is far from alone in pushing the boundaries. A parade of Progressive Conservatives has soaked the public for more than $120,000 in hotel bills over the past three years.

So this isn’t just Cho’s scandal, it’s the premier’s debacle. He started the double standards, and they may yet finish off his government. All that hotel-hopping by MPPs, and executive jet-setting by the premier won’t fly at a time when he claims to be fighting for affordability.

You can’t maintain credibility about affordability when the politicians who should be leading by example are living the high life. Predictably, Ford made a show of rebuking Cho when reporters asked him to explain this week: “I told him: ‘You’re paying back every single penny — that’s not the way we operate, simple as that,’” Ford protested, adding that his fellow Tories “literally had to pull me off the roof.” Literally not true.

Figuratively, perhaps, but go figure — Ford himself led the charge against spendthrift school trustees just a few months ago, lambasting them for wasting taxpayer funds on foreign trips and hotel retreats. “People call me every single day — people are done with these school trustees wasting money,” Ford complained last year as he detailed the overspending by errant trustees. “The bad ones like to go to the baseball game and rent a box for $34,000 and in the hotel suites looking over the baseball game that other people can’t afford.”

Oops. Turns out Ford’s Tories are equally guilty of misusing public funds, and the public will judge them just as harshly. It wasn’t

just Cho who buried his swelling head in the sand. And it wasn’t just Ford who got carried away with his fly-away visits on the private jet. The entire provincial cabinet gave unanimous approval, without a peep of dissent, for Ford’s purchase of the gravy plane.

Perhaps Cho assumed this meant they were all in this together, and thus each could have a piece of the action — if not up in the air then under the sheets. The lack of restraint is reflected not only in their individual self-indulgence but in their collective excess. By building bloat into his cabinet, appointing an unwieldy and unaffordable 36 ministers, backed by a roster of overpaid parliamentary assistants — Ford keeps padding the payroll of his PC caucus at taxpayer expense (a minister makes more than $224,000 a year).

The premier who promised a lean and mean government has delivered on the latter without the former. With the latest sloppiness and overspending by Cho and his colleagues, the onus is on Ford to purge and prune his out-of-control cabinet, ridding himself of the junior and “associate” ministers who backstop the senior portfolios. Rather than a pretend minister of red tape reduction, it’s time for ministerial reduction and redirection.

Instead of bloviating rhetoric about overspending by others, Ford needs to set an example by curbing his own grandiose impulses that contradict those press lines. Ford’s Tories responded to the hotel scandal with their practiced playbook of deflection and retaliation. The government now wants to rescind a legislative provision that allows MPPs to bill for a hotel stay in “special circumstances,” such as a snowstorm or unusual event.

Never mind that no opposition NDP or Liberal MPPs have billed for hotel emergencies in the last couple of years. One supposes a strong offence is the best defence — even when the government is guilty of the offence.