“Speed Matters”: Ontario’s strong-mayor reforms and the populist inversion of municipal democracy

Abstract

This article explores how a Right-wing populist discursive ­framework, which mobilized popular resentment against progressive neoliberalism, secured consent for strong-mayor reforms in Ontario. A discourse analysis of the Hansard records reveals that a form of “Ford Nation” populism—which reconceptualizes the essence of democracy as being constituted by a strong executive with the speed and flexibility to respond to market demand—functioned as a necessary moment in a broader effort to preserve neoliberalism’s hegemony by situating it in a minoritarian institutional shell.