ADAMS: When I wore a Pride shirt to Ford Fest, the PC’s moderation got tested

I went to Ford Fest this year because I've spent the last year inside federal Conservative events and wanted to see what the provincial side looked like up close. After the Poilievre rallies, the Restore the North stops, and the Calgary convention, I figured it was worth checking the Ontario PCs on their own turf.

A lot of federal Conservatives (especially Restore the North populists) treat Doug Ford like the devil himself, so I was curious whether the provincial party actually operated differently or whether it was just the same dynamics with better branding.

The first thing that hit me at Ford Fest was the scale. This was easily the biggest political crowd I've been in to date. People everywhere, lines for food, music in the background, the whole thing set up like a cross between a fair and a campaign stop. The mix of people at Ford Fest felt broader than what I've seen at federal events. There were working-class women and men, plenty of people of colour, and a visible LGBTQ presence. I wasn't the only one wearing one of those Ontario PC Pride month shirts.

Most people in attendance talked to me like I was just another person at an event, rather than an intruder who needed to prove something. It felt closer to the Carney Liberal events I've been to than anything Poilievre has put on lately. A big tent, sure, but one held together more by habit and branding than by any shared set of hard principles.

That's where the problems started showing up.

I asked a lot of folks why they liked Doug Ford. Most of the answers were the same vague lines: he's building Ontario, he's protecting workers, he's standing up for the province. When I pressed for specifics on what exactly he'd done on housing or healthcare or wages that made the difference, I mostly got shrugs or a quick pivot to how bad the Liberals were before him. Kathleen Wynne's name came up constantly, even though Ford has been in power for nearly a decade. Same pattern I've seen with some Carney supporters: the current guy can do no wrong, and every problem traces back to the previous administration.

That vagueness showed up in other ways too. There was a generational edge I didn't expect to hear so openly. A few older attendees talked about young people like we're a bunch of entitled kids who don't understand how "good" we have it. One guy told me Zoomers just want everything handed to them and don't want to work for it the way his generation did.

I've heard versions of this at federal events, but it was louder here, maybe because there weren't as many young people around to push back. The younger crowd that did show up skewed heavily toward people of colour, both women and men, and even then, the youngest were older Millennials. Most of the Caucasian attendees looked to be at least Gen X or older.

By contrast, at the federal Conservative events I've attended, you saw plenty of Zoomer men from a range of religious and ethnic backgrounds, but the Zoomer women were almost all white. I don't have a grand theory about that split, but once you start paying attention, it's hard to miss.

The non-political attendees were another layer. Plenty of people told me they came for the free hot dogs and the concert and weren't really following the politics at all. They weren't hostile to Ford per se, but they didn't seem invested either way. That tracks with the broader apathy I've felt in Ontario lately. When the biggest political event of the year draws a huge crowd but half of them are there for the food and the other half are protesters in purple shirts, it says something about how much actual engagement is happening.

Ford's speech itself didn't do much to change that impression. He hit the usual notes—Trump's tariffs, taxes, the old McGuinty/Wynne Liberal failures—and the delivery was the familiar populist rhythm. What stood out was the noise. Almost half the crowd was booing or chanting over him the entire time.

The protesters were loud enough that the cheering was getting drowned out in places. Ford kept smiling through it, but up close you could see he was pissed. He didn't hang around afterward for photos the way he did last year. He finished and left.

Then there was what happened before the speech even started.

I was near the front when a group of young male volunteers were handing out small Ford Nation flags. One of them took the tiny flag I was holding and gave it to a couple of girls nearby while they took pictures. It felt off, so I kept watching. A few minutes later they were gathered around a woman who looked like she was in her thirties—another volunteer or staffer—and they were taking photos of her and making generally sexist comments. I firmly told them to leave her alone. One of them turned around and said, “Shut up, faggot.” He'd clocked the Ontario PC Pride shirt I was wearing.

It escalated from there. They started trying to bait me into a fight while I was filming. A cop had to come over and tell them to back off. They left me alone for a bit, then ran into me again later. Same slurs. When they asked why I wasn't making eye contact and I made the poor choice of mentioning that I'm autistic and sometimes struggle with that, they started mocking me for it.

A third time, one of them touched my hair while we were talking and another took my water bottle out of my bag. The cops were there again. They told everyone to stop blocking the walkway and didn't do anything about the slurs, the unwanted touching, or the stolen water bottle.

I've been to a lot of political events over the past year. I've had uncomfortable moments. I've never had volunteers from the party I was attending call me a faggot to my face, mock having autism, put their hands on me with intent to instigate violence, and steal my stuff while their own security and police stood by and did little-to-nothing about it. That part was new.

The Ontario PCs like to present themselves as the moderate, big-tent option. They'll tell you they're pro-LGBTQ when it suits the branding. But if the volunteers they can actually recruit and keep are the ones willing to harass women on their appearance and bisexual men in party Pride gear, that tells you something about the state of the organization. The fact that nobody in the chain seemed equipped or willing to shut it down quickly? That's a leadership and culture problem, not a one-off.

I'm not saying every Ontario PC volunteer, staffer, or voter is like this. Most of the regular attendees I talked to were fine. But when the people representing the party at its signature event behave this way and face zero real consequences on site, it undercuts the whole “we're the grown-ups in the room” pitch. Ford can blame Wynne for healthcare problems that are still getting worse on his watch. He can call the protesters names from a distance. He can leave early when the crowd turns on him.

What he can't do is pretend the party he leads is immune to the same rot he claims to be fighting federally.

I went into Ford Fest expecting a different flavour of conservatism than what I've seen with Jamil Jivani's Restore the North populism. In some ways I got it—less gatekeeping on identity, more surface-level diversity in the crowd. In other ways it was the same story with different branding: thin on specifics, heavy on loyalty, and quick to treat any real pushback as illegitimate. The incident with the volunteers just made the gap between the branding and the reality impossible to ignore.

After having now watched both the federal and provincial versions up close, the through line is hard to miss. Neither Conservative Parties seem particularly interested in the slow, messy work of persuading people who don't already agree with them. One side leans on slogans and emotional validation. The other leans on incumbency and vague credit-taking.

Both treat detailed criticism like an attack rather than part of the job and seem genuinely surprised when the people who actually show up start asking harder questions than the script allows. And when the people carrying that brand at the ground level are willing to treat other human beings the way those volunteers treated me and those women, the “moderate” label starts to feel like marketing rather than description.

Ford Fest was bigger than any federal event I attended. It was also the one where I felt least safe. That shouldn't be the takeaway from a party that wants to keep running the province. But right now it is.

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