Someone should tell Doug Ford this isn’t 2012 and he isn’t mayor of Toronto

Wednesday brought another WTF (What the Ford?) moment, when the premier, out of the blue, proposed expanding Highway 401 by tunnelling under it to add more lanes — an underground expressway that might stretch from Brampton to Scarborough. 
Never mind trying to imagine the hell of being stuck in a 38-kilometre traffic jam underground.
Never mind that anyone who has spent even a few minutes looking into traffic research will tell you that a perpetual traffic jam is what would result very shortly after construction finished.
Never mind that if the tunnelling of the Eglinton Crosstown has absolutely ruined surface traffic there for a decade, it’s hard to picture just how FUBAR a decades-long tunnelling project would make the highway above it. 
Never mind that construction would likely cost — if the per-kilometre expense of Boston’s Big Dig is anything to go on (adjusted for consumer inflation and currency exchange but not for the skyrocketing cost of infrastructure since then) — well north of $150 billion, and take more than 30 or 40 years to build.
“We’re getting the tunnel built,” the premier said. 
To be clear, this was not some off-the-cuff brainstorm Ford blurted out after swallowing a bee or something. This was a news conference he called for the express purpose of making this announcement.   
Doug Ford is playing his hits — non-stop golden oldies from the glorious time he spent at Toronto city hall. Back then, when he was a city councillor and his late brother was mayor, they loved them some tunnels. They buried, at tremendous expense, the Eglinton West LRT and tried to bury the Eglinton East version too. They buried, at tremendous expense, the Scarborough subway extension. Doug Ford would muse about building a second deck atop the Gardiner Expressway, or about tunnelling under it, or both. If there was a Ford mantra from those years, it was “dig, baby, dig.” 
But if there’s another Ford mantra, it was “punish the bike riders!” And just earlier this week Ford was talking up a coming ban on bike lanes on major roads, a throwback to when he and his brother proudly ripped out bike lanes and called cyclists “pinkos.”   
Ford is like one of those Japanese soldiers who were discovered in South Pacific jungles into the 1970s who didn’t realize World War II had ended — the man is no longer at Toronto city hall and everyone has moved on from the battles of his brother’s mayoralty, but he’s still fighting his side in the decade-and-a-half-old “war on the car” from his office at Queen’s Park. 
I mean, for most of the time he’s been premier, he has made it crystal clear he sees the job mostly as a way to be the big boss of Toronto. Cutting the size of city council. Micromanaging public health budgets. Taking over all subway building in the city. Launching his own waterfront parkland redevelopment scheme at Ontario Place. Closing the Science Centre. Issuing zoning orders and setting development fees. Giving the mayor strong powers as long as the actions are in line with Ford’s priorities. Now traffic, and even bike lane placement.   
It sure feels like Ford wishes he was mayor of Toronto. He did run for that job, and he lost. I suppose getting to head the government that has constitutional authority over everything Toronto’s mayor and city council do is a nice consolation prize. 
The people of Toronto, who just recently elected a woman who is so famous for cycling that her flower-decorated bike basket is instantly recognizable, might lament this. Especially since Ford’s every move seems not so much calculated to disregard expert advice as to directly contradict it. Safe-injection sites, experts say, save lives, so Ford shuts them down. Adding new highway lanes just makes traffic worse, experts say, so Ford commits to build the most highway lanes ever, even stashing them underground. Bike lanes make roads safer and offer ways to commute quicker and cleaner, experts say, so Ford gets set to ban them. 
But all Ontarians — especially those who don’t live in Toronto — might have a different complaint. And that is the long list of things that are traditionally considered provincial responsibilities that he could be applying his attention to instead of launching new “war on the car” battles in Toronto. Millions of Ontarians don’t have a family doctor, rural hospitals are in crisis over staffing shortages, teacher shortages are strangling the education system while student performance on international achievement metrics are way down, post-secondary institutions are facing bankruptcy as a result of government funding, tuition and admissions policies.
There’s a lot a premier could be doing if he had more than a Toronto tunnel vision aimed at refighting the same old car wars.