The Ford government has hit back at questions about why the phone logs of the premier and several senior ministers were largely empty.
Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles peppered the government with questions about how ministers communicate after Global News revealed the ministers of education, finance, health, housing and transportation made between zero and 20 minutes of calls on their official devices.
Freedom of information requests have also revealed four months where Ontario Premier Doug Ford failed to make a single call from his official device.
“Is it standard practice for ministers to avoid accountability in this way?” Stiles asked Wednesday.
Progressive Conservative House Leader Paul Calandra denied any rules had been broken and said the lack of phone calls was because the Ford cabinet was communicating in other ways.
“I’ll tell you what the Minister of Health is doing, like every other minister of the government, we’re not contemplating, ‘How many times did I turn my phone on each and every day?'” he said when asked why Sylvia Jones failed to make a single call from her government device in January.
“There are other ways of communicating: my iPad — actually, I can text message on my iPad.”
Phone records obtained by Global News revealed senior cabinet ministers were not using their work devices at key times.
The finance minister, for example, made just two minutes of phone calls in March 2023 when he was finalizing and presenting the province’s annual budget.
All five ministers said they followed record-keeping rules and used other forms of communication like in-person meetings or Microsoft Teams.
“I know the Minister of Finance and the parliamentary assistants are crisscrossing the province,” Calandra said. “Not talking to people on a phone.”
Ford has long talked about how he relies on his phone to listen to residents’ concerns.
“I can’t even see straight in the morning because I’m up all night helping people, fixing the problems and returning phone calls — that’s what I’m doing,” Ford said, speaking at Queen’s Park in 2020.
Global News is in the midst of an appeal to access government-related calls made on Ford’s personal cellphone.
Stiles said the lack of phone calls on government-issued devices “appears to be a way to avoid freedom-of-information disclosures.”
Calandra, who stood to respond to three separate questions from the NDP about phones, said repeatedly that the government relies on alternative forms of communication.
“The modern age has many other ways of communicating, not just the old technology that is a phone,” he shot back.
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