The topic Ford fest photos colour corrected to remove ‘orange hue’: Premier’s Office is drawing steady attention: readers, analysts, and industry watchers are all tracking how the story may unfold in the days ahead.
This is taking place in a fast-moving context — product cycles, platform shifts, and competitive moves can reshape the outlook quickly, so the details below are worth a careful read.
What follows is a clear walkthrough of the main facts and angles you need to make sense of the news.
Aerial images taken from Premier Doug Ford’s annual community barbeque were colour corrected to adjust an “orange hue,” the government claims, after union organizers accused the Progressive Conservative party of doctoring photographs to make protesters appear like supporters.
Ford Fest, a yearly event thrown by the Ford family and the Progressive Conservative Party, attracted thousands of people to Thompson Memorial park in Scarborough including supporters, curious onlookers and hundreds of demonstrators looking to make a point.
Roughly 850 public service workers, representing 4,000 workers in the vulnerable services sector who have been on strike for four weeks, planned to disrupt the event by making their purple shirts with the words “worth fighting for” visible to the premier.
The Progressive Conservative party, however, appeared to be prepared for the unrest.
Dozens of police officers, including a heavily-armed Toronto Police unit, the Toronto Police Mounted Unit, public order office and a phalanx of OPP officers flooded the park and formed a protective ring around the main stage where Ford was to speak.
The OPP, which is responsible for the premier’s protection, refused to provide the reason for the heavy policing presence and said the force “cannot divulge operational information.”
Despite the fortress, a stream of purple-clad protesters strolled past the PC party registration area and crowded the area in front of the main stage armed with flags and whistles ready to upstage the premier.
Moments later, the family-friendly barbeque was upended by an anti-government protest.
After Ford was introduced by Scarborough MPP David Smith, protesters drowned out the premier with a chorus of chants that continued throughout Ford’s speech.
The scene came after weeks of negative headlines, including the government’s decision to purchase and sell a $28.9 million government jet for the premier’s use, and polling that put Ford’s approval rating at 21 per cent.
“It’s obviously not helpful,” said IPSOS President Darrell Bricker. “You’d rather have people cheering and applauding at an event that you’ve put on.”
Later that evening, PC MPPs received a Dropbox link with images from the event to be posted to their social media accounts.
At least two MPPs, including Attorney General Doug Downey, posted pictures showing what looked like a sea of supporters all dressed in blue which, upon closer inspection, appeared to be altered to remove the purple coloured shirts worn by protesters.
“It looked like the purple had been removed and had been replaced with the light blue that the Ford Nation volunteers had been wearing,” said OPSEU President JP Hornick.
“We were kind of stunned by that because anybody who was there could clearly see that that photo was not an accurate depiction of what the crowd looked like.”
While the Premier’s Office denied doctoring the image, they acknowledged it was colour corrected.
“Photos from Ford Fest, including the aerial shot posted by two MPPs, had default saturation applied to correct an orange hue,” the office said in a statement.
“This type of colour correction is standard and routine practice. The images were not otherwise edited or altered in any way.”
The union questioned the statement and pointed to several rainbow-coloured OPSEU flags – visible in other photographs of Ford Fest – which appeared to have been edited out.
“I can’t speak to any nefarious intent, but for a government that is trailing in the polls that is a pretty desperate look to erase the flags from the photos and adjust the colours of the shirts so that they appear to be your supporters,” Hornick said.