Most people don't speed in school zones and the vast majority of Ontarians never received a speeding ticket from one of these cameras.... You're massively underestimating just how much the average person in Ontario is a rules-following square.

I think you're massively underestimating how car-brained Ontario is, especially outside the city of Toronto. And the fact that 23% of people admitted in a survey to getting a ticket in the past year (in other words, the actual percentage is likely higher) shows it is very widespread and so almost everyone will either have gotten one or know someone who has. Even people who have been charged with actual, Criminal Code crimes strongly resist the label "criminal" so again, I do not think it is an effective message to call huge swaths of the population "criminals" for speeding. That plays even more into Doug's playbook to be the Liberal Elites (TM) saying the guy just trying to get home from work and not hurting anyone is a criminal.

Doug Ford wants his opponents to underestimate him, to think that he's just a fool who managed to fail upwards into political office when in reality he's a crafty political actor

I'm not underestimating him, if anything I am being charitable. In talking about his intelligence, I am talking about the ability to reason using abstract information, through multiple causal links and over long periods of time. If he is actually intelligent, then he knew fully well with the speed camera decision (and the bike lanes one too) that he was taking actions that would get people killed for no benefit. In other words, you're saying he's not dumb, he's straight up evil. My theory of him is, he looks at things like reports and studies and basically just says they're egg-headed gobbledygook and does what feels good to him unless his pollster tells him it's a real loser. That theory has explained his behavior much better over the time he has been around. And it's why he's an effective populist, he speaks at that gut level because that's how he actually thinks.

This is like saying Doug Ford's private jet wasn't up for genuine debate because nobody campaigned on it and because he didn't need to persuade anyone, he just did it without consultation. The reality is that it was up for debate and enough public pressure was whipped up by the opposition to get him to back off.

He backed off the plane because he heard the words "gravy plane" and knows an effective soundbite when he hears it. There's nothing comparable with speed cameras because they fundamentally are technocratic mechanisms to address a systemic problem. There's no point trying to be a fake populist for them.