The Ontario NDP unveiled a bespoke “plan for Toronto” this week, and it’s not hard to see why. Poll analyst Philippe J. Fournier’s seat model shows the party in serious danger of losing official party status once the votes are counted on Feb. 27.
New Democrats need 12 seats to guarantee that status and all the benefits that come with it, including funding and standing in the legislature. At just 16 per cent support, per Leger’s and Nanos’s latest polls — that’s down from 24 per cent in the 2022 election — Fournier has the NDP posting “safe” wins in just four ridings, three of them in Toronto, with five other ridings “leaning” toward an NDP victory, of which two more are in the city.
With Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie now explicitly calling on New Democrats to vote red to slay the Demon Ford, NDP leader Marit Stiles will want to lock down what she can. (For the record, Crombie’s Liberals are also flirting with losing official-party status — for the third election in a row, no less.)
As such, I expected the NDP’s new plan for Toronto would make folks in places like Toronto-Danforth, Spadina-Fort York, University-Rosedale and Stiles’ own riding of Davenport happy. There would be a promise not to meddle with the city’s bike lanes like the Ford government has, at the very least. Maybe there would be a new financial deal for Ontario’s big cities, or maybe even support for much more democratically autonomous “charter cities.” A 2021 Ekos poll found 89 per cent of NDP voters in Toronto, and 76 per cent province-wide, supported the idea.
Giving more power to Toronto politicians is always a risk, I will concede. But Doug Ford’s government isn’t exactly knocking its Toronto files out of the park. Its plan for Ontario Place is a bizarre $2.2-billion taxpayer giveaway to an Austrianwaterpark-cum-spa developer; the PCs clearly shut down the Ontario Science Centre, decrepit though it may be, to move it to Ontario Place in hopes of making the waterpark-cum-spa development look less terrible; the Eglinton Crosstown line has no opening date attached to it, nor are we entitled to know why there is no opening date attached to it.
Anyway, there’s none of that in the NDP plan for Toronto. It’s remarkably weak, flat beer.
The press release announcing the plan mentions just one Toronto-specific item: A provincial NDP government would pay 50 per cent of the TTC’s operating costs. That’s significant. Toronto’s appallingly dysfunctional transit system’s net operating budget in 2025 is $1.4 billion.
Dive into the 12-page plan itself and you’ll find a few more Toronto-specific items. Cancelling the Ontario Place deal, and renovating and reopening the Science Centre in situ. Funding the Waterfront East LRT. Reviving the Mimico and Park Lawn GO train station projects — but not, strangely, to fund the recently forsaken Finch East and King-Liberty GO stations, the latter of which is in one of those “NDP-leaning” ridings of Spadina-Fort York. (It’s also just a good idea.) And naturally, because no one may disagree on this issue in Ontario politics, the NDP will remove tolls from Highway 407. (I’m almost tempted to call it Trump-ian, but that would be churlish.)
Bike lanes aren’t mentioned.
There are other things in the NDP plan to appeal to urbanites in general, of course. Rent control that includes “vacancy control,” meaning landlords can’t raise rents between tenancies. Most economists will tell you it’s a terrible idea, especially during a housing crisis: it makes it less attractive as a business proposition to build more rental units, which we desperately need. But good luck with that argument on the campaign trail.
The plan to upload shelter costs to the province would certainly help municipal budgets. The proposal to fix the courts system is a smart, essential plank in any law-and-order platform … though in the NDP’s case it seems to be the only such plank.
But it all seems like throwing so much stuff at a wall and hoping some of it sticks before it goes splat on the floor. Beating Ford in this election was always going to be a very tall order — though I don’t think the Liberals and NDP helped themselves by insisting, over and over again, that we shouldn’t be having an election at all. But if Stiles can’t even hold on to official party status, never mind official opposition, surely a reckoning must be at hand.
New Democrats govern now, or have governed this century, in British Columbia (albeit is a somewhat unique two-party system), Alberta, Saskatchewan (where they finished a strong second in last year’s election), Manitoba (Premier Wab Kinew, like him or not, is certainly a compelling figure by modern Canadian political standards) and Nova Scotia.
They were one-offs, so far, in Alberta and Nova Scotia — protest votes, essentially, which is what threw Bob Rae’s Ontario NDP into power in 1990. But in three Canadian provinces, the NDP have long known how to win friends and influence people. It’s the Ontarians, both at Queen’s Park and in Ottawa, who seem to let the side down. They can’t go on like this, surely.
Unlike some provincial parties named Liberal and Conservative, the New Democrats are officially one party from sea to sea to sea. In practice it’s clearly at least two parties: One that cares about winning, and sometimes-to-often does in certain provinces; and this sad-sack outfit in Upper Canada, who cannot possibly be doing the brand any good.
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