Vote Tory to stop Trump’s tariffs: that’s the basic message Ontario Premier Doug Ford was sending voters as he prepared to trigger the province’s 44th general election, dissolving the legislature on Tuesday just two-and-a-half years into his second majority government. Ford said he needs “the largest mandate in Ontario’s history” to stand up to the president’s threats, and if those threats come good, to “invest tens of billions of dollars in unplanned spending and make tough choices.”
As it stands, polls suggest no compelling reason to think the vote now scheduled for Feb. 27 will return anything other than the third majority Ford desires. But polls also suggest no compelling reason to think the election will leave him any better off.
The Tories’ numbers in recent weeks have topped out at 46 per cent (per Leger)and 47 per cent (per Campaign Research), with a rolling average (per polling analyst Philippe J. Fournier) of around 42 per cent. That’s only one point higher than the Tories’ score in the 2022 election. And that’s pretty good for a party led by the least popular premier in Canada (per the Angus Reid Institute last month).
Ford has been blessed with weak opposition. But he has now invited Ontarians to take a long, hard look at the New Democrats’ Marit Stiles and the Liberals’ Bonnie Crombie, neither of whom was party leader in 2022. For better or worse, neither significantly disagrees with Ford’s proposed approach to Trump’s tariff threats: tough talk, retaliation and (if necessary) stimulus spending.
Were voters suddenly inclined to punish a premier for taking a month off from governing for no particularly good reason — indeed, in the middle of what he describes as a historic crisis — things could get interesting. Obvious opportunism has cost Canadian political leaders dearly in the past. Most relevantly, perhaps, in 1990’s early Ontario election, Liberal premier David Peterson parlayed 95 seats in the 130-seat legislature, and poll numbers similar to Ford’s today, into just 36 seats. A gobsmacked New Democrat called Bob Rae was suddenly premier.
The Liberals and NDP will want to make this election a referendum on Ford’s record, not about tariffs. And there should be ample room for that. A mid-January Postmedia-Leger poll found just five per cent of respondents mentioned tariffs were “the most important issue that has … your attention these days in your community.”
“Cost of living (including prices, utility bills and wages)” was way out in front at 28 per cent, while another four per cent mentioned the cost of housing specifically. If you can’t afford housing, you can’t afford anything else. And housing has been a notable problem for Ford’s government, even as it claims to be laser-focused on the issue.
In November, economist Mike Moffatt analyzed housing starts per capita in Canadian cities and found just three Ontario jurisdictions in the top 20 — and a bunch down near the bottom. “The provincial government estimates we need to average 150,000 housing starts each year between now and 2031,” Moffatt wrote in the Toronto Star at the time. “This year (2024) we will be slightly over 80,000 units, with the next two years looking no better.”
Crombie, formerly mayor of notoriously NIMBY-ish Mississauga, is an unlikely champion for loosening restrictions on housing construction. But the Ontario Liberals’ housing plan — basically to slash development charges — got very positive reviews from across the political spectrum when it was released in November.
Back to the Postmedia-Leger poll: 24 per cent of respondents chose health-care issues as top of their minds. That’s not necessarily a winner file for the Tories either.
Were voters suddenly inclined to punish a premier for taking a month off from governing for no particularly good reason, things could get interesting
On Monday, Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones announced a $1.8-billion plan ($1.4 billion of it being new money) to boost access to primary health care. The plan, headed up by former federal federal health minister Dr. Jane Philpott, has also received positive reviews. Think less about having “a doctor” and more about having a health-care team (nurses, nurse practitioners, GPs, specialists) who can treat you more quickly, efficiently and appropriately.
But Ford has been premier for six years and seven months. Many Ontarians will have seen, read or heard the news out of Walkerton two weeks ago. A GP hung his shingle and announced he would take on as patients the first 500 people who showed up at the Legion Hall on a Wednesday between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. People started queueing at 2 a.m., in –9 C weather. More than a thousand reportedly showed up, which is roughly 10 per cent of the population of the municipality. (Watch for that footage when the New Democrats and Liberals launch their attack ads.)
Ontario’s health-care outcomes are a mixed bag, according to figures compiled by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI): below average on home care, above average for joint-replacement timelines. (That’s above the Canadian average, of course: 77 per cent of Ontarians get a new hip or knee within the six-month benchmark. In Denmark, meanwhile, the median wait time is 104 days; in Italy, it’s 38.)
But statistics won’t help Jones or Ford impress a vomit-stained parent who just spent 18 hours with a sick child in the ER — 17 hours and 42 minutes being, at time of writing, the “expected longest wait for lower urgency patients” at the Ottawa Children’s Hospital. Telling people not to go to the ER when they don’t really need emergency care won’t get the Tories much joy either, considering many Ontarians who do have family doctors are prohibited under the terms of their agreement with the practice from seeking treatment at walk-in clinics, which is why they go to the ER.
Let’s see, what else do Ontarians care about. Law and order? That’s not great, as Ford himself keeps saying. Violent crime is up. Carjackings are a fact of life in some Toronto suburbs.
The economy? Jobs? Ontario has plowed billions upon billions into subsidizing the production of batteries for electric cars. As Randall Denley noted in the National Post last week, thanks to Trump’s lack of interest in green technology that investment is starting to look like a turkey even by the standards of corporate welfare, which Ford once pledged to oppose.
Gridlock in the GTA? Well, it’s gridlocked. One of the provincial government’s signature public-transit projects, the Eglinton-Crosstown line, is essentially finished, but for mysterious reasons we have received neither an opening date nor an explanation for why there’s no opening date.
Beer and wine in corner stores? That’s hard to screw up. You just have to let it happen. And it has been a boon to consumers and retailers alike. But for no reason at all it’s costing taxpayers a fortune in compensation to The Beer Store, a monopoly that never should have existed in the first place. By the government’s own account, it spent $225 million making that happen. In a report released Monday, the Financial Accountability Officer suggested it was several times more than that.
Clearly, the allure of an extra two-and-a-half years in government was too much for Ford to resist. Many Tories also seem convinced by the received wisdom that Ontarians won’t simultaneously vote conservative at the federal and provincial level — i.e., a Pierre Poilievre victory nationally would have severely weakened the PCs’ chances in Ontario if they had waited.
But again, perceived opportunism in a crisis might be just as damaging. And then of course there’s the possibility that in the middle of the campaign, Trump will follow through and whack us with tariffs — precisely what Ford says we need an election to prevent. That’s a time a premier would want to be using his majority government to maximum effect, not risking it in hopes of winning another.
The most boring outcome is always a safe bet in Canadian politics. But there is plenty of hay here for Ford’s opposition to make.
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