Ontario voters went to the polls Thursday for a rare mid-winter election, with Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford hoping to ride his campaign against threatened U.S. tariffs to a third-straight majority government.
Ford didn’t have to go to the polls until June 2026, raising questions about the necessity of an earlier vote.
The Tory leader argued he needed a new mandate to put the province in a strong position in the brewing trade war with President Donald Trump. His naysayers said it was a bald attempt to capitalize on rosy poll numbers before the completion of an RCMP corruption investigation of his government.
The official opposition NDP under leader Marit Stiles and Ontario Liberals led by Bonnie Crombie, both relatively new to their jobs, fought to put a halt to Ford’s continuing success in Ontario politics. Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner sought to push his caucus beyond its current two seats.
The Liberals, who fell to third place and lost official party status in 2018, seemed to make some headway. But polls suggested the premier was steaming toward an even-more-commanding majority in the legislature.
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Advance voting was down from the election in 2022, as the tariff issue in general, the federal Liberal leadership race and a looming federal election sucked up most of the political oxygen in Ontario.
Each party proposed its own plan for weathering the storm if Trump follows through on his threat to impose across-the-board, 25-per-cent tariffs next week. But the opposition parties tried to draw attention to issues considered weaknesses for the Tories: Ontario’s heavily burdened health-care system and the shortage of affordable housing.
Ford first rose to wide prominence as a Toronto city councillor and the older brother of Rob Ford, then the Toronto mayor who became embroiled in controversy over his use of crack cocaine before passing away from cancer.
Doug Ford had never sat in the Ontario legislature when he captured the Progressive Conservative leadership in 2018 and then won the general election against an unpopular Liberal premier, Kathleen Wynne.
He’s remained strong in the polls most of the last six years with a somewhat populist style, despite a number of controversies.
Most significant of among those was his proposal to open up development on the protected Green Belt around greater Toronto, and revelations that companies that backed the Tories would benefit from access to the land. Ford scrapped the plan amid a political firestorm in 2023 and now the Mounties are investigating whether any crimes were committed.
Stiles is a former school-board trustee who took over the reigns of her party uncontested in 2023
Crombie entered provincial politics after serving as mayor of Mississauga, Ontario’s second biggest city, and become Liberal leader in 2023. She doesn’t have a seat in the house yet. Crombie has worked to rebuild her party after its collapse in 2018 and failure to rebound in 2022, moving the Liberals more toward the centre.
The Kansas-born Schreiner became the first Green member of the Ontario legislature in 2018, and was joined by a second party MPP, Aislinn Clancy, in the last election.
All four parties have proposed tax cuts or freezes of some fashion, and promised they would both offer financial support to businesses and individuals hurt by tariffs, and remove barriers to inter-provincial trade within Canada.