How Doug Ford and his PCs won their 3rd straight Ontario election
Ford becomes first Ontario premier since the 1950s to win 3 successive majorities
Doug Ford and his Progressive Conservatives' victory in Thursday's Ontario election came as the result of a campaign that focused ruthlessly on the one issue capturing the minds of Canadians right now, a leader who worked relentlessly to make the most of his opportunity, and perfect political timing.
Ford's PCs were elected or leading in 80 of Ontario's 124 seats early Friday, making him the first leader since the 1950s to win three consecutive majorities in this province.
Success in politics means winning elections, so the majority three-peat means the name Doug Ford must now be included with the likes of Bill Davis, Leslie Frost, James Whitney and Oliver Mowat in conversations about the most successful Ontario premiers of all time.
"This election, we promised to do whatever it takes to protect Ontario and I'm so proud of the support we received," Ford told the crowd in his speech at his election night celebration in Toronto.
Ford had set his sights higher than just another status-quo majority. "The bigger the mandate I receive from you, the better we'll be able to protect our province," he said in his first speech of the campaign.
Measured by seats, Ford's mandate is actually smaller than the one he had before triggering the election. However, a majority is a majority, so Ford has now won himself another four years in power.
Ford's political advisers had been urging him for months to call an early election, and their motivation was clear.
The goal was to get to the polls before anything could happen to hurt Ford's chances of winning, particularly the possibility of criminal charges in the Greenbelt scandal against anyone connected to the premier's office, or the prospect of a future federal Conservative government under Pierre Poilievre doing anything that would sour Ontario voters on the Tory brand.
The Greenbelt controversy stems from the Ford government's decision to give certain developers the right to build homes on protected land.
Trump gave PCs reason for early election
But beyond the pure political advantage, the PC team needed an ostensible reason for the election that they could sell to voters.
Donald Trump handed them one just weeks after he won the U.S. presidential election.
Trump threatened in late November to slap 25 per cent tariffs on all Canadian exports to the U.S. immediately after his inauguration.
Credit the PC team, led by campaign director Kory Teneycke, for realizing that an election in these circumstances would make the ballot question "Who's the best person to lead Ontario under the threat of tariffs?" and for knowing that this was a winning formula for Ford.
And Doug Ford seized the moment.
As the premier of Canada's most populous province, with an export-oriented economy deeply vulnerable to tariffs, Ford would naturally have the chance to step into the national spotlight in such a situation.
He also happened to be serving as the chair of Canada's premiers, giving him a formal political leadership role (and a photo for the ages, framed by a throng of reporters and microphones, which his party later used in campaign advertising).
All this was going on for Ford at a time when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was politically weak, facing what seemed like near-certain defeat in an election that could come at any time.
While the instability in Ottawa helped boost the tariff-fighting credibility of Ford, it also posed a problem for his team in the timing of an election call. The very real prospect that Trudeau's minority government could fall in a non-confidence vote meant a federal election could be triggered imminently, making it impossible for Ford — with his rock-solid majority — to justify calling a provincial election.
Prorogued Parliament gives Ford window
As recently as Christmas, Ford's advisers had still not managed to persuade him to go early.
What finally tipped the scales: Trudeau's announcement on Jan. 6 that he would prorogue Parliament and resign as prime minister.
Prorogation and the federal Liberal leadership race gave the Ontario PCs a guaranteed two-month window in which there could be no federal election. (The leadership contest also provided the added bonus of sucking some key personnel, resources and attention away from the provincial Liberals).
The PC campaign machinery kicked into high gear. Just three weeks and one day after Trudeau announced his resignation, Ford visited the lieutenant governor to kick off the campaign.
Ford's stated justification for the election was that he needed a new mandate to "outlive and outlast the Trump administration."
The premise can most charitably be described as questionable — as if the results of a Canadian provincial election would somehow make an ounce of difference to the U.S. president — but voters declined to punish Ford for it.
Kicks off campaign in Windsor
Ford's campaign began in Windsor, with the Ambassador Bridge in the background, symbolizing the threat that U.S. tariffs would pose to the Ontario economy.
The PC leader's itinerary showed a party aggressively aiming to add to its seat count, rather than just protecting its wins from the last election. In the first half of the campaign, Ford hit such cities as London, St. Catharines, Niagara Falls, Ottawa and Waterloo, all places the PCs were targeting to unseat incumbents, mostly New Democrats.
Thursday night's numbers show the PCs fell far short of that ambition: Ford's party gained just two seats previously held by other parties: Hamilton-Mountain and Algoma-Manitoulin.
He played it safe in the province-wide televised debate, not taking the bait when Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie, NDP Leader Marit Stiles or Green Leader Mike Schreiner tried to provoke him into a viral moment they could use against him.
Ford's campaign was on such cruise control that he went nine straight days without holding a news conference in Ontario, and there was no sign that his absence had any impact on his polling numbers.
He did at least 10 interviews with major U.S. media outlets during the campaign, and precisely zero interviews with any of the media outlets that cover Ontario politics on a daily basis. Again, there's no evidence that strategy hurt his election chances, and may in fact have improved them.
Hot-mic gaffes
Ford's own performance in the campaign was not without gaffes. The two biggest involved him making intemperate remarks in moments when he was unaware he was being recorded.
A camera microphone captured Ford on Feb. 3 telling two of his candidates and some supporters that he was "100 per cent" happy when Trump won the presidential election in November.
As first reported by the Toronto Star on Feb. 13, Ford told a police gala in London on the first night of the campaign that if he had his way, he would send criminals who kill someone in a home invasion "right to Sparky," a nickname for the electric chair.
Ford brushed aside both comments: his happiness at Trump's win as a belief that "things might be a little different" from the president's first term, and his preference for capital punishment as "a joke."
Although Ford's rivals tried to pounce on his remarks as evidence of dishonesty, neither incident appeared to cause a blip in his polling.
Looming large over the entire length of the campaign was Trump's wildly unpredictable and seemingly irrational approach to tariffs against Canada.
On Feb. 1, (the fourth day of the campaign), Trump signed an executive order to hit Canada with 25 per cent tariffs. Two days later Trump offered a 30-day pause on the across-the-board tariffs. Then six days later, he announced a plan to slap tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum.
Pour one out for Ford's rivals, and their attempts to make the campaign about any provincial issue beyond tariffs.
The NDP and Liberals were playing catch-up from the get-go. In a rush to nominate candidates, building from just nine incumbents in a province with 124 ridings, Crombie found herself having to defend or abandon Liberal candidates whose ill-advised past social media postings were dug up by the well-resourced PC party research team.
The election was clearly Ford's to win. Consider the timeliness of the Ford government's move to cut every single Ontario taxpaying voter a cheque for $200, starting in early January. It meant millions of cheques landed in mailboxes across the province during the campaign, sometimes arriving on the same day as a voter's information card.
Ford now has a mandate for slightly more than four years. Under Ontario's fixed-date election law, voting day is the first Thursday in June four calendar years after the last election. That means Ontario voters are next scheduled to go to the polls in June 2029.
Will Ford seek re-election? On the last day of the campaign, he said, "I want to be premier forever."
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