Less than an hour before sitting down with TVO Today for an end-of-year interview, NDP leader Marit Stiles learned that her winter break was going to be unexpectedly extended. Premier Doug Ford and his government won’t call the legislature back until March 23, 2026, five weeks later than normally called for by the rules of the legislative calendar. The leader of the official opposition was sanguine about this end-of-year news.
“I wish I could say I was surprised. I'm not, unfortunately,” Stiles said Thursday afternoon. “I’ve seen this government's pattern of increasingly not wanting to be in the legislature.”
The government made similar changes in the recent fall sitting, which affected how MPPs worked: government bills were rushed through the house with little or nothing in the way of committee hearings, and the government relied on a small number of sprawling, omnibus bills filled with numerous schedules to achieve its legislative agenda.
“They rush everything through. They don't leave time for us to debate things properly or hear from experts, people who are going to be impacted,” Stiles said. “And that to me means that we don't pass good laws.”
Stiles has been a sharp critic of the government — it’s literally the job description — but the year hasn’t been what she’d hoped for. A snap election call saw the NDP fall further in the vote share from their 2018 high-water mark, garnering 18.5 per cent of the vote (to the Liberals’ 30), down from 23 in 2022 and 33.5 in 2018. The NDP remained the official opposition thanks to the vagaries of Ontario’s first-past-the-post electoral system, but returned to a legislature with competition in the opposition benches: the Liberals earned official party status for the first time since their 2018 wipeout.
Stiles faced dissent in her party over the disappointing results and received a relatively tepid endorsement from NDP members, with 68 per cent of members expressing support for her staying on as leader. This at least exceeded Liberal Bonnie Crombie, who received 57 per cent support from Liberals and thereafter announced her intention to resign. But it was something of a near-miss for Stiles, and she reacted by promptly making changes in her office, including bringing in a new chief of staff (Caitlin Pettifor, with a prior history in NDP governments in Alberta and more recently in Manitoba under Premier Wab Kinew).
“I'm going to continue to bring in new people and change things up. I'm going to keep building that team out as well, because we're not messing around,” Stiles says. “I mean, if Doug Ford can call an election basically any day on a whim, we have to be ready.”
Stiles wants the 55 per cent of Ontarians who didn’t vote in the last election to consider her party — as well as Green, Liberal, and Tory voters. “In fact, especially people who voted conservative. I need to convince them,” she says.
The NDP has made changes in some of its longstanding policy prescriptions this year, such as substantially revising its position on nuclear power to be much more positive on the largest single source of electricity in the province. But Stiles wouldn’t name another area where she thought the NDP needed to get outside of its comfort zone, politically, to appeal to people who voted for other parties.
“Things do become dated sometimes, and we need to evolve our policy, but I think where we have to land is where we know people are at. You cannot go to a doorstep and convince somebody that your priorities are more important than theirs.” To that end, Stiles is focusing on affordability issues and job losses from major plant closures announced in places like Brampton and Ingersoll. She acknowledged that, along with affordability, questions of public safety and public order are top of mind for many voters.
“I think people are reaching their limit. I see it all the time in my own community. I see it all the time, and I don’t blame them,” she says. But Stiles says a whack-a-mole approach to clearing park encampments won’t work, even if it’s what voters might want to see in the short term.
“You bump one encampment out of a park, and it goes to the next one… We have to invest in truly affordable housing. We need to build homes, but this government is not building homes. Nobody is building homes,” Stiles said. (Earlier on Thursday, the Missing Middle Initiative released a report card grading Canada’s provinces on housing policy metrics; Ontario came in last.)
In the new year, Stiles and the NDP will spend a lot of time in Sault Ste. Marie. The local MPP there, Chris Scott, was elected as a Progressive Conservative (defeating the NDP candidate, city councillor Lisa Vezeau-Allen, by 114 votes) but was summarily expelled from the PC caucus earlier this fall when he was charged with assault — and now sits as an independent in the legislature. Scott hasn’t resigned or indicated whether he will, but Stiles says the NDP will be ready to fight for that seat again if a byelection is called.
The turmoil in the Ontario Liberal Party presents an opportunity. The legislature’s third party has not yet set a date for picking a new leader and may opt for a lengthy race that might only conclude late in 2026 (with some observers speculating that 2027 isn’t out of the question). While the Liberals continue to participate in question period and make their own criticisms of the government, being functionally leaderless is undeniably blunting some of their impact — giving Stiles time to set voters’ impression of her before the Liberals pick a new head. That has included a bit of spectacle, like getting expelled from the chamber at the legislature for calling the premier and his government “corrupt” in relation to the Skills Development Fund controversy. But it also includes trying to sell voters on an alternative.
“I think most people are looking for someone who is going to show them that politics actually can make a difference and that things can be different right now and has a plan for what that could look like,” Stiles says.
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