“All options are on the table. We want to support Ontario workers, we want to support Ontario companies,” Premier Doug Ford told reporters Tuesday morning, referencing his forthcoming response to Donald Trump’s threats of massive tariffs on Canadian goods.
Those options include even the radical notion that the government just keep doing its job: Ford volunteered that he still hasn’t decided whether to seek a dissolution of the legislature and trigger an election campaign a year earlier than is legally required.
It's good that Ford is taking the economic threat of Trump tariffs seriously, even as it’s increasingly unclear what or how large the tariffs will be. (Reporting from U.S. media suggests the tariffs might start small and ramp up over time, which might perversely be good for Ontario in the short term as American importers rush to stock up their warehouses before costs go up even further.)
But that’s about where the sense in the government’s latest line of reasoning ends. The premier has argued that the response will be expensive, and he can’t spend the sums being discussed without going to the voters first.
At a news conference in Darlington last week he compared the potential provincial response to the COVID-19 pandemic. “If [the tariffs] last for months and months, we’re going to have to do the same thing as what we did during the pandemic. We’re going to have to put tens of billions of dollars into the economy… to protect Canadian and Ontario jobs. I don’t have a mandate from the people to spend tens of billions of dollars,” Ford said, adding that the first COVID-19 budget was passed with unanimous consent — something he doesn’t expect this time around.
It's true enough that the government’s mini-budget bill (Bill 188, technically a fiscal and economic update) was introduced, debated, and passed in a single day in March 2020. That was because MPPs literally didn’t know if or when they would be able to return, or whether remote voting would be possible or allowed. That changed by the presentation of the next full budget, in the Fall of that year. Opposition MPPs voted against the government’s budget measures, as opposition parties always do.
Nobody at the time argued that dissent from the opposition benches meant that we needed an election to settle the legitimacy of tens of billions of dollars in spending — least of all the premier himself. Worse, demanding unanimous consent to the government’s spending plans simply isn’t a reasonable standard. If the Liberals had made that argument when the Tories were in opposition there would have been howls of tyranny and dictatorship from their benches. The opposition has to be allowed to oppose (careful readers will note it’s literally in their job description) without the majority party in the legislature throwing a tantrum.
Opposition leaders at the legislature have signaled that they’re entirely willing to work with the government on a Trump response — a somewhat empty gesture, given that Ford’s large majority in the legislature and the institutional weakness of opposition parties at Queen’s Park make their cooperation entirely unnecessary for the government to implement its agenda.
“Ontario’s New Democrats are ready to work with the government to fight these tariffs and protect jobs in auto, agriculture, forestry, and any other sector that is at risk,” NDP leader Marit Stiles said in a statement from Windsor on Monday. “When Canadian jobs and our livelihoods are at risk, we need to work together to fight back.”
Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie agreed, telling reporters at Queen’s Park that current events called for a wartime effort. The opposition parties have their own reasons for playing nice, of course: time is their friend, and if they can derail Ford’s early election plans they’ve got more time to position themselves for a vote in 2026. Crombie will likely benefit from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s departure from the national political scene. She did concede on Monday that if there must be an election in 2025, it might be better for Ontario Liberals if they go to the hustings before a national election (and thereby get early access to Liberal volunteers and money).
Stiles, for her part, has mixed her conciliatory messages with confrontation. In an appearance in Niagara Region last week she lambasted the Tories for not getting a GO train station built in Grimsby — and all but dared the government to call an election so the NDP can run against its record.
These are the tensions in Ontario politics right now: we have a premier who’s visibly itching for an early election before the Trudeau political bonus for conservative premiers expires, but who also knows he can’t appear to be too cavalier about his opportunism, so he’s concocting reasons that barely resemble the facts of recent history. The opposition parties would prefer to wait and keep their powder dry for an election next year but also see just as clearly that the decision is largely out of their hands, so they might as well gear up for a fight.
The premier insists he hasn’t made a decision about an early election, and that might even be true. But often in politics once people have started the machinery moving — once candidates have been selected and trained, funds have been raised — that machinery keeps moving under its own power. The train for an election this year might not yet have left the station, but you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re hearing the whistle.