A day after advance voting began across Ontario (you can still vote in your riding Friday and Saturday this week, citizens), the two largest opposition parties have finally released their platforms, which lay out the most comprehensive view of what they’d do if they were to form government. This puts the New Democrats and Liberals substantially behind the Greens (whose leader, Mike Schreiner, released their platform last week) but still ahead of the Progressive Conservatives, who have yet to release a platform.
Both the Liberals and NDP are proposing substantial new spending. The New Democrats had already announced some measures to improve affordability, including a grocery rebate for Ontarians, and the platform released Friday morning commits to freezing taxes for people making less than $220,000 per year, or 98 per cent of Ontarians. Does that mean the NDP would raise taxes on the remaining 2 per cent? It certainly does: the party is proposing new income-tax brackets for people making $300,000, $400,000, and $500,000 annually to raise an estimated $3 billion.
They’d raise a further $3.5 billion by increasing the rate of capital gains included as income taxation, from 50 per cent to 80. A similar proposal was made by the Liberal party federally last year and was extremely controversial; former finance minister Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney, both front-runners to replace Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader, have now disavowed the idea. Whether an NDP government could weather the political storm a similar tax proposal would create in Ontario is an open question.
While the NDP also has other taxes aimed at higher earners (including a luxury-homes sales tax), one attention-grabbing promise is to levy a one-time-only “grocery profiteering” tax on large retailers that made windfall profits after COVID-19; the NDP projects that could raise $1 billion in 2026-27.
But the NDP has expensive promises in its platform, including restoring provincial grants for 50 per cent of transit operations (a provincial policy that was killed nearly 30 years ago under the Mike Harris government), doubling the primary social-assistance programs (ODSP and OW), and investing in social housing. Given the kinds of promises being made, the NDP acknowledges that its new spending would be substantially more than it’d be taking in in new taxes alone: by 2027-28, it expects to be spending $17 billion in new money beyond what they’d be taking in new taxes. That doesn’t mean Ontario’s existing deficit would directly grow by $17 billion — economic growth could bring in new revenues to offset some of the new spending.
The Liberal promises are more modest (or, if you prefer, less ambitious) and would amount to $9 billion in new spending annually, for a total of $36 billion. The Liberals are promising substantial spending in education on top of the substantial health-care spending they had already proposed. (The state of Ontario’s health-care system has been one of leader Bonnie Crombie’s signature attacks on the Ford government since the campaign began.) Education funding is comfortable territory for the Liberals, as Dalton McGuinty won in 2003 in large part by promising to more generously fund provincial public schools and end nearly a decade of labour disruptions between the government and teacher unions. The Liberal platform includes commitments to increase both per-student funding for classrooms and “mutual respect” between the government and unions. It also commits to providing a free breakfast and lunch to every elementary and high-school student by quadrupling the existing school food programs.
Neither the NDP nor Liberal costing documents are what anyone would call abundant on detail, especially in comparison with what the Greens released. But we can charitably acknowledge that, in 2025 more than in other recent election cycles, the state of the economy — and thus the state of the province’s finances — is uncertain. Additionally, Ontario elections have for the past generation been held either in the fall or in the spring after the introduction of the provincial budget, allowing all parties to base their platforms on reasonably solid public fiscal estimates. Not so this year, thanks to the timing of the election Premier Doug Ford chose.
If the polls are correct and an election were held tomorrow, neither the Liberal nor the NDP campaign platforms would matter: Ford would handily lead the PC party to a new majority in the legislature. There is a little bit less than a week to go in this election, and Crombie pledged on Thursday to defeat the Ford government if a minority legislature were returned. That’s the scenario in which the campaign platforms matter: they show us where the Liberals and the NDP agree and might be able to cobble together an agreement to defeat a Ford government — and also where the fault lines exist that could blow any agreement apart. Would the Liberals agree to an NDP demand for new taxes on high earners? Could the NDP agree to a housing plan that relies more on market developers than on government-built social housing?
We’ll need to see the results come in on Thursday night before we even know whether those questions are worth asking seriously.
Donate Now