You had to like the spirit of the new law.
It’s June 2004, less than a year into Dalton McGuinty’s first year as premier. To date, Ontario premiers have enjoyed one of the most imperial powers of any democracy. Yes, the Constitution limited governments to a maximum five-year term. But premiers could essentially decide to call elections whenever they wanted within that window. And, of course, they exercised that power when it was most beneficial to their re-election prospects.
Most seemed to think calling elections around the four-year mark was the best approach. The thinking was: get all the hard stuff out of the way in the first couple of years, roll out some good news announcements over the last two years, then call an election in hopes of renewing the mandate.
That wasn’t set in stone: if calling an election after three years, to take advantage of buoyant polls, seemed advisable, then early to the polls we’d go. It might not have been the fairest approach, but these folks weren’t idiots. The idea, after all, is to win.
Former premier Bob Rae once called it the “divine right of premiers” to call elections whenever they wanted.
But the Ontario Liberals under McGuinty thought this wasn’t fair to the opposition parties or to the electorate. The public was constantly inundated by unsubstantiated gossip about when the election call would come, as if we were waiting for white smoke to emerge from a chimney.
McGuinty folks wanted election timing to be predictable. The government shouldn’t have any advantage in timing over the opposition, and the public should be able to judge government announcements on their merits. Since premiers were calling elections basically every four years anyway, why not fix that duration in law?
So, the government introduced the fixed election date law. Voters were promised an election every four years, on the first Thursday in October. The campaign span was also fixed at 28 days. Gone would be the interminable 56-day-long campaigns, which the old law allowed.
There was more to the story. When the Liberals came to power in October 2003, they were convinced the previous PC government had overstated its budgetary prudence. The Tories said the books were balanced; the Libs doubted it but couldn’t prove it. So, when McGuinty came into office, he gave the Auditor General the power to release a special report on the fiscal state of the province six months before an election. That way, each party could base their spending promises on the same numbers.
Of course, to do that, you’ve gotta know when election day is way ahead of time.
It was a bit of a controversial decision inside the provincial Liberal cabinet. They had just watched Prime Minister Jean Chretien call an early federal election, winning his third straight majority government. Some thought: why handcuff ourselves?
But “Premier Dad,” as McGuinty was often dubbed, opted for fairness,
While the law was well-intentioned, it did have a couple of provisos that took a lot of the guts out of it. It was only applicable during majority parliaments — it couldn’t prevent the opposition from bringing down a minority government and sending the people to the polls before the four-year mark. That happened to Kathleen Wynne, who took over as premier in February 2013, but pulled the plug on her own minority government in May 2014 when it became apparent she was about to lose a budget vote.
There was also an “out clause” in the fixed election date law, which allowed a premier to call an election either earlier or later than the four-year period, if the circumstances required an urgent response. The Liberals were convinced no premier would mess with that option, because the electorate would surely punish anyone who tried to violate the spirit of the law.
Enter Doug Ford.
Towards the end of 2024, Ford and his people saw two political trains coming down the tracks right at them: a federal Conservative party with a massive lead on the Justin Trudeau Liberals, and Donald Trump’s return to power. Neither boded well for the Ontario PC party.
Ontarians like to have different parties in power in Ottawa and Toronto, so Ford was being urged to call an election while the unpopular federal Liberals were still in power.
Ford was advised that the early election could be justified by the threat posed by Trump’s return to power. And so, just two-and-a-half years into his four-year term, Ford unilaterally pulled the plug on the 43rd parliament, sending voters to the polls in frigid February, the first time that had happened since 1883.
It worked.
The opposition cried foul, but most voters didn’t seem particularly fussed, as Ford cruised to a third consecutive majority. Now, Ford has announced he’ll give legal effect to what he just pulled off. The fixed election date law will be officially killed, and we’ll go back to the old rules of calling elections whenever premiers feel like it.
Some Liberals who helped enact the 2004 law don’t love this development. In a conversation with former finance minister Greg Sorbara, he suggested voters ask themselves, “Who really would benefit from Ford’s proposal?”
"Would it help kick-start a housing industry in paralysis? Would it deal with the crisis in Ontario’s health-care system? Would it alleviate the huge challenges faced by our post-secondary institutions?”
"None of the above,” he says. “There is only one beneficiary for reverting to the old system: the Ontario [Progressive] Conservative Party.” (Sorbara later published his thoughts in the Toronto Star.)
Sorbara recognizes the shortcomings of the old fixed-date law and suggests this change: if any government wants to call an election before its four-year term expires, it should seek a two-thirds majority of all MPPs, in effect, requiring some opposition cooperation.
Ford appears to have figured out something important. There really are two different kinds of Ontarians: those who care a great deal about democratic guardrails, political customs, and the like; and others who really couldn’t care less, as long as they can maintain their jobs, feed their families, and have some sense that the politicians are minding the store well enough.
Ford clearly has a hammerlock on that second group, who are uninterested in fixed election date laws, the premier’s use of the notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or his doubling of the allowable campaign contributions.
On the one hand, it gives the opposition an issue to attack Ford on. On the other hand, it feels as if the number of people interested in that attack is dwindling.
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