Ontario premiers used to have the ultimate power. They could decide, all by themselves, when they wanted the public to render its verdict on their governments.
In other words, premiers called elections whenever they wanted to, which of course meant they could try to line things up in a way that gave them the best chance to keep their jobs.
Premier Dalton McGuinty changed all that nearly two decades ago. Hoping to avoid endless speculation about election timing and the motives behind program announcements, his government passed a bill fixing the election date on the first Thursday in October, every four years.
Since then, the law has been tinkered with a bit. Election dates have been moved by a few days to avoid significant religious holidays. And Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government wanted to avoid overlapping with municipal elections, also held in October, so she moved the fixed date back to the first Thursday in June for the 2018 campaign. That’s how we know the next Ontario election will be held on June 4, 2026.
Or will it?
I’m not a particularly suspicious person. However, one can’t help but see some things happening out there that strongly point to Premier Doug Ford calling an election for well before that June date in 2026.
I know what you’re thinking: Didn’t you just tell us that the date is fixed in law to prevent the premier from gaming the system to his own advantage?
I did. But if you read the fine print of the fixed-election-date law, you’ll also see loopholes big enough to drive a Mack truck through. So, yes, the election date is fixed. But elections can also be called “when the lieutenant-governor sees fit.” And the lieutenant-governor sees fit when her first minister, the premier, tells her she should see fit.
The long-time conventional wisdom has been that no premier would dare violate at least the spirit of the law by calling an early election. And none has since the fixed-election-date law was passed 19 years ago. (Notable exception: minority parliaments don’t count in this scenario, which is why Wynne, who had only a minority government in 2013, was well within her rights to call an election in 2014 — she was about to lose the confidence of the house when the New Democratic Party announced it would no longer prop up her government.)
But consider this: Ford’s government will celebrate the second anniversary of its second term this June. It sits in a strong first place in all recent public-opinion surveys, even if the premier’s own personal popularity is in the bottom tier of Canada’s current crop of premiers.
Ford is doing a ton of fundraising, and it shows. There are innumerable ads on television (especially during hockey and baseball games) that both extol the virtues of the province of Ontario and also take aim at the new Liberal leader, Bonnie Crombie. I can’t ever recall so much political advertising taking place more than two years before the next scheduled provincial election.
The other thing to consider is Ontario’s well-established pattern of putting different parties in power on Parliament Hill and at Queen’s Park. Ontarians, unlike other Canadians, seem to do this all the time. I well remember former Liberal finance minister Greg Sorbara silently cheering, on federal election night in 2011, because Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper had just won a majority government. Sorbara told me he figured that change in dynamic on Parliament Hill could convince Ontarians to give a then very unpopular McGuinty government a second look. Sure enough, five months after Harper’s big win, Ontarians gave McGuinty a third consecutive victory — an outcome that had seemed impossible earlier that year.
A former Harper cabinet minister recently told me he had pored over numerous focus groups, studies, and surveys to try to understand the phenomenon of Ontarians almost always “ticket splitting,” decade after decade. His conclusion: “There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for the proposition that Ontario voters choose one party federally and vote for the opposite party provincially — other than the fact that it always happens.”
In which case, if you’re the current premier, and you’re convinced Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is going to win the next federal election, and that election is currently slated for October 2025, wouldn’t you think hard about not waiting until June 2026 to have the next provincial campaign?
I bet you would.
History sometimes isn’t all that helpful in determining the risks of an early election call. David Peterson went early in 1990, less than three years into his second term. The voters punished him by tossing out his Liberals and giving Bob Rae’s New Democrats a majority government.
However, perhaps spooked by that example, Ernie Eves succeeded Tory premier Mike Harris in 2002 and waited nearly a year and a half before seeking his own mandate. When he did, the voters gave McGuinty the big win. Eves’s takeaway: “I should have called a snap election right after I won the leadership,” he told me. “I was never more popular than then.”
It seems highly improbable that Ford would call an election just two years into his second majority mandate. But keep your eyes open for harbingers of a spring 2025 election. There are two byelections on May 2 — one in Lambton–Kent–Middlesex, and the other in Milton. It’s not inconceivable the Progressive Conservatives could win them both. The big spend on trying to increase Crombie’s negatives could go on. And if things continue to look promising for Poilievre at the national level, that would surely encourage Ford’s team to consider the risk of an early election call, rather than the risk of having history’s alternation pattern trample over them.
The next 12 months just got a lot more interesting.
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