It’s difficult to know, in politics, which moments will stick in voters’ memories and which will evaporate from the public consciousness without leaving an impression. Those of us who are paid to watch this stuff more intently than the general public have a habit of overrating the importance of some incidents that end up being trifles. So out of an abundance of caution, I’m going to state outright that I don’t think Doug Ford lost the 2026 election this week, and I don’t think that most voters even noticed what was going on at Queen’s Park. Nevertheless, while what happened is not in itself going to cause problems for the Progressive Conservative majority at the legislature or for the premier, it’s an example of the kind of trouble the Tories cause for themselves when they forget how they look to anyone who isn’t already a campaign donor.
March 8 is International Women’s Day, which is irrelevant to the legislature in that MPPs don’t sit on Fridays. Instead, MPPs spoke on Thursday — but not before the majority party at Queen’s Park managed to fumble something that ought to have been as uncontroversial as, well, mom and apple pie.
Last month, Liberal MPP Lucille Collard told reporters the government had advised her party that, when the house returned from its winter break, it would no longer be extending some of the speaking rights previously enjoyed. Here it’s relevant to remember that, while we refer to the Liberals as a party, under the rules of the legislature they’re all “independents” and thus lack the formal speaking rights afforded to the Progressive Conservatives and the New Democrats. The PC majority, in its (marginal) defence, isn’t rewriting any rules to silence the Liberals — as it did, for example, when it raised the threshold of official-party status from eight MPPs to 12. It’s simply being a bit more aggressive in enforcing the written rules of the legislature.
(Speaker Ted Arnott is also something of a countervailing force in the legislature, and he’s adopted rules that allow the independents speaking time commensurate with their numbers. That means that the election of Green MPP Aislinn Clancy — again, formally an independent — has increased the frequency with which they’ll be allowed to speak.)
So the Tories are playing hardball, but it’s also a pretty inside-baseball issue that wouldn’t necessarily have made headlines — except that International Women’s Day is precisely the kind of uncontroversial event that MPPs expect to be given time to speak on, and the Liberals had previously enjoyed the expectation that they’d be allowed to. Notably, on Wednesday, the government did grant the independents the right to speak with a unanimous consent motion — to mark the passing of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.
The optics get even worse for the Tories: There are currently 16 MPPs not sitting in either of the recognized parties. Eight are women, including Haldimand–Norfolk MPP Bobbi Ann Brady, the only member of the legislature actually elected without a registered party beside her name on the ballot in 2022. So by dogmatically enforcing the rules allocating speaking time, the PC majority appeared to be silencing a substantial number of women specifically on the topic of International Women’s Day.
The Liberals haven’t had a ton of luck in the past two election campaigns, but they clearly know an opportunity when they see it.
“By denying our request to speak in the Legislature, Doug Ford and his Conservatives have made the deliberate decision to silence women on a day meant to celebrate our social, economic, cultural, and political achievements,” Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie and her female colleagues said in a statement. “This is a gross abuse of power, and sends the wrong message to all the girls and boys across Ontario who look up to us for leadership.”
The Tories, seeing which way the wind was blowing on this one, eventually relented on Thursday and agreed to give the independents their speaking time for International Women’s Day. Liberals Andrea Hazell and Stephanie Bowman spoke for their party. It amounts to only a bit more than a tempest in a teapot, in the end.
But, and this is the point, it really didn’t need to amount to anything at all. The Tories aren’t enforcing this rule uniformly (see the speeches for the late PM Mulroney). They’re not overloading the legislative agenda at Queen’s Park so thoroughly that they couldn’t spare five minutes on a Thursday afternoon. And all they managed to accomplish was some political self-harm before they conceded the inevitable anyway.
As I said at the beginning, this incident likely won’t be remembered by many at the voting booth in 2026. But while voters don’t mind anger in politics if a leader is angry about the same things they are — witness Pierre Poilievre’s enduring lead in the federal polls — they can be substantially more averse to the appearance of deliberate nastiness, pettiness, and meanness. And that’s where the real risk for the Tories lies. If they can’t control their instinctive desire to rub Liberal noses in their current powerlessness, eventually they’re going to do so in a way that actually does blow up and gives voters a reason to vote for someone else.
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