For months, there’ve been rumours that Doug Ford and his inner circle are planning for an election call earlier than otherwise required by Ontario’s fixed-term-election act. The speculation began in earnest with the announcement in the spring of this year that the province would accelerate the rollout of beer and wine in corner stores, and more or less everything that has transpired since has made it even more clear that Ontario voters will be heading to the polls sometime early next year.
There was just one hitch: Ford lacked anything remotely like a justification for an early election call — or at least not one that could pass a laugh test. The actual reason Ford, like other conservative premiers around the country, wants an early election is pretty simple: Justin Trudeau has put the Liberal brand in the sub-basement of national opinion polling, and so long as that’s true, getting elected or re-elected as a right-of-centre government in Canada is playing the game on easy mode. The political problem for Ford is that stating his naked self-interest out loud would probably be poor form.
Nova Scotia’s Tim Houston faced the same problem; he is attempting to solve it in part by telling voters that his party has a plan for big new investments (including in housing) and that voters deserve a say before the government commits to big changes. I’m not an expert on Nova Scotia politics, so I won’t comment on whether that will work for Houston or not, but it’s obvious that this tactic isn’t available to Ford: there is no big, ambitious legislative agenda on the horizon (the government is currently seized by the matter of bike lanes), and the premier certainly can’t claim to have an ambitious housing plan.
And then Tuesday happened. Donald Trump has been elected once again to the presidency of the United States, and the reverberations of that choice will have massive, real, and ongoing impacts on Canada. Ontario’s export sectors are deeply intertwined with American consumers, and the prospect of a Trump administration raising general tariffs on all foreign producers is a dagger pointed at the heart of the Canadian economy. It’s not an exaggeration to say that we’re about to discover whether the ever-deeper trade integration with the U.S. favoured by two generations of Canadian national policy can endure — and if not, what will replace it.
There’s arguably nowhere that this question is as acute as in Ontario’s auto sector. American tariffs on things like food or steel will be disruptive, but in principle there’s a whole world of customers out there for those goods. The auto sector is structurally different, with jobs in Ontario intimately dependent on seamless cross-border trade with facilities in the U.S. Midwest. If U.S. tariffs are applied to Canadian manufacturing, including cars, the effects could be devastating.
(The Trudeau government is currently politely reminding the incoming administration that Trump renegotiated NAFTA and renamed it the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. The idea that this will restrain a Republican trifecta in a new Trump term seems adorably quaint.)
Things could potentially get even worse if the Republicans in Congress decide to gut substantial portions of the Inflation Reduction Act, which has spurred so much investment in electric vehicles. The auto industry is already getting cold feet about the transition to EVs; a major change in national policy could be a deathblow. The billions of dollars the federal and provincial governments have committed to luring EV manufacturing here to Ontario could all end up being wasted on plants that are mothballed before they even get up and running.
(Here, too, people are pinning a lot of hope on the fact that EV-monger Elon Musk is one of Trump’s closest allies and that this will preserve America’s current policies. To this, I will simply say that the list of people who thought they could profitably manage a long-term relationship with Trump and failed is much, much longer than the list of people who succeeded.)
The potential effects of a Trump administration are all necessarily a matter of speculation right now, but it’d be foolish to pretend that it will be business as usual. Which brings us back to Ford and the matter of election timing. Trump will be inaugurated once again on January 20 of next year, and we will start to get a clearer idea of what his immediate priorities are and what the likely impacts will be for Canada.
I don’t know what Ford will tell the public when that happens, but I do know that he’d be on totally solid factual ground if he said that Trump’s second term represented a comprehensive change in Ontario’s circumstances — after all, our largest trading partner could threaten massive economic dislocation that the province would have to mount a serious response to. He’d also be able to say, with reason, that he’s the only party leader at Queen’s Park who dealt with the chaos of Trump’s first term and that, if voters re-elect his party, they’ll know what they’ll be getting for the full four years of Trump’s second term.
There is the small matter that this is all, at best, reality-adjacent: Ford clearly wanted an early election months before we knew what the outcome of the U.S. election would be, and not for high-minded reasons related to public policy. Maybe that will matter to voters next year — though the events of the last week are a pretty strong argument for skepticism.