If you’re a registered voter in Ontario, you’ll be busy answering your phone and doorbell pretty soon — and likely will be for a while to come. (And if you’re not registered but are eligible, save yourself the headache and register now!) The year is a week old and we’re looking at the very real prospect of a provincial and a federal election before the Victoria Day long weekend.
Insofar as there’s any real guesswork left here, it’s what Premier Doug Ford will do. As colleague Steve Paikin explained yesterday, Ford is running out of time to decide whether to call an early election. Speaking with reporters on Monday, Ford repeatedly declined to clarify his thinking on the matter. It’s not unfair to assume that this means he’s at least still leaning towards an early election call: Ford faced similar questions in 2021 and repeatedly, categorically ruled out an early trip to the ballot box. He knows how to answer the question clearly when he wants to.
The timing is tricky and will depend on events the Premier can’t control. There’s the matter of President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to impose large tariffs on all U.S. imports, including goods from Canada, and whether that will materialize (as promised) on January 20th when he’s inaugurated. It’s been clear for months that the Tories see Trump’s election and the economic threat it poses for Ontario as a kind of gift: finally, they have a plausible reason for the early election they wanted anyway.
The other key factor for Ford’s consideration is the precise timing of the Liberal leadership race. Outgoing-but-not-gone Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prorogued parliament until March 24, and national observers expect a new Liberal leader will be chosen by then. Whoever that new leader is will have a simple choice as Canada’s newest prime minister: be pushed off a cliff, or jump. The new prime minister can recall the parliament and present a new throne speech laying out their agenda but the very next item of business would be a confidence vote: one it’s unlikely the Liberals would survive.
So the other alternative would be for the new PM to simply skip that part of the process altogether and call an election on their own initiative. They can’t do that until they’re formally in office, which can’t happen until at least some interval after the leadership race concludes. In 2013, the transition from Dalton McGuinty to Kathleen Wynne took about two weeks.
If Ford is still considering calling an early election, he needs to know when exactly the new Liberal leader will be chosen and what room he has to maneuver. If he were to ask Lieutenant Governor Edith Dumont to dissolve the legislature on the first Wednesday after Trump’s inauguration (under Ontario law, writs of election must be issued on Wednesdays) that would mean a provincial voting day on February 20 — likely still in the midst of the Liberal leadership race and well before the worst of the federal political chaos truly gets underway.
If you think that Ontario voters will get to relax a little when the spotlight shifts from provincial to federal politics, guess again. The Liberal party is in no shape to go on the offensive and the new leader will largely be playing defense as Conservatives look to sweep up a substantial majority in the Commons. Most of the additional, winnable seats for Pierre Poilievre’s party are necessarily going to be in Ontario, just from sheer arithmetic: the Tories already hold more than half of the seats in western Canada and roughly half of the Liberal party’s current seat count is in Ontario. The next-largest share is in Quebec where the Bloc Québecois is more heavily favoured. Ontario voters are going to be the recipients, willing or otherwise, of a lot of attention in the federal election to come.
What Canadian politics looks like after the dust settles is, of course, anyone’s guess. Campaigns matter and we can’t assume that current opinion polling is gospel — voters still have the ability to surprise us. But it’s also true that both Ford and Poilievre have large leads in all of the available opinion polling; leads that have endured despite the events of the last year. If those polls hold up on the respective election days, the results would be something Ontarians haven’t seen in more than 60 years: a four-year spell of majority conservative governments at both Queen’s Park and Parliament Hill. The last time that happened was from 1958 to 1962, John Diefenbaker was prime minister, Leslie Frost was premier, and none of the official parties in the current House of Commons is led by someone who was alive back then.
Having a premier and prime minister from the same side of the ideological spectrum doesn’t guarantee they’ll both get along or that they’ll have any kind of unified agenda — Ford and Ontario still have distinct political interests different from Poilievre and the national political context. But if nothing else you can expect fewer cases of the federal government trying to thwart provincial projects, like the Liberals (briefly) tried to with the 413 highway.
Elections always matter, even when they seem dull: the 2022 election had abysmal turnout but it set the stage for Ford’s attempt to open up the Greenbelt for development, and everything that followed from that (including, now, a criminal investigation by the RCMP). The elections of 2025 will be at least as important and are going to deserve our attention.
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