Front Burner - Ontario votes amidst tariff crisis

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

People in Ontario will head to the polls on Thursday, in an election that was called more than a year ahead of schedule.Doug Ford, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party is on track to win a third mandate. He says he needs the province’s confidence to deal with U.S.President Trump’s tariffs. The latest from Abacus Data puts the Conservatives at 41 per cent of the vote share.CBC Queen’s Park reporter Mike Crawley talks to host Jayme Poisson about the campaign so far, including the fight that other parties have mounted on issues like health care, and why Doug Ford is holding a steady lead.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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Hey, it's Jamie. So people in Ontario will head to the polls on Thursday. And Doug Ford, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, which currently has a majority government, is on track for his third straight one. The latest from Abacus Data puts the Conservatives at 41 percent of the vote share. As we've discussed on the show, Ford called the election a year ahead of schedule to capitalize on the whole tariff 51st state crisis. He says that he needs a new mandate to deal with Trump. And that's primarily what he's been talking about during the campaign. When times are tough, I will do whatever it takes to keep you safe. I will work with anyone and I will stand up to anyone in order to protect our

province and our people. Today, my colleague, Mike Crawley, long time CBC Queens Park reporter, friend of the pod is on the show. Hey Mike. Hey Jamie. And we are going to discuss the campaign, including the fight the other parties have mounted, especially on issues like healthcare and whether any of it has really mattered. Mike, let's start with Ford's slogan for this campaign. It is protect Ontario. This is a real crisis for Ontario. Trump tariffs could put up to 500,000 jobs in the province at

risk. A large portion of them are in the provinces manufacturing industry. And how has this looming crisis played throughout the campaign? What have we seen from Ford? It's the big thing that people in Ontario are talking about and Doug Ford and his PCs have really tried to capitalize on that by pitching Doug Ford as the premier who would be best placed to respond to the terrorists. They're very much pitching Doug Ford's persona and the kind of Captain Canada approach that he's taken in recent months, when you've had the political instability going on in Ottawa, Doug Ford having that position as head of the chair of the Council of the Federation, lots of advertising about what Doug Ford is doing to take on the tariffs.

When Ottawa descended into chaos, he stood up for us. Now taking Trump on tonight, Ontario premier Doug Ford. The next four years won't be easy. There's big decisions ahead, and there's only one leader to protect Ontario. That's premier Doug Ford. Who's gonna fight for you? And it has literally been the one note

of the entire PC campaign. He can make an election promise about building infrastructure and they style it as a way of protecting Ontario against tariffs. Mm-hmm. Fair for me to say that it's working because they're doing pretty well right now. I mean, certainly all of the available polling, the publicly available polling suggests Ford is on his way to yet another majority. And all of the polling also seems to say that on the tariff issue, that's the thing that he pulls the best on. Have either of his main opponents, so Bonnie Cromby, leader of the liberals, or Marit Stiles, leader of the NDP, have they been able to get any traction on

pitching themselves as better leaders or a better party to deal with Trump and the tariffs? Basically zero traction. It's just simply not the issue that those parties can win on. And they're aware of that. They've put forward things that they would do if they were elected as premier in terms of trying to retaliate against tariffs, if they were imposed or to help out Ontario businesses

that are affected by it. If Trump goes through with it and tariffs hit you hard, we're going to take care of you and your family through a strong income protection program. FTF, I like to call it the F-Trump Fund. That's just between us. This will provide Ontario businesses with access to cheaper interest rates for operational costs or capital investment so that they can borrow at government rates. Their ability to pitch themselves as the leader who's best place to deal with tariffs.

It's just not something that they're particularly strong on. Mike, do you have a sense of why voters think that Doug Ford is the guy for this job? I think some of it goes back to the legacy of what Ontario saw from Doug Ford during the pandemic. You criticize the Ontario government's response to COVID, all the horrible things that went on in long-term care, etc. But you did have Doug Ford out there basically every single day for months, giving a news conference and at least showing leadership. That was certainly the image that he was projecting. And I think some of that changed people's attitudes about Doug Ford, and he's riding on that to some extent. People also seem to feel that the way Doug Ford has

portrayed himself on the national stage, people feel relatively good about that. Right. I know even some of his appearances on US television networks like Fox News have gotten quite a bit of plaudits, even from people who might normally be critical of him. Can I jump in, though, and say, Jamie, that although Doug Ford has done probably a dozen interviews with US media outlets during this election campaign.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who lived in America for 20 years, joins us now from Toronto. Premier Ford is out front with me tonight. And Premier, I appreciate your time. Joining us now to discuss what impact these tariffs might have on his province and country is the Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford. Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario Canada, joins me now.

He hasn't done a single interview with an Ontario media outlet or at least one of the major media outlets in Ontario. Very good point, noted. Have the other parties been able to get inroads on any other issues here? The other parties are doing everything they can. Provincial elections are about a heck of a lot more than just tariffs. There's healthcare, obviously, education. There's certainly some fertile ground for the other parties to criticize Ford's record

on a bunch of these other provincial issues. I think the question is really whether that is resonating with voters at this particular point in time when Ontario's staring down the barrel of With the caveat that it seems like maybe not, right? Let's delve into some of those issues a little bit more and do health care for me. I know that this is something that theals have been hitting really hard. I'm going to make a commitment right here, right now, to the fix for our health care system in Ontario. Number one, we invest in family doctors so that everyone across Ontario has a family doctor and that of course will help alleviate the wait times and the pressure in our hospitals.

I think everybody in this campaign has talked about that scene out of Walkerton, Ontario, last month where hundreds of people waited in the cold for a chance to get a family doctor. Just tell me more about the issues that the province is facing around health care. Yeah, there's two and a half million people in Ontario that don't have regular access to a family doctor. And that scene in Walkerton, it was a really vivid illustration of the family doctor shortage in Ontario. More than a thousand people came to line up here in the cold, in the snow, all desperate, all with stories of what life has been like without a family doctor.

My husband, he has fairly serious health issues and many times I feel like I'm not able to cope. It says that there's a problem if there's this many people willing to come out in a snowstorm to try and get a doctor. I've had five years now without a doctor, so it feels like we hit one in the lottery. And in some ways I'm surprised that we haven't seen, you know, those images being used over and over and over to hammer away at the Ford government. But there's a flip side to this, Jamie. If you look at the fact that two and a half million Ontarians don't have a family doctor, there's also loads and loads of Ontarians don't have a family doctor. There's also loads and loads of Ontarians

that do have a family doctor. And in fact, if you look across the country, what's the province where the highest percentage of the population has access to a family doctor? It's Ontario. As rough as the healthcare system is in Ontario, some of the stats are actually good here, relatively speaking. Waiting lists for things like hip replacements or knee replacements are shorter in Ontario than they are in all of the other provinces. There's a bit of a challenge for the other parties to turn votes on healthcare. Again, looking at the polling, it's hard to see that Doug Ford's PCs are being hurt by the state of the healthcare system, even though the hallway medicine crisis, the issue of the overcrowding

that's going on in the hospitals is actually worse now than it was before COVID. Right. ER wait times, I saw the Toronto Star reporting ER wait times in the past three years, people waited longer than they did in the previous 13 years. So, you know, that's something. Is there a lot of daylight between what the parties are promising around healthcare? The promises are quite similar between the Liberals, the NDP and the Ontario Green Party led by Mike Schreiner. all of them have plans to get everybody in Ontario a family doctor within a four-year period. And even the amounts of money that they would spend

to do that are fairly similar. I will make sure that healthcare workers get the respect they deserve with a fair wage and safe working condition. And I'm gonna bring in nurse to patient ratios to stop burnout and deliver better care for people. Nurses, PSWs, other frontline healthcare workers, they felt disrespected, overworked, underpaid.

We have to fix that. If we don't care for the people who... A lot less actually being promised by the Ford government. But I spoke to the head of the Ontario Medical Association, the group that represents physicians in the province. And he actually said a lot of it comes down to who do you trust to fix the problem? I also wonder too, whether some of people's opinions about the healthcare system or their views of the healthcare system are in some ways like a little bit sort of fatalistic. Like the healthcare system has been a challenge in Ontario for quite a long time. And you know, maybe yes, by degrees, it's getting

worse and worse. But have people just in some ways come to accept that and they don't necessarily even believe anybody's promises that they're going to fix it. On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz comes an unprecedented exhibition about one of history's darkest moments. Auschwitz, not long ago, not far away, features more than 500 original objects, first-hand accounts and survivor testimonies that tell the powerful story of the Auschwitz concentration camp, its history and legacy, and the underlying conditions that allowed the Holocaust to happen. On now exclusively at ROM.

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Don't miss a brand new season of Stuff the British Stole. Watch it free on CBC Gem. Again, with the caveat that these issues that are important to people in their daily lives and even important when you look at polling, they still are not coming close to the tariff, 51st state stuff. I do want to talk about a couple housing, education, just tell me a little bit more about what we're hearing from the parties on those issues, the daylight between them. Yeah, in many ways, it surprised me how little housing has been a focus of the parties' platforms because a couple of years ago, it was talked about as a huge crisis,

the shortage of available new homes, the pace at which new construction was happening. And honestly, the pace of new construction has actually dropped off in the last couple of years. Doug Ford made a promise in the last campaign of building one and a half million new homes in Ontario over the coming 10 years. And the actual numbers of new home constructions starts that have happened since that promise are way off that pace. The construction industry is in a real slump in Ontario. You take a look at what the parties are promising. are how likely is it that any of these plans are actually enough to address sort of the fundamental fact that builders aren't building, developers aren't launching projects.

Kind of similarly to what you were saying about healthcare, there does also seem to be this resignation around housing. I also want to talk to you about the tunnel. So Doug Ford has promised that if re-elected, his government would put road lanes and possibly a transit line under at least 50 kilometers of the 401. A re-elected PC government will move forward with the largest infrastructure project in Ontario's history, Canadian history, and in North America. This is something that could cost upwards of a hundred billion dollars to build.

Well, what's the motivation in pitching something like this? The motivation is supposedly solving the horrible traffic congestion problem in Toronto. Toronto has some of the worst commuting times in all of North America. And look, the 401, it is the busiest highway in Canada and anybody who drives on it, in particular the stretch that runs right through

the city of Toronto, but as well east and west out into the Toronto suburbs, it's a mess. The question really is, is building a tunnel underneath, really a solution to the traffic problems and because it would take forever. It would cost so much. And there's actually a highway that runs parallel to the 401 a little bit further north. It's a toll highway and it's practically empty. And it's practically empty. So there's a lot of questions being asked about Doug Ford's idea of building a tunnel under the 401. And in fact, Jamie, as far as I can tell, in all the research we've done, it would be the single most expensive election promise ever made in the history of Ontario. They pump it a lot in radio ads that drivers who are stuck in their car in traffic are gonna be hearing. Popular, feasible?

That's another question entirely. Right, and am I right to say that there hasn't even been a feasibility study done on that yet? Yeah, this is one of the weird things about it. When Doug Ford first promised it, he said, we're gonna build it, and we're gonna do a feasibility study from Brampton in this saga all the way out the Scarborough and Markham that's a feasibility study will will study take a look at it no feasibility study has been done and you

know he's very much campaigning on it it seems to be that if he wins this election he is taking it as a mandate to build the thing. We'll be transparent as we pull these numbers together. We can't sit back and just wait. That's the difference between ourselves and the other parties. We're visionaries. We're thinking 50 years and 100 years out. So we've talked about how the Liberals and the NDP are pretty far behind here, but Bonnie Crombie has been pitching directly to NDP supporters on this last stretch of the campaign. She's saying that the Liberals are the only alternative to the PC's. I'm reaching out today to NDP voters and I'm asking them, if you want to change our health care system, please vote for Ontario's Liberals.

We have the momentum, we have the wind at our sails, but we can't make that change without your support. So once again... An NDP candidate in the Toronto riding of Eglinton Lawrence actually dropped out and threw her support behind the Liberal candidate. I was curious to get your thoughts on this. Could this strategy of vote sharing, I guess, work here? This has been a question, a debate that has happened in each of the last three elections when the PC's have seemed like they're ahead. Both the NDP and the Liberals kind of fighting to say,

we're the only party that can beat Doug Ford. That argument didn't work at all for the Liberals the last two elections, in part because the numbers just weren't there. They were trailing. This time, the polls province-wide would suggest there's a bit more daylight between the liberals and the NDP, that the liberals are a certain number of percentage points overall ahead of the NDP. So there's maybe a little bit more logic to that argument, but it doesn't really indicate that the liberals have any chance of actually beating Doug Ford. It's a picture of the liberals, in fact, to try to take away seats that are actually liberal NDP fights, which is, in many ways ways has absolutely nothing to do with stopping Doug Ford. Does it make a difference in some close races that are PC, NDP contests or PC liberal contests? It might.

Other thing that I think is worth us talking about here is that it's not like Ford has run this perfect campaign, right? There have been gaffes on his part. Let's just say times where he wasn't really certain that anybody was actually listening to what it was that he was saying. So one happened at an invitation only police gala in London, Ontario. God forbid they kill an innocent person. I don't even go 25 years. I send them right to Sparky and they will take care of everything from there. So you heard him say Sparky there, that's a reference to the electric chair. Once this tape emerged partway through the campaign, the PC's tried to brush it off as a poor-taste joke out of frustration with the way the courts handle violent offenders. When Ford has been asked about it himself, he claims to not support capital punishment. The other hot mic moment happened at an event

in which a camera caught a conversation between Ford and some of his candidates and a few supporters. The election day was I happy, this guy won 100% I was. Then the guy pulled out the knife and f***ed me into India. Now it's a little hard to hear what he said, but the key point there is that he said that he was 100% happy on election night when Donald Trump won. And then after that, expletive knifed us in the back. And so when this came out, the news there wasn't for it swearing, but that Ford was happy that Donald Trump had won the election on election night. He has in the past, you know, actually been fairly open about his support for Donald Trump.

Are you still a supporter of Donald Trump? Absolutely. I wouldn't waver. So what's been interesting about both of these moments doesn't appear that either of them had an impact on Ford in the polls. And I think what's going on there, Jamie, is people's opinions about Doug Ford are pretty firm. You know, they've had a lot of time to get to know him. And I don't think anybody who supports Doug Ford would have been surprised to learn that, you know, maybe he might secretly favor capital punishment, joke,

joke, and maybe he was kind of happy that Donald Trump won the election before it does. Mike, you've set me up perfectly for my final question to you, which is really about that enduring appeal, right? If Ford gets another four years here, he would be the first Ontario Premier to get a third straight majority since the 1950s, which is quite a feat. And like you just mentioned, this is a politician that has weathered some storms. You know, before he became premier, he lost the Toronto mayoral election. During his first term, he was mired in nepotism scandals, appointing people with direct connections to his team. He was booed at the Raptors parade in 2019 after announcing budget cuts.

The premier of Ontario, Doug Ford! There was a lot of criticism lobbed at him around the handling of COVID. I know as we talked about he did get plaudits, but also a lot of criticism. And then, of course, there was the Green Belt scandal. That was over the government's decision to open up some of the protected Green Belt lands to housing development. Two government watchdogs then found that the process was biased and favored certain developers with ties to a government staffer. Two of Ford's ministers had to resign over this.

He did eventually reverse the decision, but there's an ongoing RCMP investigation. You know, just you've been covering this guy for years and what does his current position tell you about his appeal, about his ability to move through scandals, gaffes, downturns, which I think, you know, reasonably would destroy other politicians. So I think part of what has happened is that he has figured out when he needs to apologize for things and reverse course. That's one thing. And that's what you saw after the the green belt reversal. I made a promise to you that I wouldn't touch the green belt. I broke that promise and for that I am very very sorry. He had gone down in the polls. He went right back up so it's almost as if it hadn't even happened. So that's been one thing. I think Doug Ford has changed as a politician since his days at Toronto City Hall in his early

days as Ontario Premier. He used to be a lot more aggressive, combative. We used to talk in the media about angry Doug. He's got that under control to a large extent. He answers questions the way he wants to answer them now and doesn't get ruffled when people try to get under his skin, didn't get ruffled in the debate. Doug, you put us into an extra hundred billion dollars of debt. How does any one government spend a hundred billion dollars and pay a two 2.5 million people still don't have a family doctor? That's the difference between us.

Doug, Doug, Doug, a fantasy tunnel. How dumb is that, Doug? 40 year project. Investing in infrastructure. Okay, let's give him a chance to answer the miracle question. I believe in building infrastructure. Under the liberal.

So I think that's part of it is that he's become more skilled as a politician and the people who, like Doug Ford, who have supported him through the last two elections and looks like they're going to support him for this election, they like him a lot. They feel he cares about them. That's one of the things I spoke to a PC strategist who told me that when the NDP and the liberals go after Doug Ford on an attack line of, he doesn't care about you, that it doesn't work

because people think that Doug Ford actually does care about them. I think that's part of his appeal is, despite the fact that this guy grew up wealthy, inherited a business, in his very early days as premier, gutted a ton of labor laws and froze the minimum wage and did a bunch of things that actually seemed to favor corporations over ordinary people, he has developed a very strong pitch to ordinary voters. And we saw the results in the last election where the PCs won a bunch of seats in largely

working class writings in places like Windsor and Hamilton and Timmons. And when I look at the regional polling and I talk to strategists within the parties about what's going to happen on Thursday night, the PCs look like they could win a bunch more seats in those kind of writings, beat the NDP in a number of seats that the NDP have held for a long time. So it's actually really quite remarkable the political transformation of Doug Ford and the PC's ability to pitch him as a friend of the worker. Okay. Mike, always a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Jamie. All right. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.