The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Does Voting Matter in Ontario?

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

Premier Doug Ford has been re-elected in Ontario's 44th provincial election. With voter turnout at 45% and lost seats for the Progressive Conservative party, what does this mean for Ontario's democracy? Joining The Agenda to discuss is Martin Regg Cohn, Political Columnist for the Toronto Star; Karim Bardeesy, Executive Director of the Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University; Sonal Champsee Director at Not One Seat and Nelson Wiseman, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Toronto.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Renew your 2.0 TVO with more thought-provoking documentaries, insightful current affairs coverage, and fun programs and learning experiences for kids. Regular contributions from people like you help us make a difference in the lives of Ontarians of all ages. Visit tvo.me slash 2025 donate to renew your support or make a first-time donation and continue to discover your 2.0 TVO. The results of Ontario's 44th general election show less than half of registered voters chose to exercise their franchise. With such a poor turnout, at what point do elections reflect the will of the people, and to what extent can we re-energize democracy in Ontario? Let's discuss with Karim Bardizi. He is executive director of the DAESC

at Toronto Metropolitan University. Sonal Champsey, director at Not One Seat, a progressive grassroots organization. Nelson Wiseman, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Toronto. And Martin Regcon, political columnist for the Toronto Star and it's great to have you four here in our studio for our first post program post-election program I guess and it's sad we're gonna start with some sad numbers. Sheldon you want to

bring these up right off the top here. In 2022 we had about 10.7 million people registered to vote it was more this time, over 11 million. The number of people who actually voted in 2022 was 4.7 million. A little higher this time in 2025, just over 5 million. But the turnout, boy, when I was a kid, we had turnout in the 70s and the 80s. In 2022, it was just over 44%.

And this time, it was just over 44 percent and this time it was just over 45 percent. Okay let's weigh in on this. MRC what do those numbers tell you? Well let's first set the stage which is that this was a no surprises election. It was like a holiday in election. Not in a surprise. Yeah so it was not a change election. It was a more of the same election and it was election in many election. It was more of the same election. And it was election in many ways about nothing. And so the turnout flows from that.

Political scientists will tell you that when there's a change election, you tend to get a really bit of a kick in the turnout. Because this was a no surprises election, the turnout was at our new equilibrium of below 50%. That said, the surprise was that it wasn't as bad as most of us thought it would be. I think some of us thought, I thought it might be below 40%.

And it was at 45 in a little bit in the middle of winter. So not that bad. Sonal, what did you think of those numbers? I think the fact that it was at 45 shows that people were motivated to come out much more than we would have thought, especially in a terrible February. But I think people are disengaged. I think a lot of that is, I mean, you're right, it wasn't a change election, but at the same

time the opposition decided to play games and fight for second place. And I think when the opposition the opposition parties and show her that they don't care about voters why would voters care about them to get them out that speaks to what your organization is all about which we'll come back to a little bit later Kareem what did you think of the numbers I'm somewhat higher turnout that surprised a bunch of us is still pretty faint praise and there are a bunch of reasons why turnout is consistently low. And you can look at the political parties, you can look at the electoral system.

But I think we have some fundamentally deeper issues with our democracy that we'll need to dive into, especially in Ontario, especially at a time when it feels like the stakes are, for a lot of people, very high. And so we have some work to do. All the elite institutions that are supposed to be driving people to the polls are getting people excited about democracy.

They're not succeeding in doing that. We shall dive into those reasons during the course of our discussion. Nelson Wiseman. I'm a contrarian. I don't think low turnout is the big issue that many people make it out to be. And I don't think it's a threat to Canadian democracy,

because I think democracy is a much broader spectrum of factors and institutions like courts, the operation of legislatures, the free and independent media, those things. About this specific turnout I did notice that commentators were expecting a lower turnout. I wasn't sure. I thought it would be around what it was, because it was consistent with last time. I agree about the winter. Steve, you mentioned when turnouts were in the 70s and 80s.

I don't recall when they were that high in Ontario. And if you compare Ontario to other provinces, you'll see Ontario and Alberta, Alberta's breaking away from it now, have consistently had lower turnouts than in other provinces. Why should we, I mean, OK, be the contrarian. I like that. But why should we not be mortified by the fact that more than half the people don't want to vote?

What it tells me is that a lot of people think it either doesn't matter who you vote for or that the quality of their life is not going to change significantly. And this speaks to the idea of change. If they think really big issues are at play and they want to get rid of somebody, as a lot wanted to get rid of Trudeau, you'll get a higher turnout. As a lot wanted to get rid of Harper, you'll get higher turnout. But otherwise, voter participation

has trended down, I'd say, since the 50s. But I think, too, that. I think there were a lot of important issues in this election. I think that Ontario is in crisis in many ways. I mean, there's millions of people without a family doctor. The homelessness issue is much higher. Public education is crumbling.

Our secondary schools are being underfunded. Lots of programs have to be canceled. So there were big issues. But I think to what you're saying, it's like people didn't think any of it was going to change. Because if you're going to vote for, and I mean, this is what my organization is about, but if you're going to vote for change

and no one's offering any, or no one's offering a path towards successfully changing anything, why go out and vote at all? Let me pick up on that with Martin. You had three of the four major party leaders come to TMU to do your democracy forum. Could you infer that people didn't show up to vote in the numbers that they used to,

because they just didn't believe that the opposition leaders would be any better than the guy who's in there now? I think that's true. I think people believe that. I think many of the people that perhaps you talk to or you interact with believe that the province is in crisis too. So there are all kinds of belief sets. Without trying to get too abstract here, it's hard to extrapolate from ourselves. I think if people really thought the province was

in crisis, they would have turned out in bigger numbers. So I think to be fair, in relative terms, the province isn't in a huge crisis. I would say that Ontario did have a big turnout in 2018 because that was a change election. It went back above 50%, I think it was 57% or so, to get rid of Kathleen Wynne, to throw the bums out as a, forgive me, Ms. Wynne. But in Alberta, one of the reasons,

Nelson, that you're right, that election turnouts are so low in Alberta is that for the longest time, people even today, it was a one party state. I mean that in a North Korean way. But there was no significant opposition. Steve, just to answer your question, though, I do think some of the opposition parties do offer pathways to change.

They just aren't able to connect with voters. Well, yeah, and I aren't able to connect with voters. Well, yeah, and I think they can't connect with voters. And they can't simply because it didn't look like anyone was going to win. I mean, both the liberals and the NDP and, of course, the Green Party were very low in the polls. I mean, no one expects the Green Party to win from two seats. Let's be realistic.

But they're very down on the polls. None of the three parties were offering anything interesting or anything very different from one another. And I think everyone knew from the outset that the vote was going to split. And yet, none of the opposition leaders decided to do anything about vote splitting. Let me pick up.

OK, I'm going to come to that later. I want to pick up on the polling angle here. And to that end, Sheldon, can I get you to bring up stat board number two here, how people voted? We want to compare essentially how people voted in this election compared to 2022, two and a half years ago. The progressive conservatives in the previous election got almost 41% of the vote.

They got almost 43% of the vote this time. The New Democrats, they went down quite a bit, actually. They went from 23.74% down to below 19%. Still managed to be official opposition, though. The liberals, almost the exact same vote as the NDP in the last election. They actually went up a lot this time, but didn't get very many more seats for all of their troubles. And the Greens lost about a point and change.

And there's Bobbi Ann Brady at the bottom. Boy, she represented 60% of all the independent votes that took place there. I guess one of the points, okay, a bunch of points to make here, Kareem, let me go with you first on this. The polls during this election campaign barely moved at all. I mean, really didn't move at all. It was conservatives in first by a lot all the way through,

NDP and liberals sort of fighting for second, and then it sort of clarified itself, Greens down there in last. I don't know how many voters I talked to who said why am I gonna bother voting? I know who's gonna win, polls haven't moved, I don't care who comes second, so why should we get out there? How much of a factor is that? Yeah I think that's a that's a real thing. One of the things that this conservative party has succeeded in doing, and whenever we have a party that sort of dominates one ideological space, and you've got a split on the other side,

is the conservative, progressive conservatives in Ontario have done a really good job of this, of kind of keeping the opposition parties equal, so that one isn't too far ahead of the other. And they can do that by doing regional attacks. They can pick issues that kind of have the parties fighting with each other. So I think that's a real thing. They experience this individually as well.

At the day, as we do a lot of work with students, we had a project with an organization called the Democratic Engagement Exchange to do voter mobilization on campuses across Ontario, with Elections Ontario. And you have to go where people are and actually show them what it means to actually cast your ballot. You actually have to show them that this is what's happening,

this is the broader system, and you can have a voice. Now, does that voice mean a change in government? Not necessarily. Does that voice mean that you can have a voice. Now, does that voice mean a change in government? Not necessarily. Does that voice mean that you can have some form of representation? Maybe yes. I mean, you mentioned Bobbie Ann Brady. Those voters in Haldeman Norfolk knew

that they were not going to get a government member, or for that matter, an opposition party member. But they felt some identification with Ms. Brady. Political entrepreneurs, politicians who are working hard to do politics a bit differently, with that, with Ms. Brady. You know, political entrepreneurs, politicians who are working hard to do politics a bit differently or using media differently can cut through. Sometimes the party leadership is a bit more

cautious in that respect. That's the other, I think, lesson from this, that when opposition parties take chances and break a bit out of their bubbles about the way they think politics needs to work, that's one way of gaining vote and gaining attention. But Nelson, I want to ask you about this because media think they are doing a service to the public by letting them know what the state of play is pretty much every day. You know, here's what the polls say your voter intention is today.

And you know, pretty much every day of the campaign, you've got somebody putting new numbers out there. We think we do we are doing a service to the electorate by doing that, because we're giving them information. Can it have the opposite effect of saying, this thing's a fait accompli, it's a foregone conclusion, you don't need to vote? Well, I think political junkies knew that, but a lot of the public just doesn't tune in to politics.

They're watching the food channel. They're not watching the agenda or the golf channel. And they've got to go pick up their kids, their concerns, or their daily life. I think it's also helpful to put Ontario again in comparative perspective. Ontario, Ontarians historically, have been more oriented to federal politics

than provincial politics. There could be various reasons, including the fact that Ontario has a disproportionate number of immigrants and recent arrivals. But there's also the fact, and I grew up in Manitoba, is that in Manitoba, provincial politics are covered in the local media. Here, I can read the Globe and Mail maybe for three, four years

before I run into the name of a backbencher. I'll run into the names of the leaders and the premier, of course, but that's inconceivable in Nova Scotia. And when you're outside of Ontario, the center of the country, you're much more sensitive to the fact that you're not in the center. And Ontarians think, oh, yeah, what politics is about is what's going on federally.

And my whole experience as an immigrant has been living in Ontario. Kareem, where voters get their information from is so crucial. Just to pick up on Professor Wiseman's point, you know, I survey my students every semester about where they get their information. And there's a good, engaged subset of students who go to TVO, who go to the agenda, go to other kind of what you might call more trusted news platforms, the Star, the Globe and Mail, CTV and CBC. The two most common sources, and this is somewhat scientific, and we also have some data research that's more scientific. The data research shows that

Instagram and YouTube are among the most common sources for news. Instagram and YouTube are among the most common sources for news. TV news, though, is still quite high. But within those kind of online platforms, the ones that come up for my students are CP24 on the one hand, very straight news, and SixBuzz. What is that? SixBuzz is a kind of a flashy, newsy website that just takes little pictures, little pieces of news that are happening out there and kind of throws them online. It might have some viral videos about some crime happening in the GTA, what a celebrity

is doing. But then they'll throw up Justin Trudeau, Doug Ford, Bonnie Cromby, Marit Stiles, and Mike Schreiner. There's no context to this news and it's just people are scrolling through it. And so media and politics are fusing like never before, but the kinds of sources of media that people are getting are just not conducive to that depth of engagement. Martin, I want your take on whether or not

your attempt to inform the electorate as to the state of play in an election has a perverse effect of having people not show up to vote, because when one party's in first place by a big margin throughout the whole writ period, people think it's a foregone conclusion. When you said perverse, I suddenly felt guilty and like the Japanese.

But I think I would agree with you that it can have a discouraging effect. That's just fair. That's the truth. That doesn't mean any of us, nor would you suggest, should suppress that perversity. I think Sonal would argue that those polling numbers could actually help people decide how to vote strategically

for that relatively small number of people who do vote strategically, because most people don't. But just my point is that I think polling is, it can actually help people. If it's a close election, if the numbers were closer, so let's not blame the perverse pollsters. I'm talking to him today. I'm going to call him perverse.

That if it's a close election, those polling numbers can actually encourage people to vote. So that's just the way the ball goes. Let's explain what your group is all about. Because you're in the strategic voting realm, right? Yeah, we are. I mean, ideally what we would love to see

is electoral cooperation, so have the parties work together as a united front against Doug Ford. But we knew from the outset that that is a really difficult task. So then the next best option for us, because our focus is Doug Ford, our next best option was to try to unite the public to vote strategically. And we weren't the only people doing this.

There was a huge movement on TikTok for smartvoting.ca. Voto well was big. There was a lot of talk about strategic voting. And there was a nano poll just before the election that showed that 3 in 10 Ontarians were intended to vote strategically. So I don't think it's a minority of people. It's a plurality, certainly.

I don't want to get into the weeds on that, but I think strategic voting, if strategic voting was as effective as some of us would like it to be, you would have seen a much different result. I mean, I don't think strategic voting is enormously effective. I think it is a last-ditch attempt to do something because there is no other option. So how would you like to see the so-called three progressive parties cooperating more in order to take down Doug Ford? I think what a lot of people wanted to see and we have an open letter up on our website right now and we've had like a number of people saw like hundreds of people have signed it so far and almost all of them

have been writing comments which is interesting because I you know I didn't expect this minute to comment but almost everybody is so angry that they that the parties didn't didn't that the parties didn't field the candidates strategically. Why is the NDP out in Scarborough, where they don't get a lot of attention? Except for Scarborough Southwest or in Etobicoke, where they don't get a lot of votes.

Let me give a concrete example. If you go to Perry's and Muskoka. Yes, that was a great example. The conservative candidate won reelection. The Greens were just nipping at his heels, like really close behind, and had a liberal and new Democrat candidate not run in that riding, and had the Green candidate enjoyed the votes that went liberal or NDP, they would have won. And the liberals got maybe 6% of the vote,

and the NDP like maybe 2%. And the Greens lost by two. Yeah. They lost by two points. And it's infuriating, because why are you fielding candidates there? I mean, I know the liberal candidate there, because we spoke to people in the writing association,

they didn't have a local person wanting to run in Perry Salmascoca and the leadership parachuted somebody in. Why are you having someone who doesn't have any connection there? Well first off you've got to parachute somebody in because once the media publishes that you're not running a full slate it communicates that you're not really running for government. Now the theme of this show has been voter turnout. You're committed, your organization, if there's one thing that brings it together is to get rid of Doug Ford.

Let me suggest where you might want to put your strategy. Which is in pushing for electoral reform. Had we had a ranked ballot, the outcome that you like would more likely have happened. I absolutely agree. And so, and you noted that the Liberal Party is the party that made the biggest gain. I was wrong. I thought that the Liberals were going to displace the NDP as the second party based on the polls.

Because the NDP was dropping, Liberals were going up. That didn't happen. Because they have an inefficient vote. Yes. I mean, the liberal vote is spread like butter on toast. The NDP vote is concentrated. It's a lump. And it's in the core of big cities like Toronto and Ottawa and London and so on.

So the Liberals have more potential. The big threat now to the Liberals is that they could get squeezed out. If you look at all four provinces in Western Canada, the provincial Liberal parties aren't a factor anymore. They don't even compete. And this is now the third election in a row that the liberals have been the third party. But the Liberal Party in Ontario hasn't supported electoral reform. We had a referendum on it a number of years ago.

But the Liberal Party didn't speak in favor of it. I'm going to just quickly clarify on behalf of Stephen Del Duca that in the last campaign, the election of 2022, the official policy of the Liberal Party was to have a ranked ballot without a referendum. They were just going to go right to a ranked ballot. And I agree with you.

I support a ranked ballot. I suspect you do. We might have a bit of a, we could debate that in eternity. But I think electoral reform is a tough one because it's not going to happen anytime soon. Yeah, and I think the position we take is that electoral reform will not happen unless... I'm sure Doug Ford is not going to support electoral reform, but if the parties were to unite and take over government one time as a temporary merger,

then they could do things that would be unpopular to do as one party, such as institute some form of electoral reform. And I mean, people all over the internet are coming at me saying, oh, we need this form of electoral reform. We don't propose to be electoral reform experts. But I mean, certainly if we could change the government and have a coalition of people who are trying to work for better, then that would be a great opportunity to institute something.

You know why it's never going to happen? I shouldn't say never. You know why it's not in the imminent future of this province? And Kareem, you know this better than anybody because you ran for office once upon a time and your chief opponent in that election was the NDP. Okay, so liberals and new democrats hate each other more than they hate conservatives. Absolutely. So they can't work together to get rid of Doug Ford because they don't like the other guy anymore than they like Ford.

And we would like them to get over it. Because whatever happened like, you know, in 2018 or 1957 or whenever it was that started this bitter war, like, you know, get over it because nobody in the province cares. I think it happened two millennia ago when their DNA was formed. So I think it's a tribal enmity that will not be easily over. But you've been, no, this guy's been here. And I really want to tap into, you ran in Parkdale High Park, I think, a couple of elections ago?

2022, yeah. OK. All right, then you have a very good and deep understanding of how liberals and new Democrats have a bigger problem sometimes with each other than they do with the progressive conservatives. So there's no there's no prospect of them working together on this. Liberals are a broad tent brokerage party that brings together different interests. NDP tend to be more aligned around one set of interests. As Nelson

was saying, you know, liberals in particular will look at Ontario and say, of course we're going to run someone in Perrystown, Muskoka, or in southwestern Ontario. If you look at the regional splits, actually, this time is quite interesting. The liberals who are thought to be dead in southwestern Ontario, those numbers are starting to pick up a bit more. Any riding that looks unattainable a couple

elections later can be in your favor. And so liberals who believe in, who have a positive vision for government in a way that's you know maybe a bit different than the other parties because they aspire to govern but they aspire to be quite reformist as well, they're always gonna they're always gonna show up. What you don't have in Ontario, except with one one actually example we haven't talked about yet, is what you see in other provinces which is some of the other forms of realignment. Ontario Liberals, some Ontario Liberals actually tried to force a realignment by recruiting Mike Schreiner to run for the leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party. So that would have created a new dynamic maybe along the lines that Sonal is talking about.

Part of the effect of that, if Mike Schreiner had won for the Ontario Liberal leadership and won, that would have been quite devastating for the Greens. You do see this in other provinces, where you have leaders and parties realign. I think that voters will decide after a third progressive conservative majority term what kind of realignment they will be forcing. I think they'll be interested in organizations like Sunnels.

But also, I think you're going to see this kind of, again, grassroots media, you're going to have more celebrities showing up and being engaged politically. Bobbi Ann Brady is a local celebrity in Haldeman Norfolk. To the extent that candidates can break through and create their own media interest, to the extent that parties can recruit people who are not conventional politicians and stand for them,

I think that's very interesting. You might see more TV personalities, more media influencers who are going conventional politicians and stand for them. I think that's very interesting. You might see more TV personalities, more media influencers who are going to be candidates. Whether that's a good thing or not, I'm not sure. I just know that that's where people are getting their information are from these very distributed sources of information. And those people who are influential online

could break through and could become candidates. Can I just jump in quickly? There's no single unifying theory to improve voter turnout. But while we're on the question of splits, and Karima's right about, I think, celebrity, or what I would call high name recognition politicians, I think we would all agree,

setting aside what anyone at home might think about Bonnie Cromby, she's a local celebrity in Mississauga, high name, high recognition, high profile. And yet she did not win her own seat. But if the Greens and you Democrats had not been in that riding, she would have gone over the top, because she was short by what, I think about 1,500 votes, plus or minus.

And that's how many of the Greens and you Democrats took away. So that's the challenge we always face. And Mike Schreiner and the Green Party has always been amenable to the idea of cooperating. The thing is, you can't cooperate if there's no one to cooperate with. Well, but Mike Schreiner would be in favor of that, because he only has two and a half seats. Well, absolutely. It's to his advantage. So taking out a candidate in Thunder Bay

is not a big sacrifice for him. At the end of the day, the opposition never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Sorry for borrowing about Middle Eastern aphorism. But that is the challenge. And when people talk about the liberals being low in Ontario or in the Prairie provinces, the Liberal brand is not going to go away anytime soon in Ontario. And while their

strength is in the cities of Ottawa and Toronto and they're weak in other areas, it goes up and down. And the problem that the challenge that the NDP faces is that they have a ceiling. Barring 1990 redux and Bob Rae, who cannot be replicated and is no longer a New Democrat, they seem to have a ceiling. Barring 1990 Redux and Bob Ray, who cannot be replicated and is no longer a new Democrat, they seem to have a ceiling in the number of seats that they can win. They cannot easily form a government. And they had three chances in the last three elections

when the liberals were in the penalty box, right? So the stars were in alignment. They couldn't do it. So the liberals, at some point, if you, which is, I think, what your organization wants to do, you were telling us to get rid of Doug Ford, I don't think the NDP is going to be able to do that. And the liberals, at some point, are going to have to rebuild.

Yeah, I mean, the liberals will rebuild and bounce back at some point. They've been too much of a force. But I mean, will it happen sooner or later? I mean, certainly, they haven't done. Their popular votes at 30%. That's pretty significant. That's true. It only took them 42 years to do with the first one.

Well, true, right. And you're right that the NDP also has a ceiling. And I think the difficulty is the NDP doesn't seem to realize that they have a ceiling. They come out every time saying, well, we were the opposition, so we are positioned to lead, even though they're a third in the polls. And when you come to voters with this, it know, it's like it doesn't make sense.

Nelson Weisman. Well, I agree completely. The NDP recognizes it has a ceiling. The NDP is not running to form the government. It knows, but it has to say it is. The NDP, however, sees itself as a powerful force if it can hold the balance of power. That's what it did when David Peterson was in power when the Liberals were there. So that's what the NDP is angling for in my opinion.

Can I ask you a question about... well I'm just going to ask this directly. Many people believe that it was in the interest of the conservative party in order to get re-elected to essentially suppress the vote. The fewer people that voted, the better for them. Do you think that's the case? Yes. Yes. But what was surprising is that the turnout this time, I think, was 1% higher than last time. It was.

And so what did that tell me? Were issues important? Well, people, I think, don't think their access to health care is going to immediately improve if another party gets in, or even if the liberals and the NDP had cooperated. The big issue hanging over the election, although it's not within area's jurisdiction,

with the province's jurisdiction, was the tariff threat. But the province has no say, really, in what happens at the border or in international trade or tariffs. That's decided by the federal government. And what was the differences among the parties on fighting Trump's tariffs? Was anybody saying we should go along?

Nobody. So that's an issue that overhangs over the election. And Ford was very effective going down to Washington, using that footage in his ads. And he projected an image, which I think really aided the conservatives during this election campaign. If you go back to the last poll that looked at the approval rates for premiers, the last one I saw was December, Ford's was the lowest in the country.

At the same time, his party was very popular. That's very, very unusual. Now, we haven't seen the most recent polls, but I bet Ford's numbers really went up. And one of the reasons is because he came across, in some ways, as more authentic, like aweshawks. I think his Captain Canada cosplay sort of was effective. But at the same time, I was reading an article in CBC's Sudbury over the weekend, and people were in the North, candidates were knocking

on doors and they were talking to the people there and they were saying, well, we want to vote conservative just because we think they're going to win and if we don't have a conservative leader we won't have a voice at this table and I mean I know that's not how it's supposed to work in government but that's certainly how people are perceiving it to work and I know the NDP are saying well yes with the opposition we're going to hold the government to account but you can't hold the government to account if they don't care. Let me jump in here we got a couple of minutes to go, and I want to put these numbers to you, Kareem,

and get your take on it. Doug Ford's party got 43% of the total votes cast. 45% of the eligible voters voted. So he got 43% of the 45%, which means Doug Ford has 100% of the power at Queens Park on the strength of 19.35% of eligible voters. You find that problematic? If people don't like that system, if people don't like that result, they have choices.

And when I ran, I ran, for instance, as a candidate under this ranked ballot platform that the Ontario Liberals were championing. I think we have some really big problems with our democracy. And you know, there are ways that we can move things. Outside activists have a role. One of the issues we're really concerned about today is the future of post-secondary education in Ontario and I know Martin's been doing a lot of

writing about this as well. We know this is one of the big policy failures of this government combined with some of the issues of the federal government that we have a really underfunded and not reformed post-secondary college and university system in Ontario. Well yeah you can vote on that you can say you know conservatives didn't say enough about that, and here's the platform issues. But at some point, it's going to take some outside energy. It's going to take students, it's going to take parents, it's going to take activists to actually raise the issue.

You know, in all of this conversation, politicians are still politicians. They still follow sometimes public opinion. And if an issue is raised to a high enough degree, there is the potential to make change. This is what we just fundamentally believe at the dais, and I think that you know the big change movements in history, some of them come to Ontario and they can bring change. Can I get 30 seconds from you on whether you think any government, regardless of party stripe, that wins with 19.35 percent of the eligible voters has a legitimacy problem?

Not at all. In our system, that's the way it works. As Kareem was arguing, those are the rules. People have the ability to change. To your earlier question, was this voter suppression? Not at all. In fact, this is not a repressive country. It is not a suppressive country. All you got to do is go down and vote, show your ID, and you can't make a difference. You're only wasting your vote if you sit at home and let other people vote for you. There you go. That's our time, everybody.

Can I thank Martin Regcon from the Toronto Star and Sonal Champsey. Not One Seat is her organization's name. And on the other side of the table, Kareem Bardizi from the Daes at Toronto Metropolitan University and Nelson Wiseman, whose classes we all took so many years ago at the University of Toronto. Thanks so much, everybody.

Good discussion. Thank you. Thank you.