The Decibel - Doug Ford’s big election gamble

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

Ontario is officially in an election campaign. Voters will go to the polls on February 27 – more than a year before they were supposed to cast their votes. So what is behind this early snap election? And will Premier Doug Ford’s political calculations pay off? Laura Stone covers Ontario politics for The Globe. She is on the show to explain what Doug Ford has said about why he is calling this early election, what the other party leaders think is actually behind his decision and political insiders are talking about the 1990 election in Ontario. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

To be honest, I think all the reporters at Queen's Park were sort of relieved when we found out, okay, he's actually doing it. Laura Stone covers Ontario politics for the globe. He's going to call an early election. Now we can stop talking about it and actually have the campaign. On Wednesday, a snap Ontario election campaign officially started after progressive Conservative leader and current Premier Doug Ford dissolved the legislature. Over the next 28 days, Ford, Liberal leader Bonnie Cromby, the NDP's Merit Stiles and the Green Party's Mike

Schreiner will be traveling across the province selling their vision for Ontario. And reporters like Laura will be busy. We're bombarded every day with different announcements from the various parties. You have to plan ahead to see, okay, when do you think we're going to travel? When do you think we're going to stick around here? I make sure to have, you know, like, plenty of food on hand,

get someone to walk my dog, pick up my kid. The new Premier will be elected on February 27th. Technically, Ontario wasn't supposed to have an election until June of next year. But Doug Ford is placing a bet that now is the time to get a new mandate. I'm asking the people for a strong, stable, four-year mandate to do whatever it takes to protect Ontario. It's a big bet, especially when parties running against him are unified in their messaging that this election is unnecessary.

Doug Ford has shown he can't negotiate his way out of a paper bag. Doug Ford doesn't care about you because he's decided to spend $175 million on an early election that we don't need. Doug Ford has called an election abandoning the people of Ontario when people need him the most. Today, Laura will explain why the Premier has taken this chance and what history tells us about how these gambles play out. I'm Maenika Ramen-Welms and this is The Decibel from the Globe and Mail. Laura, so great to have you here. Thanks so much for having me.

So Laura, before the race officially started on Wednesday, where did the party stand in the Ontario legislature? What was the breakdown of seats? Well, before the election, Doug Ford had a majority, a very large majority in the Ontario legislature. The PC party, the Progressive Conservatives party, which he leads, had 79 seats. The NDP, which makes up the official opposition, had 28 seats. The Liberals had only nine seats, which is short of official party status, so they had

fewer resources and don't get as much talking time in the Ontario legislature. And the Green Party had two candidates. So certainly heading into the campaign, Doug Ford's PC party had the run of the government. They could do whatever they wanted anyway, and they could pass bills and pass measures quite handily through the legislature. Okay, so despite Doug Ford having a majority government where they could really set the agenda, we are going to the polls early. So what does Ford say about why? Well, Ford's been kind of cataloging this

over recent weeks and he really has pointed to what's happening in the United States and Donald Trump's tariff threats. He says he needs a strong mandate from the public, not just for the next week or the next month, but over the next four years to take on whatever President Trump throws at him. He says, you know, he's going to potentially

have to spend tens of billions of dollars on relief package and aid for workers and businesses. And he wasn't elected to do that. So he wants to take that back to the public and wants them to reelect him again for the next four years to kind of take on this new threat to the Ontario economy. Yeah, we have seen Ford, of course, speak a lot about tariffs in recent days. and he's been wearing that hat that people may have seen that says Canada is not for sale. He's been appearing on American television too. Officially, though, Laura, what exactly is Ford's role in these trade negotiations with the US? Right now, he leads the Council of the Federation, which is the group of premiers who meet every so often and they're meeting quite regularly now to kind of deal with this Trump threat and that's a rotating position so this just happens to be the

year that he's the head of it which is quite fortuitous for him because he has a very high profile. He though and the provincial government are not at the forefront of this. This is a federal responsibility. The federal government is leading the negotiations with the the Trump administration or attempting to meet with the Trump administration. But I will say that it's a very unusual time, right? And a very unusual president in the sense that things are done in the traditional way. We saw, for instance, Alberta Premier Daniel Smith go down to Mar-a-Lago with Kevin O'Leary

and Jordan Peterson and get some time with President Trump. So it's not as though the premiers don't have a role to play or wouldn't have access to the president himself, but strictly from kind of a traditional standpoint, it's the federal government which will be leading this and leading any of the retaliatory tariffs that Canada would have to put in place if Mr. Trump goes ahead with his threat to impose 25% tariffs on Canadian goods. Yeah and his threat is to implement them this coming weekend, February 1st is the date that we're hearing and that means that we could see fallout from those tariffs during this Ontario election campaign. Ford is still premier during this time, right? So I guess I wonder how likely is it that his focus will have to be split between campaigning and dealing with this issue?

He very much still is the premier, but the government's also in caretaker mode. So they're not really supposed to be spending new money or making big decisions. Mr. Ford has been asked about this and he said essentially, I can do both. I can campaign as the PC party leader and get a new mandate from the public, but I can also be the premium recall cabinet and kind of deal with the problems at hand in the moment. He has talked about the fact that his government

has prepared some sort of economic action plan to counter the tariffs. The province has said that they would also retaliate in some way, not to the extent that the federal government probably could, but there are some things that Ontario could potentially look at doing. But this is going to be rolled out in the campaign. It's going to be part of Mr. Ford's pitch to voters over the next month as to why they should re-elect him for another four years. Okay, so he's been talking about this a lot. As you mentioned, he's got this kind of relief package

plan potentially for Ontarians. What have the leaders of the other party said though about tariffs and I guess how they would respond to it? Well, both the leaders of the NDP and the liberals have said that this election is completely unnecessary and that it's self-serving and that Mr. Ford's essentially doing it to be opportunistic and to hang onto power.

They've said that they would support any kind of relief measures that Ontario proposes. And so Mr. Ford doesn't need to take this question to the public because they have the support of the other political parties. Similar to what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic when we saw a lot of kind of cross-partisan participation. But now that we have been plunged into this election campaign, the other leaders, particularly NDP leader Mauret Stiles,

who also launched her campaign today at a big rally, talked about how she is actually the better person to take on Donald Trump. And she talked about the fact that Mr. Ford strikes terrible deals. You know, she's talking more, I think, about the tariff threat and why she would be better positioned to take on the US administration than someone like Mr. Ford. All right, so tariffs are the official reason that Ford said he is going to an election here. But Laura, what are some of the other reasons why Doug Ford might want to go to the polls now? Well, look, I mean, timing is everything in politics.

And I think Mr. Ford sees this as a very good time for him and his PC party. First of all, they're dealing with a weakened federal government. The Liberal Party at the federal level is going through a leadership race. The prime minister has resigned. There's sort of a dearth of leadership there, according to Mr. Ford. So he thinks he can position himself as some have been calling him Captain Canada as the chair of this federation and kind of take over a leadership role. And he thinks, I think, you know, judging by the polls and some comments that political observers have made, that he's doing quite well at this. People seem to like his persona right

now, they seem to be receptive to how he's been handling the terror threat. So he sees an opportunity. I think he also wants to take voters to the polls before Mr. Trudeau completely disappears from the political landscape, which is technically supposed to happen sometime this spring when the liberals pick their new leader. He wants to go up against the ghost of Justin Trudeau in Ontario, where the federal Liberals are unpopular and that seems to be rubbing off on the provincial Liberals. And I think he also wants to get ahead of a potential federal conservative government, where, you know, Mr. Pierre Poliev, the leader of the party, has

talked about making some really big changes under his mandate. If he is to win a majority, there might be some things that could be unpopular in the first year as he makes kind of difficult decisions or cuts or different program changes. And Ford might not want to have to go up against that. Yeah. And the other thing we know is this trend that happens in Ontario and in other provinces too sometimes where we have a government at the federal level that is different than the provincial, right? So if liberals are in power federally, the PC's, kind of the equivalent of the conservatives,

are in power at that level too. So I guess as he may be thinking about that kind of equation and if the conservatives went at the federal level, maybe that doesn't look so good for him. I think he is. I think it could be potentially too much conservative for people. You know, Mr. Ford is even viewed, I think, within conservative circles as not conservative enough. You know, there are some people who were dissatisfied with how he operated in COVID, for instance, and they don't really like how he operates. He's not partisan enough for them, I suppose.

So I do think he wouldn't want that to necessarily rub off on him if he were to wait another year and a half for a provincial election. What have we heard from the opposition leaders, Laura? So Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie, NDP leader Marit Stiles. What do they say about why they think Doug Ford is calling an early election? Well, the opposition leaders are essentially saying, he's trying to do this as a power grab. He sees an opportunity when Ontario is in a crisis. He's tried to do this and take advantage of this tariff threat when most people's focus

is on that one particular issue and not paying attention to the other problems that are going on in the province, such as healthcare, for instance, which is going to be a big focus of Bonnie Cromby's campaign. She's cataloged this, that the family doctor shortage and kind of the crisis in emergency rooms is going to be a big focus of her campaign. So they say he's kind of taking away attention from the real problems in the province and

trying to take advantage of a crisis that's happening both at the federal and provincial level. All right. So we've talked about the tariffs and some of the dynamics with Ottawa. But what about some of the scandals that have happened under Doug Ford? And specifically, Laura, I'm wondering about the RCMP investigation into the Ford government's decision to open up the Greenbelt lands for development. Now, this is an environmentally sensitive area, and police have been looking into whether there was any criminal favoritism in terms of which developers got contracts.

And of course, I should say that the Ford government did go back on its decision to develop this land. And there haven't been any real updates around this investigation in a while. But Laura, could this play a factor here and maybe why he wants to do this election now? I think it does. I think Doug Ford is trying to run away from a lot of the troubles that he faced over the past couple of years, particularly the green belt,

which was a huge kind of embarrassment for his government in terms of proposing a policy, having to completely do a 180 on their position on this, and now the fact that the police are looking into it. And I think the longer they wait for an election campaign, the more risk is that that could come back to haunt them as we await some sort of news on what the status of that investigation is.

So I don't think it would be the only reason why he would go to an early campaign, but I think it certainly is one of those factors that contributed to him wanting to go early and wanting to kind of leave these past controversies behind. And do we know how ready the provincial political parties are for an early election? Like, do they have their candidates lined up?

Are they ready to go? I'd say the PC party is the most ready. And that's because they have the most money first of all They're the ones that's gonna that have been controlling the timing of this and they're the ones that have crafted the message The PC party has nominated all of their candidates now. There's a hundred and twenty four writings The other parties are getting there the liberals say that they have nominated or are set to nominate about a hundred of these candidates So far the NDP are a bit further behind because they actually have contested nominations. They can't just appoint people through their constitutions.

But it's not like this is a new prospect that Mr. Ford is considering this. I mean, we've been talking about this for more than a year. The Trump tariff threat has sort of sped everything up and given, I think, think the conservatives more of a reason to go to the polls and a message with which to take voters to the polls. So it's not like it's come out of nowhere, but I think certainly the PC party is the most prepared of all of them. And then of course there's the fact that one of the leaders doesn't have a seat and that's Bonnie Cromby. She has not yet been elected to the legislature. She's the former Mississauga mayor. She announced that she's going to be running in

Mississauga where there is not a PC incumbent right now. So clearly the calculation has been made that she thinks she has the best shot there, but the liberals again don't even have official party status there. So it does sound like the opposition parties aren't particularly strong right now or aren't particularly ready to go. I guess could this be part of the reason why Ford called this early election I think he certainly views his party as the most prepared He's also going up against two leaders who haven't faced him in a campaign yet Stiles was chosen as the NDP leader after Andrea Horvath lost the last campaign and now she's the mayor of Hamilton

So he's going up against a couple of untested leaders, I think, trying to throw them off their game, going so early, certainly he's trying to take advantage of the fact that the opposition is not as well-oiled as the progressive conservative machine. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Laura, let's take a minute to look at other elections that were called early and how they turned out for the parties. So if we look at recent political history in Canada, how have these snap elections that have been called,

how have they tended to work out for the parties that are in power? It's a bit mixed, to be honest. So I think a similar kind of comparison that we can make is in 2021, when Justin Trudeau called the election on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, kind of saying, this crisis causes us to go to the polls early, take it to the public, get a new mandate, which is similar to the messaging that we're hearing from Doug Ford. He had a minority government at that time, so it was generally viewed that he was seeking out a majority.

That one was a bit of a draw. He essentially won the same number of seats. It wasn't a complete disaster, but it certainly I don't think was the outcome that Mr. Trudeau wanted. And I think you could sort of compare that to the gamble that Ford's taking. And then in Nova Scotia, you have Tim Houston, who I think is probably the comparison that that pushed Doug Ford's team to finally pull the trigger and go to this election. You saw him rewarded for an early campaign and kind of presenting himself as more of a moderate conservative, I guess, which is what Doug Ford tries to present himself as.

Not a hardcore partisan, but someone who can bring voters in from all sorts of different parties. Okay, yeah, it's interesting to see those recent examples and how they've turned out in different ways, as you pointed out, Laura. There's also another example from a few decades ago in Ontario that people are pointing to. Can we talk about that one? Sure, that's the David Peterson example from 1990 that's been brought up a lot here, I think,

because it serves as a cautionary tale for a government that has a majority that seems to be leading in public opinion polls and shows how things can go so terribly wrong during a campaign. David Peterson had, I think it was something like 50% approval in 1990 when he called an early election under the guise of kind of a constitutional crisis and a looming recession. Similar kind of economic issues, I guess, that you could point to Mr. Ford speaking about and he ended up kind of losing the public along the way

as this campaign progressed, and it led to the election of Bob Ray and the NDP for the first and only time in this province. And Mr. Ford has even been asked about this the day that he announced he was calling this early campaign last week, and he just sort of said, like, this is not a similar example,

we're not facing the same kind of existential threat that we are under under Donald Trump. So we'll see how voters respond But that's the risk of these kinds of campaigns, right? Events happen anything can happen and and if the public kind of turns on you, it's very difficult to get them back Can you remind us of where the parties stand in the polls right now? Because obviously Doug Ford feels like he is in a position of strength. So can we just look at those numbers? Yeah, I think the majority of public opinion polls put him at over 40 percent, you know, with either the NDP or liberals far behind at 20, 23 percent interchangeably, some of the polls have moved the liberals up to second position ahead of the NDP, but you know, in 40 plus percent, and if you're looking at the way the vote is kind of distributed across the province, it's not really concentrated in one area. So the general consensus is if the election were held today or tomorrow, that the PCs would go on to win another very large majority.

We've got a few more minutes here, Laura. And and before we finish I do want to turn to the campaign because it is going to be quick it's it's just over a month. What are the challenges ahead for each leader that they're going to have to deal with? Well I think first of all the challenge for Mr Ford is just to keep the messaging about Donald Trump. I think he's not even really running against his own opponents here in Ontario. Of course, he'll mention them, but he's crafted his whole campaign around the tariffs and the tariff threat

and Donald Trump's threat against the Canadian economy. I think that's risky in the sense of, you can't predict what Donald Trump's going to do. And this could change quite a bit over the course of the 28 days. So he's tried to kind of use that unpredictability as the reason why he needs the mandate. So I think we're going to continue to hear that message. And he's actually traveling to Washington at least twice during this campaign to push home that message.

I think for the other two, it's just it's going to be difficult to get airtime and to change the channel away from Donald Trump and the tariff threat to what's happening in this province. I think for Mart Stiles, I think it will be to really try to position the NDP as the viable alternative because we've talked about the NDP has won once here, but it generally is a contest between the liberals and the conservatives. So what's she going to do to try to position her party as the true second choice or viable alternative to

to Doug Ford's PCs. And then for Bonnie Cromby, it will be just to try to show that her party has come back from the brink, that it hasn't just been decimated, that they're rebuilding somehow, that they know what they stand for. I think what was really interesting during this campaign launch was the fact that both the opposition parties weren't necessarily targeting Doug Ford, although that was their primary message. They were also talking about each other. And Marit Stiles hammered Bonnie Cromby calling her essentially Doug Ford, saying that she wants to be part of Doug Ford's cabinet she wants to be Doug Ford she's Doug Ford light which is what her her

own opponents called her in the leadership race and then you know for Cromby it was more saying that you know she actually is fiscally responsible but socially liberal and that's how she's trying to portray herself and her campaign. And I want to just briefly ask you about the Green Party as well because we haven't really talked about them leader Mike Schreiner of course is the leader of the Greens. What is their goal in this election? Honestly, I think the Green Party's goal is just to present themselves as a legitimate alternative. Mike Schreiner is a really solid opposition voice at Queens Park, even though he's only picked up one seat since leading the party. He used to be a one-man show. They were able to pick up

another seat the legislature which was a huge feat for them. He's often there commenting on on issues and stories at Queens Park and I think if they were able to pick up a seat I think they would be over the moon with that. Okay so that is what success would look like for the Green Party and just before I let you go Laura let me ask you what success would look like for the Green Party. And just before I let you go Laura, let me ask you what success would look like for the other three big parties because obviously they say they want to win, they want to form government, but from where they all stand now, what would success look like for them during this election? Well, the PC party has to win and they

have to win another majority I think for them to have achieved success through this gambit. I'll also mention the chief electoral officer for Ontario mentioned today this election's going to cost upwards of $180 million. So Doug Ford's, I think, making a huge gamble in taking this to the voters early, a huge risk. He's already said he wants this even larger majority and mandate.

So if he were to lose a significant amount of seats, if he were to somehow be knocked down to a minority, it would be devastating. So I think success for him has to be at least equal, but probably more seats in the legislature and to win another huge majority. I think for the other parties, I mean, look, the NDP, the liberals are presenting themselves as the premiers and waiting, and that's how they will propose it. But it will be fascinating to see if somehow the Liberal Party is able to come back and not only achieve official party status, which they would need an additional three seats to do, but if they were somehow able to displace the NDP as the official opposition, I think

that would be a massive success for them. And of course, Bonnie Cromby will have to win her own seat in Mississauga. I think for the NDP, they still want to view themselves as the potential successors to a government in Ontario. So certainly they would want to remain official opposition or increase their seat count in order to be viewed, I think, by their own supporters, but also more moderate voters in Ontario as a real alternative to Doug Ford's PCs. Laura, so great to have you. Thank you for being here. Thanks so much. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms. This episode was mixed by Ali Graham. Our producers are Madeleine White,

Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you tomorrow.