Update: March 1
Unsurprisingly Doug Ford won his third election. All the campaigning and voting resulted in very little change. With the results in a few seats likely to go to a recount, Ford’s conservatives increased their share of the vote slightly to 43 percent, compared to the last election 2022 but their number of seats are down from 83 then to 80 now – but still a comfortable majority.
The NDP is the second largest party, but their number of seats are down from 31 to 27. The Liberals gained seats, up from 8 to 14 as they took votes from the NDP. Their share of the votes was higher than the NDP’s, 30 precent compared to the NDP’s 19 percent. However, the NDP supporters are more concentrated in some areas while the Liberal support was spread across the province.
As the article explained neither the NDP nor the Liberals are able to defeat Ford in spite of his many gaffes and reactionary policies. The NDP has now seen its share of the votes and number of seats decline in the last two elections, 2022 and 2025, compared to the 40seats and 34 percent of the vote in 2018. The NDP in Ontario is incapable of pushing the liberals into oblivion, unlike in the four western provinces.
Of the 298 seats in the legislatures of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and BC, the Liberals only have 3 in Manitoba. Although much of this is not so much credit to the NDP but a sign of how unpopular the federal Liberals are.
If the NDP is serious about opposing Ford, and the Liberals, it needs to return to its long-decayed roots of campaigning between elections on socialist ideas. However, unfortunately for Ontario’s working class the party seems content to be just a bit more radical than the Liberals, but not by much.
The problem runs deeper than just the NDP, over a dozen union locals endorsed Doug Ford despite all his anti-union actions. The lack of class conscious of the NDP and some unions is a serious barrier to working class victories.
Struggle and resistance will be outside Queen’s Park, in the streets and the workplaces.
It is said of politicians that they have one thing in common with diapers: they should both be changed regularly … and for the same reason. Regularity in terms of the election cycle in Ontario is every four years meaning that the next election, under normal circumstances, would have been June 2026. Doug Ford calculated that leaving an election until then was too risky — risky, that is, from the perspective of Ford himself not being able to retain power for another four years. The uncertain times that we are living through — Donald Trump with his tariffs, the threat of Canada being made the 51st US state, the likelihood of Pierre Poilievre coming to power, the worsening economy — all pushed Ford to bring forward the election by 16 months to the end of February 2025.
Ford ahead in the polls
Some thought that Ford’s move could backfire, citing the provincial election of 1990 when the then- Liberal Premier, David Peterson, called an early election and lost. The consensus view was that the electorate was punishing Peterson for holding an unnecessarily early election. However, at the time of writing, Ford is unlikely to suffer the same fate as Peterson — the opinion polls put Ford well ahead of the opposition. In Ontario’s last election, in 2022, Ford’s Conservative party took 40.8 percent of the popular vote across the province. Recent polls put him at over 40 percent. He is well on track to get another majority, maybe even bigger than last time. The poll showed that 64 percent of respondents, who had an opinion on the matter, believed the PCs were the best party “to deal with the impact of Donald Trump” compared to 16 percent for the Liberals and 15 percent for the NDP. This is hardly surprising as both Liberals and NDP support Ford’s position vis-a-vis Trump and tariffs — why would you take a chance on an untested party when “strong man” Ford is forging ahead with the nationalist rhetoric? And he’s showing he’s “on the ball” here by his two official lobbying visits to Washington since the election campaign began.
Ford’s vulnerabilities
Ford doesn’t have a monopoly of support on all the issues facing Ontarians. The poll that gave him 60 percent support on the matter of dealing with Trump offered a different view on some other issues.
The Tories were ahead as the party able to “keep the cost of living as low as possible,” by 8 points. Likewise, they led as the party best able “to manage the provincial economy,” by 3 points. However, that’s a significant change from early February when a poll found the Tories had a 32-point lead over the NDP. For the party that “will improve the health-care system,” the Liberals had a 10-point lead over the Tories. No surprise there, as a recent report found that, under Ford’s leadership, emergency room wait times have worsened. On which party “will do the most to make housing more affordable,” the Tories trailed the NDP by 16 points. Again, no surprise — Ford scrapped province-wide rent control on new units. He promised lower rents, but average rents have risen 34 percent since he took office. Finally, as to which party “will improve the education system,” 42 percent said the Liberals, 27 percent the Tories, 12 percent the Greens and eight percent the NDP. One teacher union calculated that there have been $3.2 billion in cuts for the 2024-2025 school year. They note that this is the estimated cost of the rebate cheques the Ford government sent to all Ontarians in the new year, cheques that will “help address the high cost of the federal carbon tax and high interest rates.”
Despite Ford’s promises, Ontario is lagging behind other provinces in building new homes. Its reliance on for-profit developers will not deliver what is needed.
Based on these polls, clearly under “normal circumstances” (no Trump, no tariffs), Ford would be facing a tighter fight in this election. The data shows that on significant issues like housing, health care and education, the Tories are losing public support. Even on key questions like the cost of living and managing the economy, where he leads, it is a very tenuous lead.
Why is Ford so popular
Still, it cannot be denied that Ford is popular and that he relies on a base that goes back to the early 2000s when, together with his brother Rob as Toronto mayor, they developed what came to be known as “Ford Nation.” Features of this included a right-wing program of austerity and cuts, summarized by their slogan of “end the gravy train,” combined with the hamming up of a folksy, ordinary guy image — the Fords would give out their private cell numbers so that people having problems with city services could contact them directly and get “immediate service” — no need to go through the bureaucracy at City Hall.
There are real similarities with Trump’s public support in the US and Ford’s support in Ontario. The former took advantage of the very real economic anxieties of millions of Americans, many of whom are financially worse off now than they were four years ago at the end of Trump’s first presidency. Trump posed — completely falsely — as an anti-establishment figure at a time when most people are understandably and correctly disgusted with the establishment. Ford has been equally scathing of the “woke’’ elites from academia and the liberal neighbourhoods.
Ford’s reactionary policies and gaffes
It would take a small book to cover all of Ford’s reactionary policies over the past eight years. Fortunately, the Ontario Federation of Labour makes it easy to keep track of them on its website. Just taking a few recent ones — there’s the mad proposal to build a $60 billion (a very low estimate of the cost) tunnel under Highway 401 in Toronto. Then there was the Green Belt fiasco of 2022 when it was revealed that the Ford government was promising to carve out land from the Green Belt for private developers, contradicting a pledge Ford made in 2021 not to open up the Greenbelt “to any kind of development.” Another embarrassing event from 2022 was the strike by CUPE education workers. Here Ford was forced to back down from threatened legislation involving use of the “Notwithstanding” clause.
Then there are the gaffes or Ford’s unfunny jokes. “By the looks of it, we know where we can send the overflow patients now for MRIs and CAT scans and everything else,” Ford quipped at the grand opening of an animal hospital. Then, there was Ford revealing his true political feelings, caught off camera but on a hot mic, stating that he was 100 percent happy with Trump’s victory. This was to be trumped, so to speak, by a speech at a London Police gathering where he said home invaders who kill their victims ought to be sent “right to sparky,” i.e., the electric chair. These don’t rival Trump’s bad taste jokes, but they are close.
NDP weaknesses
When Ford was elected premier in 2018, the NDP became the official opposition with 34 percent of the votes and 40 seats. Despite all Ford’s failings, the NDP lost the 2022 election, its votes down to 24 percent and 31 seats. It looks likely to do even worse in this election. Ford’s support has stayed consistently at around 40 precent since 2018. The NDP’s support has dropped as the province’s Liberals have gained ground. The NDP seems incapable of permanently pushing the Liberals aside.
The problem in both the US and Canada is that there is no mass, campaigning workers’ party that takes up the bread and butter issues and offers a socialist alternative. It is unfortunate that in Canada we have the NDP, which has a rich history of fighting for the interests of working people but today is a shadow of its former self. This is shown in the above poll. The NDP comes in with a surprisingly low score (8 percent) in education matters and only scores highest (41 percent) for making housing more affordable.
Federal politics cannot be separated from the provincial. The decision of Jagmeet Singh to support Trudeau in Parliament with its Supply and Confidence Agreement that promised a number of reforms, including dental care, represented a small step forward. In return for this promise and vague “commitments” to some possible future improvements, the NDP agreed to support the Liberals for the following three years. This was a major step backward and will have had an adverse effect on NDP support in Ontario. As someone asked, “How could the NDP run to replace the Liberals, after spending three years propping them up?”
The problem with the NDP is that it sees everything through the lens of elections and parliamentary arithmetic. Further, its vision is shortsighted. It does not campaign day to day in communities and workplaces. There are no big rallies like in the Bernie Sanders’ election campaign. Both at the Federal and Provincial levels, the malaise is at the top, accompanied by the lack of a vibrant organization at the bottom, which has been the case for some time. Its vision is progressive but not bold. It backs away from challenging the basic power relations in society: the working class versus those who own the means of production. It continually underestimates the ruthlessness of the elites. Its methods are not class struggle. Tommy Douglas cautioned: “We must never underestimate our opponents; nor should we forget that the closer we come to reaching our objectives, the more vicious and forthright will their opposition become.”
In contrast to the NDP of the past who fought tooth and nail for a public health care system, facing down opponents by mobilizing in the streets, today’s NDP prefers to sidle up to the ruling party to try and etch out a better deal for “ordinary Canadians.” This strategy is a recipe for extinction.
The way ahead
Ford is likely to win. In times of uncertainty, voters often go with the devil they know. To win workers away from the Ford base, a workers’ party is needed that will take up the issues workers are most affected by, including the cost of living, affordable housing, transit, health care, and education. These would be linked to a broad program of public ownership and the socialist transformation of society.
