Ontario voters have just gone through a needless election that cost the taxpayers of the province some $189 million. Extraordinarily it was called by a premier whose majority government still had 16 months left to run in its mandate. And it was called in the middle of a Canadian winter, further evidence of the high degree of opportunism and desperation on the part of premier Doug Ford’s Conservatives.
On the one hand, the Conservatives were desperate to hold an election before the fallout from the premier’s various scandals, (such as the Greenbelt fiasco, which was soon to be the subject of yet another damning public report),[i] could cause political damage to their chances. In addition, they were desperate to hold an election before any federal election could take place, since there was a near-certainty that the Poilievre Conservatives would form a majority government, a development that historically has almost always resulted in Ontario voters choosing a Liberal or NDP government as a counterweight.[ii] Meanwhile the vacuum caused by the Liberal government’s self-inflicted Freeland chaos in Ottawa, coupled with the outrageous threats directed at Canada by newly installed American president Donald Trump, provided Ford with a golden opportunity to try to fill the void and make political hay.
Ford hinted at this early election possibility for weeks in advance, but when the call finally came it was launched so abruptly that large swathes of the electorate did not even receive their voter identification cards before election day. Meanwhile both opposition parties were caught flatfooted, having to nominate candidates on the fly and rush out platforms just days before the end of the short 30-day campaign. Not so Ford’s Conservatives, whose advance knowledge of the election date gave them plenty of time to spend money on party propaganda before the writs were even dropped, and to prepare detailed ad campaigns and a platform well in advance of the official start.
Even more importantly, it allowed the government to frame the ballot question. It was to be a debate over who was the most patriotic leader and could best defend the residents of Ontario from the impending tariff war with President Donald Trump. This was quickly evident in Doug Ford’s ubiquitous “Canada is not for Sale” ballcap, his two trips to Washington during the campaign, and the Conservatives’ steady string of full page newspaper ads and TV commercials promoting the election as a “Captain Canada Defends Ontario Jobs” scenario.
Needless to say such detailed and expensive ads must have been prepared and vetted long before the writ was dropped, something opposition parties could never hope to match when they were starting from zero on the first day of the campaign. Nor were they able to overcome Ford’s head start in defining the campaign issue in terms of foreign affairs – a bizarre subject for a provincial premier to adopt — rather than pressing provincial issues such as health care, education and housing.
Equally significant, this snap election defeated the entire purpose of the fixed election date legislation that was already in place in Ontario, legislation that would have seen the next election launched in June 2026. The purpose of this legislation, (now commonly found in all provinces), is to level the playing field for all the parties involved. In theory, the only situation in which this legislation could be bypassed would be during a period of minority government, when opposition parties could choose to band together and defeat the government, forcing an election. Yet despite having a substantial majority, which meant his government could not possibly be brought down by the opposition before the fixed date, Ford voluntarily chose to call an early election. Why?
Ford’s ostensible reason for this completely unnecessary midwinter campaign was “I need a large majority.” When it was pointed out that he already had one, with his party holding 79 of the 124 seats in the legislature, he declared that he wanted at least 100 seats, or “the largest majority in Ontario history.”[iii] And why? “To fight President Trump’s tariffs and protect Ontario families and workers.”
The problems with this ridiculous argument are legion. First and foremost, it strains credulity to believe that Donald Trump cares – or even knows — whether the premier of Ontario has an 80 seat or 100 seat majority. Far more important is the fact that Trump likely has no idea who Doug Ford is. After all, in his two forays to Washington with fellow premiers, Ford only managed to meet with junior staff in the White House, including the Director of Personnel, who promised to pass on his concerns. Trying to put a brave face on this obvious slap in the face to Canadian politicians, Ford told reporters “We appreciate the Trump administration facilitating this…People don’t get last-minute meetings like this.”[iv] Or, as one report put it, while Ford may not have actually accomplished anything in terms of preventing the tariffs, “the Ontario PC leader did get a boost for his re-election campaign.”[v] Indeed, the ethical question of whether a party leader in the middle of an election campaign should also be allowed to undertake high profile activities in the role of premier, was one raised by all opposition parties and a number of academic experts. It also raised the possibility of an inquiry by the Integrity Commissioner.[vi]
Nevertheless the election went ahead as planned on February 27. And what have been the results? First and foremost, Ford failed miserably in his stated objective of achieving a larger majority. Instead, the Conservatives were returned with only one more seat (80 versus 79) than they held at the time of dissolution and their share of the popular vote remained exactly the same at 43%. And so, as one analyst put it, from one perspective “almost nothing changed” as a result of this election.[vii]
For this the voters of Ontario trudged to the polls in predictably difficult winter weather. However it is also noteworthy that only an estimated 45% of eligible voters did actually cast a ballot, making this the second lowest level of voter turnout ever. (The worst was in 2022, when only 43% of eligible voters participated.)[viii] Interestingly, apart from its obvious problems as a winter event, some observers have attributed this low turnout to the nature of the Conservative campaign, which apparently left many voters disaffected since no issues of provincial importance were discussed, and others unaware that a provincial election was even occurring, due to the Conservative’s exclusive emphasis on foreign policy and the Trump tariffs.
At the same time, at least two important changes did occur as a result of this election. First, the premier will find himself challenged by not one but two opposition parties in the next legislature. While support for the NDP also remained stagnant, with the party losing one seat and now sitting at 27 seats in the legislature, the Liberals managed to increase their vote substantially and take 14 seats. This means the Liberals will now return to official party status, something they had lost in 2018. Why does this matter? First, it means they will receive funding for their caucus and research group, as do all official parties, and, second, they will now be able to routinely ask questions in the legislature. This in turn will enable them to be far more visible at Queen’sPark and in the media.
This development will undoubtedly be frustrating for Ford, who deliberately raised the bar of official party status in 2018 from 8 to 12 seats, having first refused to allow the Liberals that status with 7 seats as a conciliatory gesture. He took this mean-spirited decision despite the fact this type of concession is a conventional practice at both provincial and federal levels. As a result, having taken 9 seats in 2022, (which would have been sufficient before Ford’s unprecedented intervention) the Liberals were still not recognized as an official party in the legislature, which severely hampered their ability to attract any attention at all for their positions or their leader, since they again had no funding and were not allowed as a matter of course to ask questions in the legislature. (Note that after the 1993 election had delivered a substantial majority for the Chretien Liberal government in Ottawa, they allowed the NDP official party status after its seat count fell to 9, or 3 below the required minimum of 12. This 12 seat minimum, in turn, must be seen in the context of a House with 295 seats, or more than twice the number of seats in the Ontario legislature.) So now, the premier will have to “endure” Question Periods in which two major parties are entitled to pose questions every day to hold his government to account, something he obviously neither expected nor wanted.
A second development which may be equally frustrating for Ford is the fact that the results have demonstrated, once again, the need for the electoral map of Ontario to be updated. Again, the example of the Liberals is instructive. In 2022 they obtained only 8 seats for their 24% share of the popular vote while the NDP, with an identical share of the popular vote, received 31 seats. This time the gap is greater still. The Liberals received 30% of the popular vote, but only 14 seats, while the NDP, with more than 10% less popular support than the Liberals at 19%, received 27 seats, or virtually the same number they took in the 2022 election (that time with 24% of the vote.) The chart below demonstrates this exceptional gap quite clearly:
| Party | 2022 | 2025 | ||
| Pop Vote | Seats | Pop Vote | Seats | |
| PC | 43% | 79 | 43% | 80 |
| Lib | 24% | 8 | 30% | 14 |
| NDP | 24% | 31 | 19% | 27 |
These anomalies signal a major problem with the distribution of population by riding. True, the concept of vote inefficiency can account for some of this discrepancy between popular vote and seat allocation. As the federal NDP knows only too well, despite often receiving close to one quarter of the national popular vote they receive fewer seats than this would suggest because their support is spread evenly across the country and they do not have enough seats where their support is sufficiently concentrated to actually win. Conversely, the Conservative Party has huge popular vote support numbers in western ridings – far more than they actually need to win – which artificially increases their national support numbers but does not get them as many seats in many central Canadian ridings as one might have expected from the overall numbers. Both of these examples demonstrate the concept of vote inefficiency.
However there are limits on what this concept can explain. Discrepancies of the margin seen in recent Ontario elections suggest something else is at play here as well. And, as experts have pointed out repeatedly over the last twenty years, one of the major concerns in Ontario is the fact that riding boundaries have not been changed to reflect demographic change. Ontario is also the only province that does not have an independent, non-partisan electoral commission to examine the situation and make recommendations for change. This means that there are now ridings where an individual’s vote is worth two or three times as much as that of a voter in another riding, because of the disproportionate size of some ridings. Put another way, we are far from the concept of one person, one vote, and getting further all the time.
Yet Doug Ford has repeatedly responded to requests for change with the line “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, apparently failing to recognize that in some ways the system is indeed broken. He has also implied that the creation of an electoral commission would put the province at risk of political interference in the electoral system, which he has incorrectly referred to as “gerryrigging” rather than “gerrymandering”, and the avoidance of which is exactly the reason why such independent commissions are typically established. [ix]
If nothing else, one would expect the Liberals as an official party to draw attention to this issue in the legislature, and attempt to embarrass or pressure the Ford government into making appropriate changes before the next election.
Nevertheless at the end of the day Ford has achieved his two unstated objectives. He has managed to hold this unnecessary election without paying a political price with disgruntled voters. And he now has another four years of majority government in which he can duck and weave around items such as the upcoming RCMP report on the Greenbelt. Ironically, the only point on which he has apparently failed to correctly perceive an advantage is the rapidly declining fortunes of the Poilievre Conservatives, who may or may not form the next federal government before the end of the year if not sooner. And the reason is the very issue on which Ford built his campaign. With Trump tariffs top of mind with most Canadian voters, Poilievre does not appear to be the ideal Captain Canada they are looking for.
[i] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/rcmp-criminal-investigation-ford-greenbelt-1.6991595
[ii] https://brookejeffrey.ca/why-doug-ford-is-really-calling-an-early-election/
[iii] Lucas Powers. “Ontario’s Conservatives Cruise to Rare Third Straight Majority.” CBC.ca. February 28, 2025
[iv] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/doug-ford-washington-ontario-election-analysis-1.7457697
[v] Op. cit.
[vi] https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6645035 and https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/doug-ford-ontario-election-washington-photographer-video-1.7465545
[vii] https://globalnews.ca/news/11053738/ontario-election-2025-seats-flipped
[viii] https://www.collingwoodtoday.ca/2025-provincial-election-news/voter-turnout-a-little-better-than-2022-but-not-much-10301505
[ix] https://globalnews.ca/news/10676417/ontario-electoral-boundary-riding-changes/
