Ontario Premier Doug Ford attends a news conference at Queen's Park Legislature in Toronto on Dec. 12, 2024.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Doug Ford, confirming that he will call an early Ontario election next week, wasted no time trashing his domestic political rivals, warning that they would be a “disaster” in talks with Donald Trump as his threatened tariffs loom over the economy.
Both NDP Leader Marit Stiles and Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie shot back at the Premier that the snap vote, more than a year in advance of the province’s next fixed election date of June, 2026, is opportunistic. They accused him of neglecting his duty to fight the tariffs and of using the crisis to secure another four years in office.
The back and forth is a preview of the coming campaign, which will kick off next week after months of speculation. Mr. Ford said he is due to meet on Tuesday with Lieutenant-Governor Edith Dumont to advise her to dissolve the legislature, starting the campaign the following day. The election is to be set for Feb. 27 – and all parties were still scrambling to nominate candidates and launch their campaigns.
The Premier, who has in recent weeks called for unity and defiance against the U.S. President’s tariff and annexation threats, announced the snap vote on Friday and pivoted into local campaign mode at an appearance in Brampton. The city is a sprawling electoral battleground northwest of Toronto where his Progressive Conservatives swept all five seats in 2022.
Mr. Ford, who won a majority government just 2½ years ago, has repeatedly insisted that he needs a new mandate from Ontarians as he faces down the economic peril posed by Mr. Trump’s threatened 25-per-cent tariffs. The levies could hammer the province’s economy if they take effect Feb. 1, as the President has promised.
Bristling at some reporters’ questions, he dismissed the idea that Ms. Stiles or Ms. Crombie could handle the current tariff crisis.
“Just Imagine this, folks. Imagine Bonnie Crombie or Marit Stiles sitting across from President Trump negotiating a deal. It would be an absolute disaster,” said Mr. Ford, who has so far failed in his own attempts to secure a meeting with the President. (Under the Canadian Constitution, the federal government, not the Ontario Premier, would be directly negotiating any trade deal with Mr. Trump’s administration.)
The Premier’s opponents charge that the early vote is really aimed at getting ahead of an economy expected to sour, a new cost-cutting Conservative government expected in Ottawa, or any charges that result from the RCMP’s probe of Mr. Ford’s aborted move to allow connected developers to build housing on the province’s protected Greenbelt.
Announcing plans for a multibillion-dollar tunnelled light-rail line extension in Brampton – but providing no firm cost estimate – Mr. Ford touted his government’s pledges for expanded highways and hospitals. He hinted that his platform could include the lifting of tolls for drivers on the easternmost, publicly owned end of the Toronto-area Highway 407.
In recent weeks, the Premier has said he needed a new mandate to justify potentially spending tens of billions of dollars to help workers and businesses affected by the U.S. tariffs, adding that the opposition would not back such a move. But both Ms. Stiles and Ms. Crombie have said they would work with Mr. Ford on any bailout.
On Friday, the Premier said he needed a new four-year mandate to match Mr. Trump’s presidential term, arguing that this would give Ontario more clout with the U.S. politicians. He also said a new mandate would boost Ontario’s voice in Ottawa if the next federal government, which polls suggest will be led by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, decides to cut cash flows to the province.
In Ontario, published opinion polls have shown Mr. Ford’s PCs with a healthy lead, while the NDP and Liberals divide the rest of the vote. Now, the opposition faces the added challenge of fighting an election that will unfold against the drama of Mr. Trump’s threatened tariffs, with Mr. Ford and other premiers making high-profile trips to Washington to meet with U.S. officials during the campaign.
Attention for other issues on which the PCs may be vulnerable will be at a premium. Both main opposition parties plan to point to jammed hospitals and shuttered rural emergency units, and the fact that millions of Ontarians remain without family doctors. And housing starts, a key goal for the government, remain far below its targets.
Mr. Ford’s two main challengers issued statements on Friday decrying Mr. Ford’s decision to call an early vote.
The NDP’s Ms. Stiles said Mr. Ford has always sided with “wealthy insiders” and suggested he could not be trusted to “stand up against Donald Trump and his billionaires.”
Ms. Crombie, the Liberal Leader, said Mr. Ford was abandoning his post in the middle of the tariff storm, only to get in front of the RCMP’s Greenbelt investigation: “He’s not a leader – he’s a coward.”
Despite election speculation that has been mounting since last May, none of the parties have a full slate of nominated candidates for all of Ontario’s 124 ridings. That includes the governing PCs, who were set to hold a “super caucus” of MPPs, candidates and campaign managers at a Toronto-area hotel on Saturday.
PC Party spokesman Peter Turkington said in an e-mail that as of Thursday, the party – which currently has 79 seats – had 88 candidates nominated. (Late Friday, the Premier’s nephew and the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Michael Ford, announced that he would not be running again in his Toronto seat of York South–Weston.)
Crombie spokeswoman Taylor Deasley said the Liberal Party – which only has nine MPPs and no official party status after disastrous results in 2018 and 2022 – had 70 candidates nominated and that “dozens more will be nominated in the coming days.” Ms. Crombie, the former mayor of Mississauga who has no seat at Queen’s Park, has still not announced which riding in her home city she will contest.
NDP spokeswoman Mayeesha Chowdhury said her party, which does not allow for the leader to appoint candidates and so must have local nomination meetings, had just 36 candidates nominated as of Thursday, with three more expected by Saturday. The NDP, with 28 MPPs, is the Official Opposition at Queen’s Park.
The Green Party, led by Mike Schreiner, has two seats, and said Friday that it had nominated half of its full slate of candidates.
While Nova Scotia’s PC Premier Tim Houston recently won big in an early vote in his province, any discussion of premature elections in Ontario always comes back to then-Liberal premier David Peterson in 1990.
Leading in the polls, he called a snap vote that angered voters and ended up losing to the NDP. On Friday, Mr. Ford batted away a reporter’s question about whether he would suffer the same fate.
“Thirty-five years ago, he woke up and decided to call an election, he wasn’t facing the largest attack in the history of our country … by the strongest country in the entire world,” Mr. Ford said. “We are in a fight of our lives.”