NDP candidate Jennifer French at her campaign office in downtown Oshawa. She is seeking re-election, with a tight race expected against the Conservatives.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
A bitter wind heralding snow was blowing as Jennifer French made her way up the icy driveways of an Oshawa neighbourhood last Wednesday, a clipboard in her hand.
A veteran of election canvassing, the city’s sole MPP wore her full combat uniform: fleece-lined blue jeans, light-blue parka, a tuque of NDP orange and what she calls her yard boots – calf-high, insulated numbers that she wore in the schoolyard back when she was a teacher monitoring recess.
With the Feb. 27 snap election called by Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford coming up fast, she is canvassing for hours every day, first outside while it’s light, then in apartment hallways after dark. Whether it will pay off is far from clear. Despite her reputation as a likeable, hard-working representative, Ms. French is facing a tough re-election fight in a changing city.
Oshawa was once a solid union town. General Motors Canada was born here more than a century ago when a local carriage maker started building horseless carriages. At one point, 28,000 people worked in the vast GM complex in the lakeside city that now has a population of 175,000, an hour’s drive down the 401 highway from Toronto. Oshawa’s pride in its role as Canada’s motor city was expressed in its former corny slogan: “The city that motovates Canada.”
But after booming in the postwar decades as North Americans embraced the automobile, the local industry went into decline. Today, GM has just 3,100 unionized workers at the Oshawa plant. The company shut down production in the city altogether in 2019, but announced the next year it would reopen.
It’s the first time in decades that Ontarians are going to the polls in a winter election, and campaigning means gloves, shovels and warm clothes are a necessity for NDP candidate Jennifer French’s volunteers.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Far more residents now work in services, education, energy and health. The city boasts three postsecondary institutions, including Ontario Tech University, and a big health care hub, Lakeridge. Thousands of new residents have moved into the flourishing north end of the city near the 407 highway, many of them exiles from Toronto’s congestion and sky-high housing prices.
The federal riding, long represented by Ed Broadbent, leader of the NDP for 14 years, has been held by Conservative Colin Carrie since 2004. Provincially, six of the seven MPPs in Oshawa’s Durham region are members of Mr. Ford’s party, leaving the riding held by Ms. French the only patch of orange in a blue sea. Will even it disappear this time?
Mr. Ford’s party has a lead in provincewide polls, with the latest giving it 44-per-cent support, compared with 29 per cent for the Liberals, 17 per cent for the NDP and 6 per cent for the Greens. If the numbers hold until election day, Mr. Ford will win a third consecutive majority, the first Ontario leader to do so since Conservative Leslie Frost in the 1950s.
While Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie and NDP Leader Marit Stiles struggle for attention and recognition, Mr. Ford has been all over the headlines for his vocal role in Canada’s confrontation with U.S. President Donald Trump over his threats to impose tariffs and make this country the 51st American state.
Ontario PC candidate Jerry Ouellette’s downtown Oshawa office.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Mr. Ford’s stand resonates with some Oshawa residents. “He’s the one that seems to say, ‘If you want to play rough, we’re gonna play rough with you,’” said Susan Clarke, 64, a server at a downtown restaurant.
Nelson Wiseman, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Toronto, says that, for Mr. Ford’s PCs, the Oshawa riding is “ripe for the picking.” The NDP came into the election “on its back foot,” Mr. Wiseman said, and has raised much less money than the two other major parties.
Though labour traditionally backs the NDP, the union at the GM plant, Unifor Local 222, is not endorsing any party, focusing instead on encouraging members simply to vote.
Even some union activists are keeping their options open. Michelle Kimble, 46, calls herself “union born and bred.” She has worked for GM since 2004 and now acts as a human-rights rep for the Local, handling complaints about sexism, ageism and harassment.
Unifor Representative Michelle Kimble at a Unifor Oshawa office.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
She likes Ms. French, but counts herself undecided. Though she thinks it was wrong for Mr. Ford to call a snap election, she conceded he has helped draw attention to the danger from Mr. Trump, whose threatened tariffs on Canadian-made cars could devastate this country’s auto industry.
“I will be open to any party that recognizes auto is huge for Canada,” Ms. Kimble said.
The local Progressive Conservative candidate seems content to ride on Mr. Ford’s broad coattails. Jerry Ouellette held the seat from 1995 to 2014, when Ms. French knocked him off. After a gap of a decade, he is hoping to return the favour.
Mr. Ouellette is running a low-profile, play-it-safe campaign. Neither PC media managers nor his Oshawa campaign office responded to interview requests for this story. He declined to debate Ms. French. His online presence is slight.
A campaign leaflet shows him in a grip-and-grin handshake with the PC Leader. Mr. Ford, it says on the back, needs a strong mandate to protect Ontario from “Mr. Trump’s threats.”
If Ms. French is discouraged by all of this, she is not showing it.
“I know Doug Ford would like nothing more than to not have me at Queen’s Park,” she says in an interview at her brightly lit campaign office, a former cannabis shop. “But I ain’t going down without a fight.”
People watch the news as they wait in line at a local Oshawa diner.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
She called Mr. Ford’s defiant Captain Canada act a pose, and his Canada is Not for Sale cap a joke. “I have sat across Doug Ford for seven years and watched him sell off Ontario,” she said, pointing to his government’s deal with an overseas company to put a waterpark and spa at Ontario Place on Toronto’s waterfront.
The best way for Oshawa voters to send a message to Mr. Ford, she says, is to rally behind the NDP: In other words, her. A campaign leaflet shows that her support has fallen over the years, from 47 per cent in her first election in 2014, to 45 in 2018, to 42 in 2022, when she won by just 757 votes.
Each time, her main rival was a Progressive Conservative. The Liberals, a bar chart shows, usually finish third. Their candidate this time is Viresh Bansal, who says on his website that he has “extensive experience providing IT support to government and businesses.”
The message from Ms. French is clear: Don’t waste your vote on him. As the leaflet puts it, “In Oshawa, only Jennifer French can defeat Doug Ford’s Conservatives.”
The auto manufacturing sector historically underpinned Oshawa’s economy, providing tens of thousands of jobs at its peak.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Canvassing charges her up. Making her way along the sidewalk last week, she stopped at the home of Raoul Lochan, 67, a retired GM worker. Ms. French, he said, is “the best thing that ever happened around this place.” He already had a Jennifer French sign in front of his house, but told her he wanted something bigger and more visible. She laughed and promised to get him one.
A minute later, she recognized a young woman who used to be one of her students. Before they said goodbye, Ms. French had persuaded her to put an NDP sign in her apartment window.
Ms. French said she knows better than to say she is feeling good about how things will turn out on Feb. 27, but recalled that the polls put her dead last when she first ran in 2014, far behind the PCs.
In the end, she says with a smile, “I smoked them.”