Doug Ford’s Ontario PC party wins third majority government
Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford has won a historic third consecutive majority government, in an election he called more than a year early to mount a campaign that focused on his vows to fight U.S. President Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs.
Mr. Ford had justified the snap vote by saying he needed a stronger mandate to face down Mr. Trump. His NDP and Liberal critics accused him of political opportunism and of using his trips to Washington to lobby against the tariffs as campaign photo-ops.
They also criticized the early election call, saying the PC Leader was trying to get ahead of any charges that could result from the RCMP’s criminal investigation into his government’s aborted plan to allow select developers to build housing on parts of the protected Greenbelt. And they tried to shift attention to the struggling health care system and the province’s housing crunch.
But in a campaign dominated by the menace of Mr. Trump, their messages failed to move voters.
Results as of just before midnight, with almost all polls reporting, showed Mr. Ford leading or elected in 80 of the legislature’s 124 seats. His PC Party had 79 seats at Queen’s Park when he called the election.
Speaking to cheering supporters at an Etobicoke convention hall, Mr. Ford said he was ready to fight for Ontario, and Canada, which he said would never become the 51st state, as Mr. Trump has threatened.
“This election was about who we are, about the future we choose for ourselves,” Mr. Ford said. “Donald Trump thinks he can break us. He thinks he can divide and conquer, pit region against region. Donald Trump doesn’t know what we know. He is underestimating us. He is underestimating the resilience of the Canadian people, the Canadian spirit.”
He repeated his vow to build a massive traffic tunnel under a stretch of Highway 401, a project experts say could cost $60-billion to $120-billion. And he touted his commitments to keep supervised drug-consumption sites away from schools and daycares, accelerate the mining of critical minerals, tear down interprovincial trade barriers – and override municipal authority to rip out bike lanes in Toronto.
Mr. Ford’s main rivals were left far behind the PC Leader.
Marit Stiles, who heads the NDP, was on track to lead her party to 27 seats, down from the 28 the NDP held when the legislature was dissolved. The result means she remains Leader of the Official Opposition.
Speaking to supporters in Toronto, Ms. Stiles acknowledged that she was disappointed but vowed to hold the Ford government to account.
“In another few years, we are going to face a rematch and I’m there for it my friends,” Ms. Stiles said.
The Liberals, under Leader Bonnie Crombie, the former mayor of Mississauga, were leading or elected in just 14 seats. And Ms. Crombie lost her bid for her first seat in the legislature in the riding of Mississauga East-Cooksville, falling to PC candidate Silvia Gualtieri.
But Ms. Crombie, who won her party’s leadership in December, 2023, vowed to stay on despite the loss. She noted that the Liberals boosted their popular vote to 30 per cent, and were set to clear the 12-seat hurdle to regain official party status.
“People counted us out. They said the Ontario Liberal Party was dead,” Ms. Crombie told cheering supporters in Mississauga. “Turns out they were wrong.”
That result is more than the nine seats the party had when the election was called, after two consecutive drubbings at the polls in 2018 and 2022. But it leaves Ontario’s Liberals in third place.
The Green Party, led by Mike Schreiner, had two seats when the election was called, and was leading or elected in two seats Thursday night.
The preliminary turnout figure was around 45 per cent of eligible voters, an extremely low level compared with elections past but similar to 2022.
The election result makes Mr. Ford the first Ontario premier to win three back-to-back majorities since Leslie Frost in 1959. The election, 15 months ahead of schedule, cost an estimated $189-million.
Several key battleground seats changed hands. The Liberals flipped PC seats in Ajax, Nepean and Etobicoke-Lakeshore, while the PCs gained Hamilton Mountain from the NDP. Meanwhile, the Liberals won Toronto-St. Paul’s, which was held by the NDP, and the NDP held on to Windsor West, which the Tories had been fighting to win.
The room at Mr. Ford’s victory party was sparse when a PC majority was called, with a smattering of applause from the crowd. Cheers grew louder when polls showed Ms. Crombie behind in her own riding.
A crowd of a few dozen Liberal supporters at the party’s election night headquarters in Mississauga watched quietly as the CBC broadcast projected a Conservative majority not long after polls closed. Many stood with arms folded in front of the screen but did not seem surprised by the result.
Boos and groans echoed out at the NDP’s election party when news outlets projected a PC majority.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau congratulated Mr. Ford in a statement, saying he would work with the Premier “to defend Canadian interests, protect workers and businesses, and grow our economy.”
With his large majority, Mr. Ford defied those who warned that he could share the fate of former Liberal premier David Peterson, who called an early election in 1990 with a large lead in the polls but was punished by voters as the NDP under Bob Rae took power.
In a winter campaign hampered by snowstorms and overshadowed by events in Washington, polls had consistently shown Mr. Ford set to win a crushing victory over his rivals, even expanding his majority.
In the campaign before Thursday’s vote, both Ms. Stiles and Ms. Crombie took aim at Mr. Ford’s move to call an early election, which took place after the government distributed $200 cheques to most residents.
Mr. Ford maintained throughout the campaign that he needed a new mandate from the public in the face of Mr. Trump’s tariff threats and vowed to spend upward of $40-billion to protect the provincial economy.
His slick TV ads, which made use of his appearances on American cable TV news channels, presented him as a fighter who would stand up to the President.
He also travelled twice to Washington to lobby U.S. lawmakers. But while in the U.S. capital, Mr. Ford and fellow premiers lobbied various officials but only met with lower-level White House staff, and came away with no guarantees that tariffs would be avoided – or that Canada would not be taken over by the U.S.
Struggling to get attention amid the crisis caused by Mr. Trump, Ms. Stiles and Ms. Crombie ran campaigns targeting Mr. Ford on other issues, such as the struggling health care system, which has left 2.5 million Ontarians without a family doctor, and long wait times in jammed emergency rooms.
The PCs promised to spend $1.8-billion to connect two million people with family physicians on the eve of the election call, something the Liberals and NDP dismissed as too little, too late.
They also criticized Mr. Ford for failing to build enough housing, with housing starts in Ontario falling well behind those in some other provinces. Ms. Crombie pledged a middle-class income-tax cut, while Ms. Stiles promised a monthly rebate for low and middle-income families to offset the cost of groceries.
Few of the opposition’s attacks seemed to affect support for Mr. Ford, even though he suffered from low approval ratings and was caught on camera saying he was “100-per-cent” happy when Mr. Trump was elected last November. Mr. Ford said afterward that he would never support Mr. Trump again.
Heading into the vote Thursday, PC pollster Nick Kouvalis said he believed the party could win as many as 89 seats. The PCs had hoped to expand their support during the campaign, targeting regions such as Windsor, London, Hamilton, Niagara and the North.
With reports from Joe Friesen and Tom Cardoso
This article was first reported by The Globe and Mail
