When Ontario’s premier Doug Ford called an early winter election, he said he needed an increased majority to deal with the Trump threat.
Ontarians weren’t fooled by that spurious, self-serving excuse. They told pollsters and journalists they did not believe an early election, for a cost of $189 million, was justified.
But Ford succeeded in his gambit nonetheless. He won a third majority in a row – although it was slightly smaller than his previous majority, in 2022.
At time of reporting, Ford’s Progressive Conservatives won 80 out of 124 seats this time, two fewer than in 2022.
A majority is a majority. Ford will get to rule Ontario for another four years.
But during the campaign Ford and his acolytes had confidently predicted a massive landslide of well over 90 seats.
Based on public opinion polls, some commentators even went so far as to evoke memories of the 1987 New Brunswick election, when Frank McKenna’s Liberals won every single seat in the Legislature.
The experts said there was a possibility of a similarly overwhelming blow-out this year for Ford, with a divided opposition reduced to close to zero.
The New Democrats, with their new leader, Marit Stiles, gave the lie to that forecast.
They kept their status as official opposition, winning 27 seats, almost as many as they won in 2022.
Stiles and her well-organized team gave a master class in maximizing what political scientists call vote efficiency.
They got the biggest possible bang-for-the buck for their not quite 19 per cent of the vote province-wide.
It was the opposite story for the hapless Ontario Liberals, who also had a new leader, Bonnie Crombie, the former mayor of Ontario’s third largest municipality, Mississauga.
The Liberals increased their popular vote from last time by about five points, to nearly 30 per cent. But they had to content themselves with a mere 14 seats.
Crombie lost her own bid for a seat in the city of which she had been mayor for almost a decade, but said she will stay on as leader.
The Liberal leader told her supporters they could celebrate a kind of Pyrrhic victory, the fact that they won more than the 12 seats needed for official party status in the Ontario legislature. In 2022, the Ontario Liberals failed to reach that threshold.
Like the New Democrats, Mike Schreiner’s Green Party maximized their vote efficiency. They managed to keep their two seats, despite a paltry total vote percentage of only four per cent.
The true winner: None of the above
The morning after the election, the electoral reform group Fair Vote Canada issued a press release under the headline: “Ontario voters cheated again by first-past-the-post.”
Curiously, the party that suffered most under the current electoral system, the Liberal Party, has not, of late, been a strong supporter of electoral reform, either in Ontario or federally.
The true winner of the 2025 Ontario election, as in 2022, was “none of the above.”
Only about 45 per cent of eligible Ontarians bothered to vote. That’s a mere two percentage points more than last time’s record low of 43 per cent.
The winter weather played a part in keeping turnout low this time. But so did poll-obsessed media coverage, which drummed home the message that Ford was so far ahead it was hardly worth putting on a coat, scarf, gloves and boots to get out and vote.
Breaking with what used to be its normal journalistic rule, even CBC news continued to report on opinion polls on election day itself.
When Ford spoke on election night, he reiterated his preoccupation with the threat from the U.S. and its dangerously unstable, authoritarian president, Donald Trump.
The U. S. president continues to say he will slap 25 per cent tariffs on everything
Canada exports to his country this coming Tuesday, March 4.
The only exception will be oil and gas, which Canada sells at a below market rate to the U.S. The tariff on those will be 10 per cent.
Meanwhile, in Ottawa …
Federal Liberal Party members are now voting for their new leader. The voting ends on Sunday, March 9 at 3 p.m. EST. The Party expects to announce the winner later that day.
The new Liberal leader will automatically become prime minister of Canada, even if that person does not have a seat in Parliament. Such is the case for the favourite to win, former Bank of Canada Governor, Mark Carney.
The transition period from Justin Trudeau to the new leader will take up to two weeks.
That means a new federal prime minister will not be sworn in until sometime around March 24, the date on which the prorogued Parliament is scheduled to return to work.
And so, the national stage will be virtually empty for a number of days, at what could be a crucial moment for the country.
That will provide a golden opportunity for the newly re-elected Premier of Ontario – who is also chair of the Council of the Federation, the body that brings together all 13 provinces and territories – to flex his political and rhetorical muscles.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
