The Ontario election is coming soon and the main party leaders have now had their only two debates of the campaign.
The first debate, on Valentine’s Day, February 14, focused on northern Ontario issues exclusively.
The second, for the whole province, took place at the end of the long weekend, on Monday, February 17. It was broadcast by multiple networks, on radio and TV, and online.
Progressive Conservative (PC) leader Doug Ford won his second majority in the last election, in 2022, helped by the lowest turnout in Ontario’s history. Only 43.5 per cent of eligible Ontarians voted.
Throughout the 2022 campaign, media coverage focused obsessively on the Ford Conservatives’ big lead in the polls, and that appears to have depressed turnout.
In 2022, a good many Ontarians seem to have decided that since the result was a foregone conclusion they would not bother going to the polls
This year, Ford decided to call a mid-winter election, even though Ontario’s fixed election date law provides that the vote should not happen until June of 2026.
For a second time in a row, the combination of opinion-poll driven journalism and Ontario’s February weather could make for a low-turnout event.
But that is not the principal reason why the PC leader decided to pull the plug early. His main reason is that he thinks he could win big now – but maybe not later.
Ford and his advisors see dark storm clouds on the horizon for their party, in the near future.
The Green Belt, beer store, Ontario Place, and other scandals
The most menacing of those clouds is an RCMP investigation of the Ford government’s (possibly) corrupt deals to allow real estate developers closely connected to their party to build on the Green Belt.
The Green Belt is a protected, environmentally-sensitive territory which surrounds the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).
Ford’s real estate deals are now history. Public outcry and more than a hint of corruption forced the PC leader to backtrack on his decision to open parts of the environmentally protected area to development.
READ MORE: Ford backtracks on Greenbelt because he fears further revelations
But the federal police force’s investigations continue.
If Doug Ford had waited to hold the next election at the mandated time, 18 months from now, he might have been forced to campaign against a backdrop of criminal charges against key members of his government.
There are other scandals too.
The costly decision to end a consortium of big breweries’ nearly exclusive right to sell beer in their own stores earlier than their contract provides is one example.
Those stores, which dot the province, are called The Beer Store (formerly Brewers’ Retail). The consortium has a monopoly on selling beer in quantities greater than a six pack and exclusive control over various other aspects of the pricing and distribution of beer in Ontario.
The monopoly goes back to the 1920s. In 2015, the Liberal government that preceded Ford’s renewed the deal with the consortium, but for only a 10-year period.
Making beer more widely available is a big priority for Doug Ford. In his first election campaign, in 2018, he made a much-mocked promise that Ontarians would get beer for a buck.
Then, in 2022, Ford promised voters he would allow grocery stores to carry any and all kinds of beer, without limits, thus ending the consortium’s nearly century-long quasi-monopoly.
Ford could have made that happen at no cost had he waited until the expiration of the 2015 agreement. But he was impatient. He wanted to fulfill the beer-in-grocery-stores pledge before the early election he was planning.
And so, Ford broke the agreement early – at great cost to the taxpayers, the exact dimensions of which are not yet clear.
The low estimate is over four hundred million dollars; the high, between one and two billion.
If that needless profligacy weren’t enough, there is the deal Ford signed with the Austrian company, Therme, to build a luxury spa on the grounds of Ontario Place, a park on the Toronto waterfront.
Therme gets a lucrative 95-year lease on prime, public land, while the province is on the hook for $2 billion for a parking garage and improvements to the site.
There are no official figures yet, but daily admission to Therme’s high-end spa could be upwards of $60 per person – not exactly within the reach of the average working and tax-paying family.
The Ontario Auditor General said of this deal that it was “neither fair, transparent nor accountable.”
On the labour front, in 2022 Ford invoked the Canadian Charter of Rights’ notwithstanding clause to force a contract on education sector workers and deny them the right to collectively bargain (and, if necessary, strike).
The united opposition of the entire Ontario labour movement, and the threat of a general strike, forced the Ford government to back down on that arrogant gambit.
Earlier, Ford’s government had enacted the notorious Bill 124, which limited public sector wage increases to two per cent. Courts found that bill to be unconstitutional and forced the Ontario government to pay multiple billions in back pay to its workers.
More recently, Ford has again reached for the notwithstanding clause.
He introduced a legislative measure to criminalize homelessness by declaring 1,400 encampments throughout the province to be illegal, and imposing harsh penalties on people who refuse to abandon them.
Leaders try gamely to rattle Ford
During the leaders’ debates, all of those scandals, and much more, should have been grist-for-the-mill for the three opposition leaders.
Those leaders are: New Democrat Marit Stiles, Liberal Bonnie Crombie, and the Greens’ Mike Schreiner.
They all tried hard to hang Doug Ford’s record around his neck, with varying degrees of success. And they had a lot more ammunition than Ford’s long list of scandals and missteps.
Health care, the biggest item in any province’s budget, was the most urgent issue for the opposition party leaders,
Liberal leader Crombie was perhaps too aggressive-by-half. She kept badgering Ford on his unfulfilled promises to end wait lists and assure all Ontarians had primary health care providers.
Two and half million Ontarians do not have a family doctor or other primary care provider.
The NDP’s Stiles was more cogent and measured.
She pointed out how hallway medicine – with patients waiting long hours, perhaps days, on gurneys in hospital corridors – started, in fact, not with Ford, but with the last Liberal government.
And Stiles was the only leader who had anything specific and tangible to offer voters on primary care reform.
Rather than just throwing money at the problem, which seems to be the Liberal approach, the NDP leader pledges a root-and-branch reorganization of the primary care sector.
Stiles and her party would move as many family doctors and other primary care health professionals as possible into cost-effective and responsive primary health teams.
At the same time, the New Democrats say they will relieve family doctors of the onerous volume of paperwork which now burdens them.
Stiles had a similarly concrete proposal for food price inflation. She promised a monthly payment of $120 for low-income families, to help offset rising prices on grocery shelves.
Stiles did not note that such a plan could drive consumer demand and thus engender even more food price inflation. Without being specific, however, she did say an NDP government would tackle what she called “food price gouging.”
Crombie’s most notable promise, overall, was to institute what she called a middle-class tax cut. She left unanswered the question of what she would do for the poor.
Throughout the debate, the Liberal leader tried to play her party’s traditional role of being all things to all people. She would be tough on crime, for instance, but compassionate toward those suffering addiction.
Mostly, Crombie focused on some of Ford’s more outlandish plans, such as his pledge to build the world’s longest tunnel under the GTA portion of the province’s busiest highway, the 401.
Despite her years of political experience, most recently as mayor of the city of Mississauga, the Liberal leader seemed nervous on the debate stage, wound up like a top.
By contrast, the ever-smiling Marit Stiles was affable and relaxed.
Green leader Schreiner always talks knowledgeably and with deep familiarity with the issues. However, the issue that is his party’s raison d’être, the environment, was virtually absent from the debate.
The debate’s moderator, the CBC’s David Commons, and the two private sector journalists who played supporting roles, did not ask the leaders a single question on the environment or climate change.
And that was not because the environment is federal turf. In Canada, the environment is the quintessential zone of shared federal-provincial responsibility.
The total lack of interest in the environment, at least during this debate, is a troubling sign of the times. Donald Trump might be reshaping our politics in more ways than we imagine
As for the current Ontario premier, he was, well, the Doug we have come to expect: supremely confident, and, in his own peculiar way, folksy.
The three journalists and the other leaders dutifully asked him some tough questions. Not a single one of them fazed Ford, not even a tiny bit.
Whatever the topic at hand, Ford would gleefully skate past it, returning time and time again to his favourite theme: the economy.
The other leaders will tax you to death and tank the economy, Doug Ford said, repeatedly, sometimes adding: I’m the only one you can trust in these uncertain times.
What specifically would you do if the tariffs happened?
Ford’s stated motive for calling this precipitous election is his need for a strong mandate to deal with Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs – which would hurt industrial Ontario more than any other province.
As this year’s campaign got underway, Ford pointed out that to mitigate the impact of punishing tariffs the Ontario government might have to spend billions, an effort even greater than the COVID response.
Ford claims he needs a massive, new mandate from the people to empower him to take such radical action.
The debate, however, did not broach that issue directly.
Neither David Common nor the other journalists asked the leaders what measures they would put in place to shield Ontarians from the impact of 25 per cent U.S. tariffs on everything the province exports.
Had the questioners put the challenge that way, voters might have gleaned some idea of each leader’s policy acumen.
Instead, David Common chose to frame the Trump threat as a question of leadership.
He asked all of the leaders to explain how they have the needed personal qualities to take on the new and daunting challenge of U.S. tariffs.
That question set the stage for a fulsome display of platitudes and clichés, from all of the leaders.
In that department, however, Doug Ford is the reigning champion.
Ford’s grandiloquent talk about fighting for Ontarians seemed to put everything scandalous and wrong-headed he has done over seven years into the rear-view mirror. And there was nothing the opposition leaders could do to counter Uncle Doug’s blithe and simple rhetoric.
More’s the pity.
The election is on February 27.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
