Ontario Premier Doug Ford and his Progressive Conservatives have cruised to their third straight majority government, CBC News projects, after a snap winter election fought amid the spectre of U.S. tariffs.
It is the first time since 1959 in Ontario that a party leader has won three consecutive majorities. The win is sure to secure Ford’s place in the annals of the province’s political history.
Results are still pouring in from ridings across the province, so the size of the majority is uncertain.
Ford took a gambit and triggered the rare winter election in late January, appealing to voters for a new and even bigger mandate to combat the threat of U.S. tariffs. The call came as Ford was enjoying national attention as one of the faces of Canada’s response to the looming shadow U.S. President Donald Trump.
It was the first time Ontarians went to the polls in a winter general election since 1981.
Often sporting a “Canada is Not for Sale” hat, Ford campaigned almost singularly on the pitch that he is the only provincial party leader who could navigate four years of economic chaos. The PC election platform included roughly $40 billion in new spending promises, nearly half of it geared toward staving off potentially devastating consequences of tariffs on key industries.
Highly unusual for a provincial election race, Ford left the country for two anti-tariff trips to Washington, D.C., during the four-week campaign. And despite declining any one-on-one interviews with media in Ontario, Ford also appeared semi-regularly on American cable news programs.
The PCs used the backdrop of economic uncertainty to expand on its strategy of targeting traditionally working class voters and tradespeople. Throughout the contest, Ford kept a relentless focus on the economy and jobs, often pivoting to the subject even when asked about other issues.
Ford’s also spent considerable time campaigning in NDP-held ridings in the Windsor, London and Hamilton areas. It’s an approach that appears to have paid off for the PCs this time around, as it did in 2022.
Ford’s opponents argued he cynically used the tariff threat as a pretext for an unnecessary election, in part because the PCs already had a considerable majority and more than a year left in their mandate. Ford first publicly mused about the possibility of an early vote last May, six months before Trump threatened to impose tariffs.
The NDP, Liberal and Green leaders also repeatedly alleged Ford was attempting to pre-empt the results of an ongoing criminal investigation by the RCMP into his government’s Greenbelt scandal.
They also tried, albeit with limited success, to turn the focus of the campaign to Ford’s record on issues like health care, housing and education. About 2.5 million Ontarians don’t have a family doctor, emergency room wait times are at record highs and hallway health care is a persistent problem. Despite a promise from the PCs during the last election to build 1.5 million new homes by 2031, housing starts in the province have essentially stalled out. Meanwhile, Ontario’s school repair backlog is nearly $13 billion.
More to come.
