The campaign for the June 2 provincial election in Ontario will not begin officially until the Lieutenant Governor Elizabeth Dowdeswell dissolves the legislature and the election writ is issued. The 2022 budget of Progressive Conservative government will come first on Thursday this week, then the election call next week.
Naturally, none of the three major parties waited for the starting gun. They’ve been waging a good old Ontario election campaign for weeks now – a traditional quadrennial lottery in which each party vies outdo its competitors by unveiling imaginative (and extravagant) ways to bribe voters with their own money. There is nothing subtle about provincial elections in Ontario. They are not occasions for debate on political principle, ideology, or direction.
The three parties are essentially the same, all crowded into the centre of the spectrum, offering policies that can be indistinguishable. Elections become auctions. Which party is offering the fanciest goodies this year – it being understood by all that the gaudiest promises are destined to dematerialize the day after the election, not to be heard from again until revived for the next election?
Premier Doug Ford’s PCs, with the most to lose, have the most on offer. Since March 1, they have made, by the government’s own tally, a staggering $10.88 billion worth of gifts and promises. These include $1.1 billion in refunds for vehicle registration stickers for 2020-22, and a similar amount for cancelling the sticker fees for 2022-23, $900 million for rural internet broadband, $763 million in retention bonuses for nurses, $450 for a university and college tuition freeze, $259 million in funding for General Motors, $662 million for long-term care homes.
The third-place Liberals and the second-place New Democrats are both offering a province-wide $10-a-day program of before- and after-class care for elementary students to supplement the universal $10-a-day program for pre-schoolers that is being phased in by the federal government. The Liberals are also promising to plant 100 million trees every year for eight years, to ban the sale, possession, importation and storage of handguns in Ontario, to raise the minimum wage to $16 an hour, and to introduce legislation to guarantee woman pay and employment opportunities equal to those of men in all Ontario workplaces.
The NDP is countering with an OHIP-like $1.15 billion universal mental health program, free birth control prescriptions, and is upping the Liberal tree-planting promise by pledging to plant 1 billion of them by 2030.
In 2018, the Progressive Conservatives elected a majority government, winning 76 seats with 41 per cent of the popular vote. Resignations and defections have reduced the seat count to 67, leaving Ford with just four seats more than the 63 needed for a bare majority in the 124-seat legislature. Although the PC’s popularity has eroded over four uneven and controversial years in office, the major polls still put the party in majority government territory. Last week, however, new poll by Abacus Data warned of peril ahead. It showed the Liberals, under still little-known Steven Del Duca had climbed to within four percentage points –32 to 36 – of the Tories, with Andrea Horwath’s NDP at 23 per cent, and the Greens at 6 per cent.
Billions in new and promised spending won’t save Premier Ford if the tide is against him. If the Liberals keep creeping up, and if Ford loses just five seats and slips into a minority government situation, he is doomed. The Liberals and New Democrats are agreed: they will not prop up a Ford minority.
Things may get frantic, and nasty, in Ontario before June 2.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is a former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail. His new book, Flora! A Woman in a Man’s World, co-authored with the late Flora MacDonald, is short-listed for the 2022 Writers’ Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens40@gmail.com