Randall Denley: Attacking Poilievre's Conservatives will come back to bite Doug Ford

National Post

01-05-2025

Ontario Premier Doug Ford clearly doesn't like federal Conservatives, but did he really sabotage their campaign in the province, as one re-elected Ontario MP recently suggested? Not likely, if you stick to the facts.
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The unseemly infighting between the leaderships of Ontario Progressive Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre's federal Conservatives boiled over this week, to the credit of neither. Ontario Conservative MP Jamil Jivani took quite a run at Ford after the federal party's election loss Monday. 'When it was our turn to run an election, he couldn't stay out of our business, always getting his criticisms and all his opinions out, distracting our campaign, trying to make it about him, trying to position himself as some kind of political genius that we needed to be taking cues from,' Jivani said. He added that Ford was a 'hype man' for the federal Liberals.
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On Wednesday, Ford couldn't resist rising to the bait, telling reporters 'Last time I checked, Pierre Poilievre never came out in our (recent provincial) election. (As a) matter of fact, him, or one of his lieutenants, told every one of his members, 'Don't you dare go out and help the (Progressive Conservatives)'. Isn't that ironic?'
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A reasonable person might make a distinction between not helping and actively, publicly criticizing, and Ford did indulge himself in some sniping at the federal party during the recent national election. So did Ford's adviser, Kory Teneycke. But if that was sabotage, it was highly ineffective.
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Under Poilievre, the Conservatives gained seats in Ontario and the Liberals lost them in sufficient numbers to prevent their leader Mark Carney from winning a majority. Poilievre even collected a higher percentage of the popular vote than did Ford himself just months ago.
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Ontario is where the Conservatives held back a seemingly unstoppable Liberal tide, confounding pollsters' predictions of a dismal result in the province. The poll aggregator 338Canada.com projected 82 seats for the Liberals in Ontario, and just 37 for the Conservatives.
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In the end, Poilievre took 53 seats, up from 37 in 2021. The Liberals got 69, down from 78 before. The Conservatives had 43.8 per cent of the vote, just ahead of Ford's 42.97 per cent in the provincial vote. If an incumbent like Ford running against two weak opponents could only get about 43 per cent provincially, that suggests it's the ceiling for conservative politicians in Ontario.
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The bad blood between federal Conservatives and PCs in Ontario certainly predates Ford and Poilievre. When I was a provincial PC candidate more than a decade ago, federal party types made it abundantly clear that they were the pros and the provincial PCs were inept losers. It seems like not much has changed. But it should.