Why calling an election now helps Doug Ford and his Ontario PCs

CBC

28-01-2025

While Premier Doug Ford insists that U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff threat is why he's calling an election 15 months ahead of schedule, there are plenty of reasons why the timing is politically advantageous to Ford and his Ontario PC Party.
Ford will visit Ontario's lieutenant-governor today to make the formal request that kickstarts the provincial campaign, with election day set to be Feb. 27.
Here's why calling the election now helps the Progressive Conservatives, with insights from party insiders.
1. Campaign readiness
Even though the early election rumours began swirling last May when Ford first refused to rule out a snap vote, there's evidence the other parties are nowhere near as ready as the PCs to contest an election.
The PCs blew the other parties out of the water in fundraising in 2023 and 2024. That money helps pay for the advertising needed to reach voters during the campaign and supports the voter outreach and data gathering work that is crucial to winning elections.
As for polling, PC campaign organizers would not have pushed for the early call if they felt their poll numbers were not in strong shape relative to Marit Stiles's NDP and Bonnie Crombie's Liberals.
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"Anytime you are leading in the polls is a good time to call an election," said Andrew Brander, a former campaign manager for Ontario PC and federal Conservative candidates, now vice president at public affairs firm Crestview Strategies.
"Probably the biggest advantage to Doug Ford calling an election now is that we haven't seen much from the opposition in terms of being able to really define themselves," said Brander in an interview.
The PCs "have been election-ready since the first day of this mandate," said Laryssa Waler, Ford's former director of communications, now leading the public affairs firm Henley Strategies.
"The PCs are ready to go," said Waler in an interview. "They've been knocking on doors every day for years."
Ford's party has nominated more candidates than any of its rivals. (No party has nominated a full slate for all of Ontario's 124 ridings yet. There's still time: the nomination deadline to get on the ballot will be Feb. 13.)
2. Justin Trudeau's resignation
Multiple sources inside the PC party say as late as early January, Ford was reluctant to call an election early. This was weeks after Trump won and began talking about slapping tariffs on Canada.
What tipped Ford from reluctance to enthusiasm: Justin Trudeau's Jan. 6 announcement that he would resign as prime minister and was proroguing Parliament.
Trudeau's announcement not only created a leadership vacuum in Ottawa that Ford could exploit, it also guaranteed there would be no federal election to interfere with a provincial campaign until at least late March, and kicked off a federal Liberal leadership race.
Because of the strong overlap between the federal and provincial Liberal parties, that leadership race is now absorbing resources — experienced political organizers, volunteers and donations — that could otherwise help Crombie's Ontario Liberals.
"There are only so many people in Ontario who know how to run elections and who know how to raise money and who know how to be campaign managers," said Waler.
Tom Allison, a veteran Liberal campaign organizer, was set to be campaign chair for the Ontario Liberals but is now managing Chrystia Freeland's leadership campaign.
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3. Ford vs. Trump
The role of chair of Canada's premiers rotates every year. The timing for Ontario's premier to take a turn at the head of the table couldn't have worked out better for Ford.
In response to Trump's tariff threat, Ford has emerged as a protector of not only Ontario, but also Canada, says Waler.
"I think that even voters who were maybe not previously accessible to the Ontario PC Party have looked at Doug Ford and said, 'He's got our best interests at heart. He's going toe-to-toe with Donald Trump.'"
Trump will hardly be negotiating with a mere premier of a province in a country that he often dismisses as the 51st state. Still, Ford is scheduled to travel to Washington twice during the election campaign, and that's a visual the PCs will want to use in their efforts to portray him as the leader Ontario needs.
Also, if Trump follows through on his tariff threat and Ontario's economy is badly damaged, by the time the province's regularly scheduled election date rolls around in June 2026, voters could be in a mood to take it out on Ford.
4. Advertising advantage
By calling the election early, the PCs benefit from pre-campaign advertising in a way that they couldn't on Ontario's normal election timetable of a vote every four years.
Provincial election law caps party spending on ads during the six months before the start of a scheduled general election campaign. In the case of a snap election like this, the pre-campaign spending cap doesn't apply.
The cash-flush PCs have flooded the airwaves over the past year with party-funded ads promoting Ford and attacking Crombie.
"The PC's have have poured millions of dollars into these advertising campaigns," said Brander. "The Liberals really didn't have the resources to push back on that hard enough, early enough."
The PCs also get a potential boost from the taxpayer-funded government ads promoting Ontario that have appeared over the past year. Provincial law prohibits government advertising for a 60-day period before each scheduled election campaign, but that prohibition doesn't apply in this situation, when an election is called early.
Ontario's auditor general found the government spent a record $103.5 million on advertising in the 2023-24 fiscal year.
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5. Getting ahead of potential Poilievre victory
Over the past 65 years, through 17 provincial elections, there's been just one time that an Ontario party formed government when its federal political cousins were in power in Ottawa. That was 2003, when Dalton McGuinty's Liberals won in Ontario while Jean Chrétien was prime minister.
That long-running historical trend is not the only reason why some Ontario PC organizers were leery of waiting for a provincial election, in the event that Pierre Poilievre leads his Conservatives to victory in a federal vote that must be held this year.
PC organizers also feared if Ford had stuck with the fixed-date election timetable, that some policies brought in by a Poilievre government could spark a backlash that would hurt the provincial party in 2026.
6. Getting ahead of potential Greenbelt charges
The early call means that unless the RCMP announces something in the next four weeks, Ford's PCs will have sent Ontarians to the polls without the spectre of any charges related to the Greenbelt affair.
The Ford government's move to allow a handpicked group of landowners to build homes in the protected Greenbelt — boosting the potential value of that land by upwards of $8 billion, according to the auditor general — dominated the first year-plus of this mandate.
While Ford eventually scrapped the plan, the RCMP is investigating how it came about, looking for any evidence of corruption.
7. Timing is everything
It also doesn't hurt Ford politically that a $200 cheque is landing in the mailboxes of pretty much every single voter in Ontario right now.
If Ford wins another majority on Feb. 27, he will be the first Ontario premier to lead their party to three straight majorities since the 1950s, when Leslie Frost did it for the PCs.