The “resounding” victory of Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives in Thursday’s election in Ontario is marked by a big downside. Just 43.5% of Ontario’s 10.7 million voters exercised their democratic right, the lowest voter turnout in the province’s history — and a national disgrace that speaks to the disengagement of a growing number citizens, for whom politics is now a waste of time.
“How would you explain to a Ukrainian, young or old, student or soldier, widow or orphan, that you don’t care about your right to vote on this election day? asked the columnist of the Toronto Star Martin Regg Cohn on the eve of the vote. “Would you tell them your vote doesn’t really count?” And that, sorry, all those Ukrainians who go into the battle for democracy are wasting their lives? »
Sadly, his message didn’t seem to move many Ontarians after an election campaign that went largely unnoticed. No issue in particular aroused the passions of voters, except the debate around the construction of a new highway north of Toronto, a Conservative promise fiercely denounced by the three main opposition parties.
The Conservatives won 83 of the 124 seats in the Ontario assembly with just over 40% of the vote. Factoring in the anemic voter turnout, that means less than one in five Ontario voters voted for the Progressive Conservative Party. That didn’t stop Mr. Ford from bragging about making history by winning a second majority government in a row, and with more seats than in 2018.
His party made gains almost everywhere in the province. The Conservatives have swept away the sprawling suburbs of Toronto, thanks in part to their pledge to invest $10 billion in the future Highway 413, sacrificing farmland on the altar of urban development. The NDP previously held four of the five ridings of Brampton, a multi-ethnic suburb in northwest Toronto that will be served by the new highway; the Conservatives won them all on Thursday. Two Brampton New Democrat stars — MP Sara Singh, deputy party leader, and Gurratan Singh, brother of federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh — lost their seats.
The defeat of Liberal MP for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell, Amanda Simard, who left the Ford government in 2018 following the elimination of the Office of the French Language Services Commissioner, speaks volumes about the failure of the Liberal Party of Ontario and its leader, Steven Del Duca, unable to resonate with the Ontario electorate. According to a mid-campaign poll, Francophones in the province preferred Mr. Ford to Mr. Del Duca despite this episode. The Liberal leader resigned Thursday night after failing to regain the riding of Vaughan-Woodbridge, which he had represented until 2018.
New Democrat Leader Andrea Horwath also announced her departure. The NDP managed to win almost four times as many seats as the Liberals — 31 to 8 — with roughly the same proportion of the popular vote, 23%. However, this is a drop compared to the 40 seats and 33% of the votes collected in 2018. After four elections at the helm of the political party, Mme Horwath had to give way. His greatest failure will have been to have allowed Mr. Ford to attract towards him a large part of the traditional base of his party, that is to say the unionized workers.
Mr Ford didn’t lie when he said in his Thursday night speech that he had changed the definition of “conservative progressiveness” since his election in 2018.
The fiscal conservative who had promised tax cuts and who opposed raising the minimum wage turned in the process into a rather centrist politician who does not care about deficits, going so far as to promise to raise minimum wage to $15.50 an hour next October. The right-wing populist who campaigned against the federal government of Justin Trudeau in 2018 even became Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland’s “best friend” during the pandemic, and worked closely with the federal Liberals to convince manufacturers of to invest billions of dollars in transforming their Ontario factories to produce electric vehicles.
Assumed libertarian who had mocked “the socialists” having “destroyed” Ontario before his election, Mr. Ford resigned himself to imposing health measures among the strictest in the country during the pandemic, in particular by closing schools in his province for longer than elsewhere. He even expelled some recalcitrant MPs from his caucus, including Roman Baber, currently a candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. His handling of the pandemic may have resulted in the creation of two new right-wing parties, but these did not hurt his re-election chances.
Aside from the low turnout, the Ontario election results give federal Conservatives food for thought. The center of the country remains after all very… centrist. Mr. Ford finally got it, and he came out on top.