How the PCs won a wild Ontario election
It was three weeks before the start of Ontario’s election campaign and Kathleen Wynne was happily posing for a National Post photographer in the ornate hallway of Ontario’s legislative building. But as Wynne strode back into her office’s reception area, she stopped. The premier was locked out of her own inner sanctum. The incident was a harbinger of what would come. Wynne’s personal approval rating was already at abysmally low levels, her party not much more popular. But as the campaign unfurled over the last four weeks, Liberal support crumbled even further.
Helped by support distributed broadly across a swath of key ridings and bolstered by a last-minute bump in support, Doug Ford’s Tories rode to a majority government Thursday. The NDP, who have held power only once in the province, became the official opposition. The results capped a frequently negative campaign that seemed as much about Ontarians deciding for whom they would not vote as about deciding who they truly wanted to govern the province.
For months the PCs held a commanding lead in the polls, only to see their support slip and the NDP surge with the finish line in sight. And key to it all was the locked door voters presented to the Liberals after 15 contentious years in power.
“What you see … is a steady march of people disagreeing that it’s a two-horse race between the Tories and the Liberals,” says pollster Greg Lyle of the Innovative Research Group. “The NDP would not have had this shot if the Liberals had not collapsed.” Wynne’s Liberals had suffered from years of controversy over a ballooning provincial debt, high electricity prices and costly, politically expedient decisions. It seemed like the Tories’ election to lose.
But trouble came for them unexpectedly. Centre-right leader Patrick Brown resigned in late January in the face of accusations of sexual impropriety, the beginning of weeks of turmoil for the party. Ford emerged victorious from the subsequent leadership race, one he had suggested was rigged against him.
Many Tories viewed the populist, plain-speaking Ford as a liability, It seemed at first that those fears were unfounded, as the new, Fordled PCs continued to poll way in front of the Liberals, with the NDP third, right until the election writ was dropped May 8.
Before that point, said Jason Roy, head of Laurier University’s Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy, “many people aren’t paying much attention.”
But, he said, “as more and more voters start to decide how they’re going to vote in this election, then you start to see some shift in the poll numbers.”
And polling even then pointed to a latent NDP strength, with the party named as the second choice by the largest proportion of voters. Within a week of the campaign starting, surveys were consistently showing the New Democrats pulling ahead of the Liberals. And then by mid-May, they were even with the Tories or even ahead in some of the flood of polls.
And as the NDP rose, the Liberals fell, sometimes dipping below 20 per cent support by late May. A key turning point may have been the first televised debate, where NDP leader Andrea Horwath delivered a solid performance, and made the case that there was an alternative to the province’s two traditional governing parties.
Still, the Tories’ “money in your pocket” messaging about cutting taxes, gas prices and electricity rates struck a chord with struggling middle class voters, said Lyle. But then the bad news started accumulating for the Conservatives, beginning with controversies around the nomination of many of their candidates, even including theft of customer data from the 407 toll highway.
Ford tried to blame such affairs on Brown, but then he was pulled into the mess himself, accused of having bought party memberships to help a young Tory capture the nomination in his home riding. A PC platform that was never fully costed did not help, either. If voters disenchanted with Ford wanted at least a centrist alternative to him, though, they had nowhere to look. The Liberal platform was packed with new spending programs, and deficits higher even than the NDP’s. Meanwhile, the New Democrats eventually hit a ceiling in the polls themselves, battered by negative news. First there was the embarrassment of a $1.4-billion mistake in their platform, then damning revelations about candidates’ past statements and actions, and finally warnings by their opponents that the free-spending socialists would ruin Ontario’s economy.
By the end, it was almost a race to see who would lose the election, rather than who might win.