Lost votes a message for Ford
PC’s triumph has a hollow core
Doug Ford has reasons to be pleased. Overjoyed. He accomplished what he set out to do — he led his Ontario Progressive Conservatives to a second majority government on Thursday. He even increased his majority, winning seven more seats, 83, up from 76 in his first election in 2018. To add icing to his cake, the leaders of the Liberal and New Democratic parties both resigned on election night.
As Ford’s people unpack the election numbers, however, they will discover that their triumph has a hollow core, a warning for the premier and his party.
The warning starts with the turnout, a dismal 43.5 per cent, the lowest turnout in Ontario provincial election history, with Ontario 2022 being challenged only by Alberta 2008 in Canadian electoral hall of shame. Although Ford may take some comfort in the party’s 40.8 per cent of votes cast, up a bit from 40.5 in 2018, the unavoidable hard truth is that the party lost more than 400,000 votes between 2018 and 2022. It fell from 2.327 million votes to 1.912 million last week; that’s 27,000 fewer votes than the secondplace New Democrats received in the 2018 election. With 10.7 million Ontarians eligible to vote, Ford won with the support of just one in six potential voters.
Loss of support on such a scale would ordinarily spell curtains for a government, but Ford & Co. were saved by the collapse of the NDP vote. It dropped by 800,000 (exit Andrea Horwath). The Liberals, meanwhile, were sentenced to spend a further four years in the doghouse they inherited from Kathleen Wynne; their vote declined by about 9,000, although they managed to gain one seat (to eight). The Green party picked up 15,000 additional voters but were unable to add to the one seat they won in 2018. The two new right-wing entrants, New Blue and the Ontario Party were not a factor; combined, they took 4.5 per cent of the popular vote and lost the two seats they held at dissolution (through expulsions from the PC caucus).
Although Ontarians historically have turned out for federal elections in about the same proportion as voters elsewhere in the country (around 75 per cent), they display less zeal for provincial elections. One survey ranked Ontario ninth in provincial election turnout between 1965 and 2009; the most conscientious voters were in Prince Edward Island.
A poor turnout had been anticipated after a month of listless, largely issue-free campaigning, but 43.5 per cent was a shocker. It had messages for the players at Queen’s Park. For the opposition parties: leadership matters. The Liberals cannot win with a leader who excites few voters beyond his immediate family; the New Democrats cannot win with a leader who is well past her political best-before date. And the only way to unseat the Progressive Conservatives four years from now will be by the opposition parties working together, as the Liberals and NDP have in Ottawa.
For Doug Ford: you won big because you ran a tightly controlled, error-avoidance campaign, because you faced uncommonly weak opposition, and because you successfully positioned yourself as a mainstream populist. You convinced enough voters that you are just an average guy, an ordinary Ontarian, one of us, who does his very best in an extremely tough job in which any of us might make an occasional mistake.
The shtick worked, but the 400,000 lost votes are a warning that winning an election is not the same as winning a vote of confidence. Voters who stay at home are sending a message, too.