Doug Ford trounces the competition as Steven Del Duca and Andrea Horwath resign as party leaders

Thestar.com
June 3, 2022

Ford more years.

Ontario voters gave Premier Doug Ford another four-year term Thursday in a resounding election victory for the Progressive Conservatives that reduced the size of the NDP opposition and left the Liberals banished to the political wilderness.

Both NDP Leader Andrea Horwath and Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca resigned their posts.

With the landslide win, the Conservatives exceeded their 2018 seat count in the legislature despite two years of COVID-19 that left 13,311 Ontarians dead and soaring inflation as the economy rebounds from the pandemic.

The Tories, who held 67 ridings at dissolution on May 4, won 83 of the 124 seats in the house with a dismal voter turnout of just 43 per cent, down from 57 per cent in 2018. The New Democrats won 31 seats to eight for the Liberals, one Green and one Independent.

“We’re reimagining our party ... and tonight, we have changed what it means to be a Progressive Conservative in Ontario,” Ford told cheering supporters at the Toronto Congress Centre in his Etobicoke North riding.

“This is my proudest achievement as a leader of this party, building a new coalition, expanding our base, creating a more inclusive party where everyone matters, because never in our lifetime has it been more important for a party to represent all of Ontario,” he said.

In appealing to so many unionized workers, Ford delivered a final setback to Horwath, who announced her resignation after leading the party for 13 years into four elections.

“Tonight, it is time for me to pass the torch,” a tearful NDP chief told disappointed supporters in Hamilton.

“We didn’t get there this time ... but we are once again going to be your official Opposition,” she said.

The New Democrats, reduced from 38 seats at dissolution, will continue to serve as the official Opposition though the Liberals tied their popular vote tally.

Del Duca, who lost his own Vaughan-Woodbridge riding, only slightly improved his party’s fortunes and resigned after failing to win the dozen seats necessary for official party status in the legislature.

“I am disappointed to have not been successful in my home constituency,” said the Liberal leader, who had said Wednesday he planned to stay at the helm “regardless of the result.”

With a campaign slogan, “get it done,” Ford promised tens of billions in new infrastructure, including subways, hospitals, and freeways like the 60-kilometre Milton-to-Vaughan Highway 413 that the NDP, Liberals and Greens opposed over environmental concerns.

The highway, which would raze 800 hectares of farmland, pave over 160 hectares of Greenbelt land and cut through 85 waterways, was a major point of contention in an otherwise uneventful campaign.

While Green Leader Mike Schreiner -- who won his Guelph seat but failed to make other gains -- was widely seen as the winner of the provincewide televised debate moderated by the Star’s Althia Raj and Steve Paikin of TVO’s The Agenda, none of Ford’s rivals benefited politically from the 90-minute encounter.

Sticking to a carefully crafted campaign script, the Tory premier -- who led in every public-opinion poll from start to finish -- courted working-class voters, securing the endorsement of eight private-sector labour unions as part of a “Big Blue Collar Machine” push to win over traditional NDP supporters.

Workplace reforms pushed by Labour Minister Monte McNaughton ensured the support of one-time PC foes like former union leader Patrick Dillon, a key architect of the Working Families coalition whose attack ads helped the Liberals win the 2003, 2007, 2011, and 2014 elections.

Ford’s surprise decision last June to invoke the Constitution’s “notwithstanding clause” for the first time in Ontario history, overriding a judge’s order lifting limits on third-party campaign advertising spending, did not appear to be a factor in the election.

He is now the first Conservative premier to be re-elected since Mike Harris in 1999.

Three years ago, Ford’s chances of a second term seemed unlikely when he was still viewed as an accidental premier and the gaffe-prone older brother of the controversial late Toronto mayor Rob Ford.

His first 20 months in office were plagued with problems, including a failed bid to make septuagenarian family friend, Toronto police Staff Supt. Ron Taverner, commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police.

Gas pump stickers attacking federal carbon pricing measures -- found to be unconstitutional after a legal challenge by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association -- were another embarrassment when it emerged the decals lacked the proper adhesion. (Ford’s family owns a label company, but they didn’t manufacture the stickers.)

Similarly, his bungled bid to switch Ontario licence plates from the traditional white to Tory-blue was abandoned after police warned they were illegible at night.

Ford was loudly booed at the Toronto Raptors’ victory celebration at Nathan Phillips Square on June 17, 2019 while Mayor John Tory and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were cheered.

Days later, after a massive cabinet shuffle that saw him dumping his finance minister 10 weeks after tabling an unpopular first PC budget, Ford parted ways with mercurial chief of staff, Dean French, in the wake of the “French connections” cronyism scandal.

That led the premier to appoint as chief Jamie Wallace, a former Toronto Sun journalist and one-time Queen’s Park press gallery president, injecting much-needed professionalism and calmness into his office.

But it was the COVID-19 pandemic that struck in March 2020 that focused the rookie premier and forced him to finally take governing -- and government -- seriously.

After hearing former Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne defend him on Newstalk 1010, a grateful Ford quietly phoned his one-time fierce rival to seek her advice on the public-health crisis.

Wynne told him he needed “to be out at the microphone. With Christine Elliott your (health) minister there, and you need to be there every day. Because people need to understand what’s going on.”

His aides gave Ford the same counsel and he did just that, convening live televised updates daily for the first months of the pandemic that became appointment viewing for a jittery province.

It was, however, a tumultuous two years.

A staggering 4,400 vulnerable seniors died of COVID-19 in nursing homes that the premier had promised to protect with an “iron ring”; there were crippling lockdowns for businesses; and Ontario schools were closed to in-class learning longer than anywhere else in North America.

Still, Ontario fared better in the global pandemic than most jurisdictions, suffering far fewer deaths per capita than neighbouring Quebec, Manitoba, Michigan and New York.

Voters on Thursday apparently forgave Ford his COVID-19 failings, including the disastrous decision in February 2021 to reopen the economy too quickly amid the Delta variant and his knee-jerk reaction to close things down two months later.

By the time the Omicron variant walloped Ontario last Christmas, millions had been vaccinated -- more than 90 per cent of eligible Ontarians aged five and up have had at least one shot and Ford forced all Tory MPPs and candidates to get shots, parting ways with three of them who declined -- so January’s lockdown seemed less panicked.

In contrast to the bluster and bravado of 2018 when he boasted of cutting spending and finding efficiencies, Ford’s Tories have tabled a record $198.6-billion budget -- 25 per cent more than Wynne spent in 2018 -- with a $19.9 billion deficit. That spending plan will be reintroduced this summer.

Where he once vowed to be a thorn in the side of Trudeau, the Tory premier has been arguably the federal Liberal government’s closest provincial ally throughout the COVID-19 crisis.

His personal friendship with Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland -- the two conferred by phone nightly for the first months of the pandemic -- was instrumental in ensuring Ontario finally signed on to Trudeau’s $10-a-day child care and to keeping federal dollars flowing to the province for COVID-19 relief and joint automotive investments.

“Honestly, I think COVID -- I had an opportunity to get out there. I think I’ve evolved. You evolve into your role,” Ford insisted to the Star’s Martin Regg Cohn on May 22, in his only major campaign interview.

Ontario voters now have another four years to watch that evolution.