Weekly Writ 1/22: Is Ontario heading to the polls?
Plus who has the inside edge in the Liberal leadership race.
Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history that lands in your inbox every Wednesday morning.
It seems that Premier Doug Ford is setting the stage for an early election in Ontario.
The signals aren’t so much subtle as they are blaring and obvious, with Ford saying that he needs a strong mandate from the people to battle U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff threats. Yesterday, Global News also reported on a message sent from Ford’s chief of staff to PC staffers repeating the message that the premier needs a mandate.
Of course, we’ve been speculating about an early Ontario election for months now, long before Trump began talking seriously about tariffs. The reasoning for an early election was simple: Ontarians tend to elect provincial governments of a different hue than the one in Ottawa, plus an Ontario election a year or so into a Pierre Poilievre government might leave Ford’s PCs vulnerable if the Conservatives’ popularity drops as they implement their platform. Better to go early while Justin Trudeau and the Liberals are still in office.
The Ford PCs lacked a rationale before Trump’s tariff threats but seemed likely to go anyway. Now, they have one. We’ll see how long they wait before pulling the plug.
If they do go ahead, it likely means that Ontario will have held a provincial election just months before the federal election is kicked off. How often has that happened?
Only nine times have Ontario and federal elections been held in the same year or within about three months of each other. With the exception of 2011, when Ontario went to the polls in October, five months after Stephen Harper won his majority government, all of these cases date to over 60 years ago.
Only twice have we had concurrent Ontario and federal elections. The first case was in 1867 (when nearly all of the country held concurrent federal and provincial elections) and the second was in 1945.
Can we learn anything from these precedents? The answer is no, not really — because the results are contradictory.
In the nine cases where Ontario and federal elections have been held in the same year or within about three months of each other, seven times have different parties won those elections. This argues in favour of the alternance theory of Ontario politics and, if we assume that Poilievre’s Conservatives will win the federal election, doesn’t bode well for the Ford PCs.
On the other hand, in six of those nine cases the same party won government in Ontario provincially and won the most Ontario seats federally. If we assume Poilievre will win the majority of Ontario’s federal seats, this bodes well for the Ford PCs.
In the end, the results of the Ontario election might not tell us much about what to expect in the federal election. While federal and provincial parties in Ontario share a lot of voters, there are enough split-ticketers between the two to produce different outcomes. At the moment, it looks like the Blue Team has a good chance of going 2-for-2 in Ontario in 2025.
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News on the latest developments in the Liberal leadership race, the criteria for the next federal leaders debates and the sad news of the passing of a Manitoba cabinet minister.
Polls show the OLP gaining in Ontario, plus reveal how Canadians view the threat of U.S. tariffs and which Trudeau policies they’d like to keep in place.
How Queen’s Park would look in Ontario if the election were held today.
The one and only time John A. Macdonald lost an election, in the #EveryElectionProject.