The delay in the imposition of U.S. tariffs by at least 30 days, that is March 4 or later, dramatically changes the Ontario election campaign. Doug Ford will not be directing Ontario’s response to tariffs. He won’t be able to do photo ops in front on empty shelves at the LCBO or shut-down production lines at an auto plant. And, with Canada no longer the top story in the U.S. media, CNN and Fox will stop calling him for interviews. Instead, he will have to face the voters of Ontario.

New Lines of Attack

Two new lines of attack have just opened up. His hot mic statement yesterday, “On election day, was I happy this guy [Trump] won? One hundred percent I was” raises all sorts of questions. The first is whether he realized that Trump’s threat of tariffs was not hot air and was aimed directly at Canada. To their credit, the Ontario Liberals overnight developed an attack ad, which you can access from an article in The Toronto Star, that makes this point. By the way, Ford is wearing a yellow sweatshirt, which isn’t a good look. The second type of question is what it is about Trump that Ford likes: his blatant conflict of interest, his climate change denial, his ciminality? his opposition to DEI? This question, too, could be turned into an attack ad, perhaps using the theme of “family values.”

A second line of attack concerns Ford’s overnight flip-flop on canceling the contract with Elon Musk’s company Starlink to provide rural Internet. As Ford will no longer cancel the contract, then he must think it is a good one. If so, he should make it public, just as he ultimately did with the Therme Group contract, which has turned out to be a very bad one. So Ford is vulnerable on both the contract itself, and the secrecy of the contracting process.

Strategic Voting Revisited

Like the 2022 election, we are in a situation where the PC’s are ahead in the polls, with 45 percent of the popular vote according to Eric Grenier’s first poll aggregation, but with the Liberals, NDP, and Greens dividing up the “progressive” 51 percent share of the vote. In the 2022 election, the NDP’s vote was much more efficient than the Liberals’ in translating votes into seats in the Legislature, as I discussed in detail in a post last August.

I reviewed Grenier’s forecast on a constituency-by-constituency basis, looking for seats that he rated likely and toss-ups, and for the toss-ups, which parties are involved. The NDP is considered likely to win 6 seats, with 13 toss-ups between the NDP and the PCs. The Liberals are considered likely to win 4 seats, with 10 toss-ups between the Liberals and the PCs. And there are 7 toss-ups between the Liberals and the NDP. If we are optimistic about both Opposition parties, the NDP would have 19 seats and the Liberals 14, there would be another 7 seats that are either Liberal of NDP, and two seats are likely to remain Green. This would put the total Opposition seats at 42 in the 124-seat legislature, similar to their total at dissolution.

Rivalry between the Liberals and the NDP is a major hindrance to strategic voting. The Liberals are more centrist than the NDP, which translates into the NDP accusing the Liberals of being a copy of the PCs. The Liberals are consistently ahead of the NDP in the popular vote, but not by so large a margin that the Liberals can appeal to NDP voters across the province to vote Liberal to avoid another Ford Government. By virtue of being more centrist, I think the Liberals have more potential to pick up votes from disaffected PC voters (though Grenier’s first aggregation doesn’t show that).

My Conclusion

The pause in the tariff war offers the Opposition parties an opportunity to change the conversation to other issues: health care, affordability, education, housing, corruption and cronyism, transportation. It’s a now-or-never moment.