Doug Ford and the victory of its progressive conservatives in Thursday’s Ontario elections occurred as a result of a campaign that focused on the only problem that captures the minds of the Canadians at this time, a leader who worked tirelessly to make the most of his opportunity and a perfect political moment.
Ford PCs were chosen or led in 80 of the 124 ontarium seats early Friday, which makes it the first leader since the 1950s to win three consecutive majorities in this province.
Success in politics means winning elections, so the majority of three mobs means that the name Doug Ford must now be included with the tastes of Bill Davis, Leslie Frost, James Whitney and Oliver Mowat in conversations about the most successful ontary prime ministers of all time.
“This choice promised to do whatever it takes to protect Ontario and I am very proud of the support we received,” Ford told the crowd in his speech in his celebration of the night of the elections in Toronto.
Ford had set his look taller than most of the status quo. “The bigger the mandate I receive from you, the better we can protect our province,” he said in his first campaign speech.
Measured by the seats, Ford’s mandate is actually smaller than the one he had before activating the elections. However, a majority is the majority, so Ford has now earned another four years in power.
From Ford’s historical victory to a humble loss in Mississauga for Crombie, looks at the most prominent aspects of the province’s winter elections, freed in front of Donald Trump’s tariff threats.
Ford’s political advisors had been urging him for months to call the early elections, and his motivation was clear.
The objective was to reach the surveys before something could damage Ford’s possibilities, particularly the possibility of criminal charges in the green belt scandal against any person related to the office of the prime minister, or the perspective of a future federal conservative government under Pierre Poilievre doing anything that obtains voters in the Tory brand.
The green -belt controversy comes from the decision of the Ford government to give certain developers the right to build houses in protected lands.
Trump gave PCs reason for early elections
But beyond the pure political advantage, the PC team needed an apparent reason for the choice they could sell to voters.
Donald Trump gave them one weeks after winning the presidential elections of the United States.
Trump threatened at the end of November to slapped 25 percent of tariffs on all Canadian exports to the United States immediately after its inauguration.
Credit the PC team, directed by the campaign director Kory Teneycke, for realizing that an election in these circumstances would ask the electoral ballot “who is the best person to take Ontario under the threat of tariffs?” And to know that this was a winning formula for Ford.
In statements to Lorenda Reddekopp of CBC, Doug Ford’s campaign manager presented the case of the first ontarium elections in the middle of the “incomparable and unprecedented threat” of the tariffs south of the border.
And Doug Ford seized the moment.
As the Prime Minister of the most populous province in Canada, with an export -oriented economy deeply vulnerable to tariffs, Ford would naturally have the opportunity to enter the center of national care in such a situation.
He also served as president of the prime ministers of Canada, giving him a formal role of political leadership (and a photo for the ages, framed by a multitude of reporters and microphones, which his party then used in campaign advertising).
All this was happening for Ford at a time when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was politically weak, facing what seemed an almost safe defeat in an election that could arise at any time.
While instability in Ottawa helped increase the credibility of Ford’s tariff fight, he also raised a problem for his team at the time of an electoral call. The very real perspective that the Trudeau minority government could fall into a vote of non -consciousness meant that a federal election could be unminely triggered, so it is impossible for Ford, with mostly solid as a rock, justify calling a provincial election.
The prorogado parliament gives Ford Window
As recently as Christmas, Ford’s advisors had not yet managed to persuade him to be early.
What finally inclined the balance: Trudeau’s announcement on January 6 that the Parliament extended and would resign as prime minister.
The prorogation and the Federal Liberal Leadership career gave the Ontario PC a two -month guaranteed window in which there could be no federal elections. (The leadership contest also provided the additional advantage of sucking a key personnel, resources and attention from provincial liberals).
PC campaign machinery was launched. Only three weeks and one day after Trudeau announced his resignation, Ford visited Lieutenant Governor to start the campaign.
The declared justification of Ford for the elections was that he needed a new mandate to “survive and survive the Trump administration.”
The premise can be described more questionable as questionable, as if the results of a Canadian provincial election somehow mark an ounce of difference for the president of the United States, but voters declined punishing Ford for it.
Patea the campaign in Windsor
The Ford campaign began in Windsor, with the ambassadors bridge at the bottom, symbolizing the threat that US tariffs would represent for the Ontario economy.
The itinerary of the PC leader showed a party aggressively with the aim of adding to its seat count, instead of just protecting their victories from the last elections. In the first half of the campaign, Ford hit Cities such as London, St. Catharines, Niagara Falls, Ottawa and Waterloo, all the places to which the PCs were heading to discourage the headlines, mostly new Democrats.
The numbers on Thursday night show that the PCs stayed well below that ambition: Ford’s party won only two seats previously in the hands of other parts: Hamilton-Mountain and Algoma-Manitoulin.
He played it safe in the televised debate throughout the province, without having the hook when liberal leader Bonnie Crombie, the leader of the NDP Marit Stiles or the green leader Mike Schreiner tried to provoke it at a viral moment that they could use against him.
The Ford campaign was in that cruise control that spent nine consecutive days without holding a press conference in Ontario, and there were no signs that his absence had any impact on his voting number.
He did at least 10 interviews with the main American media during the campaign, and precisely zero interviews with any of the media that cover the Ontario policy daily. Again, there is no evidence that the strategy harms its electoral possibilities, and in fact they may have improved them.
Hot microphone gaffes
Ford’s own performance in the campaign was not exempt from Gaffes. The largest two involved him by doing untidy comments at the time he didn’t know he was being recorded.
A camera microphone captured Ford on February 3 telling two of its candidates and some followers that was “100 percent” happy when Trump won the presidential elections In November.
As Toronto star reported for the first time on February 13, Ford told a police gala in London the first night of the campaign that if he left his, he would send criminals who kill someone in an invasion of the house “Right to Sparky”, a nickname for the electric chair.
Ford put aside both comments: his happiness for Trump’s victory as a belief that “things could be a bit different” from the president’s first mandate, and his preference for capital punishment as “a joke.”
Although Ford rivals tried to attack their comments as evidence of dishonesty, none of the incidents seemed to cause an error in their surveys.
It was coming throughout the campaign was Trump’s tremendously unpredictable approach and apparently irrational for tariffs against Canada.
On February 1 (the fourth day of the campaign), Trump signed an executive order to hit Canada with 25 percent tariffs. Two days later, Trump offered a 30 -day break in general tariffs. Then, six days later, he announced a plan to slapped tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum.
Pour one for Ford rivals and attempts to campaign about any provincial problem beyond tariffs.
Ontario has chosen Doug Ford to be his prime minister for another four years. Julia Knope de CBC breaks down her campaign promises, and what is at stake for the province.
The NDP and the liberals were updating from the first moment. In trouble to nominate the candidates, building only nine headlines in a province with 124 walks, Crombie found himself having to defend or abandon liberal candidates whose publication publications advised against them were excavated by the PC Party Party research team of PC well recurrent.
The choice was clearly Ford’s to win. Consider the punctuality of the Ford government movement to reduce each voter from Ontario taxpayers a check for $ 200, from the beginning of January. It meant that millions of checks landed in the mailboxes throughout the province during the campaign, sometimes arriving the same day as the voter information card.
Ford now has a mandate for a little more than four years. According to the Ontario Fixed Date Elections Law, the Voting Day is the first Thursday in June four calendar years after the last elections. That means that Ontario voters are scheduled to go to the polls in June 2029.
Will Ford seek re -election? The last day of the campaign, he said: “I want to be prime minister forever.”
