With rumors of a snap election in Ontario circulating in Queen’s Park, all major parties are racing to nominate a full slate of 124 candidates to compete in every election in the province.
Doug Ford appears to be ramping up his rhetoric about the need for early voting nearly a year and a half before the province’s next regular election in June 2026. The premier has refused to rule out an early election, emphasizing this week that if US President-elect Donald Trump imposes sweeping tariffs on Canadian goods, will need a new mandate to help Ontario workers and businesses.
“We’re looking at spending tens of billions of dollars right now,” he said. “It will be our province that will be affected more than any other jurisdiction in the country.
“We are the ones who have the target on our backs.”
The Ontario government has enhanced security measures along its border with the United States as part of its response to Donald Trump’s tariff threats. As CBC’s Shawn Jeffords reports, Ontario Premier Doug Ford made several international media appearances to make his case.
Despite the uncertainty surrounding a possible election, all parties are accelerating preparations with a key focus on getting their candidates into office.
The Ontario Progressive Conservatives began nominating candidates last September, but the pace of those nominations has accelerated in recent months, and the party has already nominated 74 people. The Liberal Party says it has nominated or is in the process of nominating 50 candidates. The Green Party says it has nominated 45 candidates and the New Democrats say they have 31 candidates in place.
Parties step on the accelerator to nominate candidates
“I definitely think there’s one foot on the accelerator,” said Mélanie Richer, principal at Earnscliffe Strategies and former communications director for federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh.
Richer said Ford’s comments this week about possible early voting have further solidified the push that all parties are doing right. It takes time to search for candidates, hold elections when necessary, and hold votes or meetings, even if it is just to hail a single candidate.
“Bells are ringing that maybe we will go faster,” he said. “You have to find people. You have to speed up those processes.”
With signs that an election could be called in Ontario within a month, Metro Morning hosted a panel of party strategists to discuss the strategy behind sending voters to the polls early.
And that’s no easy task, said former Ontario Liberal cabinet minister John Milloy, who is now director of the Center for Public Ethics at Martin Luther College. Parties must also spend time vetting candidates, and the rush now only increases the margin of error for all parties.
“I think we’ll also see situations in all three parties where we’ll have candidates who we’ll discover have skeletons in their closets,” he said. “And it’s a distraction to the campaign.”
Conservative strategist Dan Mader, founder of Loyalist Strategies, said it’s difficult to guard against research errors with such short potential timelines before an early election.
“The quicker you put something together, the fewer people you have a chance to take a look at and examine it, the more likely you are to make a mistake,” he said.
New campaign strategies to combat Trump’s tariff threats
Mader, who has worked on policy development for federal conservatives, says parties are also rushing to rework their campaign strategies based on the emergence of Trump’s tariff threats. The campaign that all parties anticipated last year has taken a dramatic turn since the US elections in November, he said.
“The whole campaign, or a big part of it, could be about how to respond to Trump, how to respond to his tariffs, how to protect or rebuild our economy,” he said. “People are scrambling to come up with plans.”
All major parties will also continue to raise funds to be ready to spread their messages before and during the elections. But that money also covers the logistics of bus rentals, campaign office space and things as simple as lawn signs, he added.
And while Ford’s public statements about an early election call leave some room for ambiguity, Mader said momentum is growing anyway. As time goes on and more is done to prepare for early voting, it will become increasingly difficult to avoid going to the polls, he said.
“When you start asking people to prepare to take time off from their day jobs to work on the campaign, you can’t keep it totally quiet,” he said. “That starts to trickle down and people start to get a good idea of what’s going to happen.”
Milloy said he has been part of federal campaign war rooms where inertia builds up before an election call and that goes to a point of no return. Even when storm clouds have gathered that could threaten victory, sometimes it’s too late to turn back, and that could be the case now in Ontario, he added.
“I remember being in planning meetings where we were saying, ‘Look, it’s just too late to change things,'” Milloy said.
