Buckle up for two lousy elections, Ontario

Next year, Ontarians are set to spend roughly one out of every five days in an election. The federal writs are due by the fall, and Ontario premier Doug Ford is expected to call an early election to get ahead of a police investigation into the Greenbelt scandal and to campaign against the federal Liberals, instead of the Conservatives, who are expected to soon replace them. 

The two elections are unlikely to overlap, but they don’t have to in order to create a dynamic in which an already hyper-politicized moment is driven even further into the realm of blatant, cynical electioneering. Parties from two orders of government, the Ontario Progressive Conservatives and the federal Liberals, are at once running against, and playing off of, one another, with Ford intent on attacking Trudeau, and the prime minister borrowing a move or two from the Ford playbook.

Spoiler: it’s going to be tiring, obnoxious, and cynical stuff.

Ford appears very keen to run against prime minister Justin Trudeau. There’s an old bit of folk wisdom in Canadian politics that when the Liberals govern in Ottawa, the Tories govern at Queen’s Park – and vice versa. The trend isn’t absolute, but it does more or less hold up stretching back to the 1960s, and it’s providing an opportunity for Ford to run against the unpopular Trudeau.

The cross-federation dynamic has already emerged. Ford has been using Trudeau as a foil for months. With attacks against carbon pricing and interest rates set by the Bank of Canada, Ford has worked to contrast his agenda – presented as an effort to support day-to-day, hard working folks – with a federal government he blames for the cost of living crisis. Ford has called on the feds to scrap carbon pricing and demanded the Bank of Canada lower interest rates, intimating that it’s the Liberals who are, at least in part, responsible for their being so high in the first place. 

Ford isn’t alone in calling for Trudeau to axe the tax. Other provincial parties have run against that policy, and by implication Trudeau, including Ontario Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie. So did British Columbia NDP leader David Eby in his successful bid to remain in power this fall. With Trudeau’s numbers in the tank, and the federal Conservatives also calling for an end to carbon pricing, Trudeau and his policy are easy targets – and easy scapegoats. Expect plenty of focus on repealing carbon pricing in the months to come. 

There are certain affinities between Ford and Trudeau, however – or perhaps unintended flattery by way of imitation. Both favour sending pre-election bribe cheques to voters. In October, the Ontario government announced it would send cash to residents in the new year, with $200 “rebates” going out “to support families facing high interest rates and the federal carbon tax.” In November, Trudeau announced he’d do the same – $250 cheques, in this case – alongside a GST holiday on a number of consumer goods from Dec. 14 to Feb 15. But while the GST break is on, the cheques are being held up in the House of Commons.

Both leaders are responding to public frustration at high costs which, despite cuts to the Bank of Canada interest rate and prices rising more slowly, are still making it tough for people to make ends meet. The pre-election bribe cheques may indicate that while Ford may be running against Trudeau, both will be laser-focused on affordability in the months to come ahead of their respective elections, and neither will be above crass politicking and borrowing an idea or two if they think it will play.

Whatever happens, the two will still have to work together, especially on managing the threat of Donald Trump’s upcoming across-the-board tariffs. Trudeau met with Ford and the other premiers last week and presented a border security plan designed to placate Trump and, the feds hope, get him to walk back the tariff threat, which the incoming Republican says is in response to fentanyl and irregular migrants crossing the Canada-U.S. border en masse (two things that are not, in fact, happening). Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland is preparing to retaliate with tariffs on U.S. goods while Ford, for his part, is threatening to cut off energy sales to the five states Ontario supplies. 

That politicians will be partisan and political — mixing cooperation and competition, searching endlessly for advantage, and always worrying about the next election — is a political truism. And for a reason. But the coming year will dial the politicking between Trudeau and Ford up to 11 – and will almost certainly leave Ontarians, already frustrated and irritated with their leaders and worried about paying the bills, wearier than ever. No $200 or $250 cheque is going to change that.