Sulking towards the big house. Cronyocracy rules?

William Paul  – 2025-03-11

Doug Ford spent last weekend “sulking” because he didn’t grab the 90 to 100 seats he was hoping for during the bogus election campaign that ended with a third Tory majority on February 27. At least that’s what Tory sources told Toronto Star reporters Sunday. It’s kind of telling, that the premier for whom victory was unquestionable would be ticked because he didn’t get the absolute electoral supremacy he thought was coming to him. He’s a rich man whose house is never quite big enough.

Blame it on Trump. Maybe if Ford had just kept his mic off and not slavered on about his favourite sociopath – except the bit about “ the guy pulled out the knife and f..king yanked it into us, ” he might have maintained his amicable average guy routine. But as I mentioned in a previous article that mic slip-up  says a lot about his true ideological bent: admiration for dictatorial leaders, breaking down government, privatizing public services that have taken generations to create, leaving the sick untended, houses unbuilt and the homeless on the street.

That part’s not in the Tory platform which, off the top, touts $18 billion1 just to shore things up for workers if they’re hurt by U.S. tariffs, while it cuts business taxes, pays the privately owned 407 ETR to cut tolls and builds plenty more new highways including – God help us – tunnelling a new expressway under the Toronto section of the 401.2 He’s going to make it easier for developers to get projects started – watch for that one3 – put $50 billion towards new hospitals4 and keep criminals behind bars with new mandatory minimum sentences, a three-strike rule restriction for bail and more.5 Are the Tories planning to be in power for another 40 years? Where’s the money coming from to pay for all of this, with a government, mired in a net debt of $429 billion? This, even as it passed out $3 billion in vote-buying treats and another $189 million for that election. Of course, no mention anywhere of tax increases; Ford would lose his base. So what public goods and services will he be throwing into the smelter?

An unnamed senior PC official told the Star that it was “smart” to pull the election switch 15 months before time, even though Ford possessed just what he needed to fight those Trump tariffs: a stable majority. As the official added, you never know; things might have become dicey with the tariff war, recession and that looming RCMP report about the Greenbelt fiasco. It might have put that majority out of reach. Whoa – hold everything! An election held at the proper time might have imperilled Tories’ presumed right to rule? That would have caused a bit more than a sulk.

However, Ford did manage to make one last use of Bill 307 the Protecting Elections and Defending Democracy Act. While this act did nothing to defend democracy, it did limit third party election advertising to $600 000 during the year prior to a scheduled election. That put a collar on organizations like unions spending money to raise issues about whomever is in power. The Tories have always done better with individual donations from people and companies chipping in $1 000 and up.6  For instance, “opportunities” to chat with Tory MPPs come with a price tag; $1 250 a head seems to be the going rate. Readers of the Queen’s Park report, The Trillium, could check out these paywall chats throughout the election, even though the PCs already had $4.8 million in the election kitty, nearly double the total raised by the Liberals and NDP combined.

So vital to the health of Tory cronyocracy was the legislation, that Ford used of the “notwithstanding clause”, Section 33 of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms to override any protest people might have about its effect upon freedom of expression. Nonetheless, a coalition of teachers’ unions OSSTF/FEESO, OECTA, ETFO and Working Families won their appeal against the legislation at the Ontario Court of Appeal. When the Ford government appealed the appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, it lost in a 5-4 decision announced last Friday. The majority justices noted that:

“Third parties often use political advertisements to comment on the merits and faults of a particular candidate or party, bring new issues to the political discourse, and add new perspectives on issues associated with candidates and political parties. Regulation of third party advertising may thus restrict citizens’ opportunity to become informed of political issues, parties, and candidates.”7

This has never been anywhere close to top-of-mind for the Tories who work under a buddy-system of government patronage. PC Party first vice-president, Chis Loreto, also head of Strategy Corporation, lobbied on behalf of Arch Capital to his government friends in its bid to explore the long-term care market. Kory Teneycke, Ford’s campaign director for the past 3 elections, co-founder of lobby group, Rubicon Strategies, helped KWG Resources link up with the premier as it explored chromite deposits in his much-touted Ring of Fire in northern Ontario. The list of friends goes on.8

After all the noise about a must-have election to save Ontario from Trump, what do we have for our $189 million? Tories up 2 percent in the popular vote, but down 3 seats in the legislature and with pretty much the same commanding majority they will now keep until 2029 – unless they decide to call another snap election over some other trumped up concern.

The real eye-opener, despite their claim of victory as third-time Opposition Party is the sinking of the NDP. Okay, they only lost 4 seats and that’s better than pollsters like Allan Gregg predicted. But look at their results: 931 796 people voted for them– 18.6 percent of those who cast a ballot. The Liberals beat them by over 573 000 votes, with nearly 30 percent of the overall count, though they only gained 6 seats. After 7 years, Liberals now have official party status.

This is bad – really bad for people’s confidence in the democratic process here in Ontario, despite my antipathy for the Liberal Party. The Tories, with about 43 percent of the popular vote, control 64.5 percent of the 124 seats in the legislature. The NDP, Liberals and Greens combined, have 53 percent of the vote but only 41 percent of the seats. Yes, the NDP mostly did well with their incumbents, unfortunately losing a good MPP, Jill Andrew. They also dumped their short-lived star Sara Jama after she refused to retract a statement decrying gross human rights violations made by Israel in its slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

At 45.5 percent, the turnout for Doug Ford’s winter election of 2025 was a tiny bit better than that of 2022, something that underscores – again – the pathetic drop in voter participation over the last number of years. When the Tories get 43 percent of that 45.5 percent voter people, it looks more like they got the nod from about 20 percent of the voting population. The opposition NDP garnered more like 9 percent of that voting pool. And so it goes.

This is a shambles, not a representative government, no matter what victories are claimed. It’s essentially the same government as the one elected in 2022 by such a low turnout Democracy Watch called it a “clear crisis”. The first-past-the-post electoral system in which the candidate with – not the majority – but the most votes wins: this system has to go. A form of proportional representation that assigns seats in government according to parties’ share of the overall vote must replace it. Three of Ontario’s parties – the NDP, Liberals and Greens –pledged to support electoral reform before the 2022 election. But Doug Ford, with the most to lose in a proportional ranked system, said ‘no thanks.’

According to Fair Vote Canada, 2025 election results from a proportional ranked ballot could look like this:

Party                Percent of vote           # of Seats        Percent of seats

PC                                43                        58                            46.8

Liberal                         30                        39                            31.5

NDP                             18.5                     23                            18.5

Green                          4.8                       3                              2.4

Other                           2.1                       1                                 .8

New Blue                    1.6                       0                                  0

 

With more Tory seats, despite a prevailing majority, Doug Ford wanted quiescence in the legislature, not so many bothersome or organized opposition members questioning what appears to be his party’s assumption about its prerogative to rule. It’s one of the qualities he admires about the U.S. oligarch and the main reason he needs a powerful opposition based upon fair representation in the legislature.

 

 

 

Notes:

  1. Ontario PC Party 2025 Election Platform https://ontariopc.ca/our-plan/  p.5
  2. Ibid – p. 8
  3. Ibid – p.20
  4. Ibid – p. 27
  5. Ibid – p. 24
  6. Democracy Watch, “ 2021 Donations Show Ford PC Party Made Ontario Political Finance System More Undemocratic,” May 31, 2022.
  7. Supreme Court of Canada Decision, 2025-03-07 https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/20896/index.do
  8. Will Paul “Riding the Gravy Train,” Against the People: How Ford Nation is Dismantling Ontario, – eds: Bryan Evans and Carlo Fanelli, Fernwood Press, January 2025.