With rumours of an early Ontario election swirling at Queen’s Park, all of the major parties are racing to nominate a full slate of 124 candidates to contest every riding in the province.
Doug Ford appears to be ramping up his rhetoric around the need for an early vote nearly a year and a half ahead of the province’s next fixed election in June 2026. The premier has refused to rule out an early election and stressed this week that if U.S. president-elect Donald Trump imposes sweeping tariffs on Canadian goods, he 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’s going to be our province that’s going to be affected more than any other jurisdiction in the country.
“We’re the ones with the target on our back.”
The Ontario government has enhanced security measures along its border with the United States as part of its response to tariff threats from Donald Trump. As CBC’s Shawn Jeffords reports, Ontario Premier Doug Ford made several appearances on international media to make his case.
Despite the uncertainty surrounding a possible election, all of the parties are kicking preparations into high gear with a key focus on getting their candidates in place.
Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives began nominating candidates last September, but the pace of those nominations has quickened over the past few months, with the party now having 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 put ‘foot on the gas’ to nominate candidates
“I definitely think that there’s a foot on the gas,” said Mélanie Richer, a principal at Earnscliffe Strategies and former communications director for federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh.
Richer said Ford’s comments this week about a possible early vote have further solidified the push all parties are making right. It takes time to search for candidates, run races where required and hold votes or meetings — even if it’s just to acclaim a single candidate.
“Bells are ringing that we may be going faster,” she said. “You have to find folks. You have to accelerate those processes.”
With signs that an election in Ontario could be called within a month, Metro Morning hosted a panel of party strategists to debate the strategy behind sending voters to the polls early.
And that’s no simple task, said former Ontario Liberal cabinet minister John Milloy, who is now the director of the Centre for Public Ethics at Martin Luther University College. Parties must also spend time vetting candidates, and the rush now just increases the margin of error for all of the parties.
“I think we’re also going to see situations in all three parties where we’re going to have candidates (who) we’re going to find out they have skeletons in their closets,” he said. “And it’s a distraction for the campaign.”
Conservative strategist Dan Mader, a founder of Loyalist Strategies, said it’s difficult to guard against vetting errors with such short potential timelines ahead of a snap election.
“The quicker you put something together, the fewer people you have who have a chance to take a look at it and vet it, the more likely you are to make a mistake,” he said.
New campaign strategies to fight Trump tariff threats
Mader, who has worked on policy development for the federal Conservatives, says the parties are also rushing to re-draft their campaign strategies based on the emergence of Trump’s tariff threats. The campaign all of the parties anticipated last year, has taken a dramatic turn since the U.S. election in November, he said.
“The entire campaign, or a huge part of it, might 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 of the major parties will also continue to fundraise so they’re ready to blast out their messages ahead of, and during, an election. But that cash also pays for the logistics of renting buses, campaign office space and things as simple as lawn signs, he added.
And while Ford’s public statements about an early election call leaves some room for ambiguity, Mader said momentum is building regardless. As time passes and more is done to prepare for an early vote, it will be harder and harder to keep from going to the polls, he said.
“As you start to ask people to prepare to take a leave of absence from their day jobs and work on the campaign, you can’t keep it totally quiet,” he said. “That starts to leak out and people start to get a good idea that it’s coming.”
Milloy said he’s been part of federal campaign war rooms where an inertia builds ahead of an election call and that passes a point of no return. Even when storm clouds have developed 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 at planning meetings where we would say, “Look, it’s simply too late to turn it around,'” Milloy said.
