(Bloomberg) — Doug Ford, whose folksy briefings became a daily fixture for Ontario residents during the pandemic, looks set to win a second term as premier of Canada’s most populous province.
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Ford’s Conservatives have a commanding lead over their nearest rivals in polls and appear likely to secure a majority with least 63 seats in the province’s legislature. It’s a comeback that speaks to the exhaustion of voters and their desire for a familiar road ahead.
The premier, whose province has about 15 million people and an economy larger than Ohio’s, is running on a election platform titled “Let’s Get It Done” that includes a grab-bag of spending policies. Promises to build new highways, cut fuel taxes for six months and solve traffic gridlock have appealed to his suburban base.
Massive construction plans — for housing, long-term care facilities and a new university — won him endorsements from trade unions that don’t usually support conservative parties in Canada.
Ford, 57, imposed some of the toughest restrictions in North America to handle the pandemic: many businesses were forced to close their doors for the better part of a year. As recently as December, he was facing withering criticism for his handling of the crisis and his approval rating dropped to a two-year low.
Yet five months later, he could win the largest number of seats in the province’s legislature since the 1990s.
Ford’s rivals have called out his performance during the pandemic — from his U-turns on lockdowns to failing to protect seniors in long-term care facilities from the virus. They’ve also attacked his history of cutting social services and record on climate change. Since coming to power in 2018, Ford has scrapped a number of climate initiatives including Ontario’s cap-and-trade system and renewable energy contracts.
But little of the criticism has stuck. “The opposition parties have never managed to get their message through and they were never able to dent the armor of Doug Ford,” said Philippe Fournier, founder of polling site 338Canada.
Post-pandemic commuter woes have proven an opportunity for the car-loving Ford, who once filmed himself going through a fast-food drive-through. Andrea Horwath, who leads the largest opposition party in the legislature, has tried to compete with her own promise to remove tolls for commercial trucks on a major highway spanning the Greater Toronto Area. But Horwath is running for election for the fourth time and has never managed to come close to winning.
“I find it a little rich that this is the campaign where they’re talking about ‘getting it done’ but for the last four years they haven’t,“ Sara Singh, deputy leader of the Horwath’s New Democratic Party, said in an interview. Relieving traffic congestion is important in her community but the Conservative proposals are “election gimmicks” rather than real proposals, said Singh, who is trying to retain a seat in Brampton, a Toronto suburb, that she won by only 89 votes in 2018.
“Infrastructure that’s about building a highway that takes less than one minute off of peoples’ commute times and really just supports developers, is not what people are looking for,” said Stephanie Bowman, the Liberal candidate in the Toronto seat of Don Valley West and a former Bank of Canada board member, in a phone interview. Her party’s leader, Steven Del Duca, offered “buck-a-ride” public transit to voters but is still is in danger of losing his own district.
Throughout the campaign, Ford has stayed on message, emphasizing a forward-looking infrastructure-building agenda and avoiding controversial decisions in the past, which also include cuts to public health budgets and the cancellation of a universal basic income pilot project.
“Because there’s so many other things going on, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, high inflation, affordability issues and so on, the election itself hasn’t really been front and center,” Christopher Cochrane, a University of Toronto political science professor, said. “That’s been a big advantage for Ford.”
With less than a week to go, the election appears Ford’s to lose. “The Conservative lead is as safe as it can get,” Cochrane said. It seems all Ford has to do is keep both hands on the wheel — and cruise to victory.
“To say that it flew under the radar is a nice euphemism,” Fournier said of the election race. “It was boring as hell.”
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