Ontario Election: Pivoting Plans
With the opening weekend of the campaign now over, the Ford Conservatives are tweaking their message to reflect the arrival of Trump’s tariffs. Each opposition party is now pivoting their messaging to the ballot question they didn’t want but will not be able to avoid. This election will be about Ontario’s economy and how to save it from an American bully.
Months of planning go into setting the opening narrative of a party’s campaign. The leader’s tour is planned out in advance down to the inch. Seriously — tour teams actually measure the height of the campaign bus and the clearance available under bridges on its route. They do this to ensure the leader never arrives at a campaign stop in a newly convertible ride.
All of this means that political campaigns are more like cruise ships than speedboats — they don’t turn particularly quickly. I’ve long believed a lot has to go right for even a good campaign team to win an election. But sometimes, all that has to go wrong to lose an election is a team that refuses to read the room and pivot.
It looks like that pivot is now happening. Ford now has to put his cards on the table and say how he’ll respond to Trump from the caretaker governing position he put himself in by calling this campaign. While the opposition parties have realized that if they are going to tell voters that Ford is not the guy to lead us through this emergency, they better have their own plan to assure us they are the better bet.
Ford’s Response
Despite Ford having called this election to perfectly coincide with these tariffs so he can keep cosplaying as Captain Canada, his response has been pretty light.
He’s made the rounds on American television. He plans to remove American booze from stores (but only after spending an extra $600 million of taxpayers’ money to rush it into those stores in time for this campaign). And today he finally decided to cancel the $100 million he planned to pay Elon Musk’s Starlink to deliver internet to just 15,000 Ontarians.
Instead of demonstrating his strong leadership record, the tariffs are actually highlighting how his past blunders have always been at odds with what’s best for our province and its people. It begs the question — if he never gets it right during good times, why would we trust him to lead us through bad times?
Perhaps that’s why on the eve of the tariffs kicking in, he spent the day instead talking about how he has the endorsement of Ontario’s firefighters for the first time in party history. Greg Horton, President of the OPFFA, highlighted Ford’s healthcare record as a reason for the endorsement.
Firefighters, of course, need emergency rooms to be open in order to do their jobs. Not just for the lives they save but also in case they are injured on the job. It’s bewildering, then, that they would back the guy who is singlehandedly dismantling health care in our province.
It remains to be seen whether this endorsement will come with a wave of volunteers for PC campaigns across the province. Historically, the firefighters can be counted on to put up signs and tackle other tasks that need strong bodies on a campaign. And we know that in recent by-elections, the Conservatives had to pay people to canvass for their candidates.
Setting this endorsement distraction aside, Ford will have to spend this week keeping up with the other premiers if he hopes to continue being seen as the country’s leading defender. If his counterparts begin to lap him with decisive action focused on actually helping real people, he could quickly find himself in trouble because he has yet to ever do the same even after six years in office.
The Opposition Response
The NDP Plan
A lot of what the NDP is offering so far is generalized statements of support for workers and industries that will be hit hardest by the tariffs.
They plan to launch a Buy Ontario campaign to promote Ontario-made goods, create a Premier’s Task Force on the Economy with representatives from business and labour, and remove the cap on the Risk Management Program for farmers. Similar to what we saw during COVID, they would negotiate a federal-provincial income program for workers hit hard by this crisis and accelerate infrastructure projects, presumably as part of a broad stimulus package.
To launch this plan, Stiles did something I would not have advised if I had been her tour director. It was smart to launch her plan in Oshawa to show support for Ontario’s auto workers and to protect incumbent NDP MPP Jennifer French. But the NDP held the announcement at the Canadian Automotive Museum with a backdrop of old-timey cars no longer in production.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, you simply don’t put the leader in front of an automotive graveyard on the eve of crushing auto-sector tariffs. It tells your audience that under an NDP Government, Canadian automotive production will only be found in a museum.
The Ontario Liberal Plan
The Ontario Liberal tariff plan launch looked much flashier by comparison. Instead of an event, OLP launched a video of their leader taking credit for pushing Ford to abandon his buy-American track record and cancel the terrible $100 million contract with Elon Musk’s Starlink. The team gets extra points for not including an American flag in their backdrop, unlike Doug Ford.
Then, the Liberals released pretty slick visuals for social media to highlight what they would do to respond to Trump’s tariffs. It almost looked like this had always been the plan for day 5 of the campaign. Given the wall-to-wall coverage of the tariffs, the only real way to break through to the eyeballs of Ontario voters is through paid and viral social media content.
While there’s no guarantee voters will stop and take a look, it seems way more likely they’ll see this content than a boring NDP press release and photo of their leader with century-old vehicles in the background.
Green Party
As much as I didn’t like the NDP’s message response to the tariffs, no one has done a poorer job responding than the Ontario Green Party. With tariffs starting tomorrow after being threatened for months, they still haven’t seen fit to comment. Today, Schreiner is focused on housing instead of the economic tidal wave on its way. If most campaigns are like a cruise ship, then the Green Party is that ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal for six days back in 2021.
What’s Next
If Ford is smart, he’ll spend the rest of this week taking a flurry of action to respond to the tariffs so that his opponents can’t claim he’s sitting on his hands or that his opportunistic election call has left his hands tied.
If the opposition is smart, they’ll use ongoing tariff talk to lean into all the times Ford has gotten it wrong on the economy and Ontario’s finances in the past. By doing this, they can demonstrate he is the wrong person to protect us in the years ahead.
Update:
Since writing this piece, Prime Minister Trudeau has announced that the tariffs will be put on hold for at least 30 days. But each Ontario party leader should not put their plans away — we know from the first Trump administration that it’s important to stay vigilant and have an answer ready when the ground inevitably begins to shift again.
Theresa has served as the Communications Coordinator for the Ontario Liberal Party, the Director of Communications to Ontario Deputy Premier Deb Matthews, and an election speechwriter for former Premier Kathleen Wynne. She owns a communications company operating out of Toronto.
