Ford wins Ontario election but the real fights are still to come

Ontario Premier Doug Ford claimed he called an election for February 27 because he needed to secure a strong mandate to take on Donald Trump. It was always a poor justification — he already had a majority — but it didn’t turn out the way he hoped.

While his Conservatives won again, they actually lost a few seats compared to the last vote in 2022.

But the tariff threat from Trump really was a gift to Ford. His ‘Captain Canada’ rhetoric allowed him to change the narrative and avoid running on his record. Whenever an opposition candidate or reporter tried to bring up the many scandals of the Tories — from the greenbelt scandal to the destruction of public healthcare— he simply avoided the question and went back to the threat from the US.

His previous public support for Trump was barely talked about.

So we ended up with a legislature that is very similar to the last one. Bonnie Crombie and the Liberals gained 6 seats and the NDP lost 4.

For the Liberals, the link between the hated Trudeau and the provincial party meant that Crombie was waging an uphill battle and didn’t even win her own seat.

The same can be said for the provincial NDP, which lost hundreds of thousands of votes. The connection between the Federal NDP wing under Jagmeet Singh, which propped up Trudeau for 3 years, meant they had a difficult time posing as a real opposition. This is especially so given their own seriously uninspiring platform.

The NDP decision to both expel and then run against Sarah Jama in Hamilton Centre meant that a younger generation of activists wrote off the party and decided to sit out the campaign this time.

The NDP brass will not see it this way. The fact that Jama lost to an NDP candidate and that Marit Stiles was able to tread water and maintain official opposition status will be used to justify this ongoing shift towards the centre.

Overall, it was the weakness of the opposition party campaigns and the fact that they ceded the terrain of the tariff fight, which meant that Ford coasted to victory rather easily.

Elections and capitalism

As socialists we see the electoral process under capitalism as a deeply flawed and distorted reflection of the political will of the people. Elections certainly have an impact on people’s lives, but on the most substantive issues little changes for working people.

You don’t elect your boss or your landlord or any of the billionaires that really pull the strings in our society. Your options are to support one of a few parties that all accept the dominance of the capitalists. So after dutifully voting, most people continue to suffer. Rents still go up, the cost of living continues to get worse and none of the parties are capable or even willing to change that.

In this election, once again, more people decided not to vote at all. That reflects this malaise with the official institution of formal bourgeois democracy which seems more for show than to bring about real change.

The state is designed to maintain the class rule of the rich in the context of irreconcilable class antagonisms. The rich and the rest of us (the working class and poor) are constantly in conflict. The state is designed to play a role in mitigating that conflict and keeping it within proper and allowable channels, the parameters of which are dictated by the ruling class.

Frederick Engels wrote in The Origin of the family, private property and the state, “Because the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but because it arose, at the same time, in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class.”

To overcome the impasse that this context ensures, we need to build a larger and broader working class movement to alter the balance of class forces and push for a radical break with the system.

The tasks ahead

The fight against the Ford government sits today on the same terrain as it did before the vote. There will be many fights to come.

We still need to push to stop the destruction of healthcare. We still need to walk the picket lines to show solidarity with workers who are fighting back. We still need to fight the rise of racist anti-immigrant sentiment that is a threat both in Canada and across the world.

The Trump tariff and annexation threats will make these fights ever more acute. The bosses will use the resulting economic instability to force concessions from an already beleaguered working class. Our fight remains in the streets and workplaces and communities, where working people can unite and push back against the bosses’ attacks.