Bluer than blue? New Blue and Ontario Party vying for non-PC votes

In a small and sweltering hotel room in suburban Ottawa, it was standing-room only last Wednesday night as more than a hundred supporters listened to 90 minutes of speeches from the leader and local candidates of a party running in its first election ever.

"I'm very grateful that they showed up," New Blue Party leader Jim Karahalios told CBC News after the event.

"Every time we take a step, we gain momentum.There's no shortcuts for us. So this is all a grassroots effort. But every meeting we're having, we're pleasantly surprised."

Along with the Ontario Party, founded in 2018, the New Blue party is positioning itself as a more conservative alternative to Doug Ford's Progressive Conservatives.

The New Blue and Ontario Party have similarities. Their platforms both have anti-pandemic mandate stances, and each boasts an incumbent MPP who was thrown out of the PC caucus in the last term.

They're both among 21 minor parties — and 41 independent candidates —  that are vying for voters dissatisfied with the four mainstream options in the June 2 provincial election. 

Of the 900 candidates registered with Elections Ontario by the May 12 deadline, more than 400 are affiliated with minor parties.

However, because these minor parties are often lumped together under "other" in opinion polls, it's hard to know how much support any individual party might have.

Currently, polling shows about five or six per cent of people are responding "other" when asked if they'd vote for the PCs, Liberals, New Democrats or Greens. But according to Éric Grenier — the polling analyst with TheWrit.ca who runs CBC's poll tracker — that figure can be misleading.

"When pollsters have a category that they deem as 'others,' it can get a lot of non-voters or people who ... are not sure of which parties they're going to vote for," he said.

"So it is usually a number that is a little bit inflated."

In the 2018 provincial election, for example, only one per cent of votes cast were for non-mainstream parties.

Still, it does appear that the New Blues and the Ontario Party are taking up most of the oxygen in the "other" category during this campaign.

New Blue is fielding a full slate of 124 candidates, while the Ontario Party has 105 (most other minor parties are running slates of fewer than 20 candidates).