Doug Ford's early election musing sets Ontario politics abuzz

If Premier Doug Ford decides to call an early election, political strategists say he'll need to give Ontario voters a compelling reason for why he's sending them to the polls ahead of schedule.

Over the past week, Ford has repeatedly declined to rule out calling an election before his government's four-year mandate expires in June 2026. Multiple sources close to the Progressive Conservatives say no decision has been made to proceed with a snap vote, but say late next spring is the most likely date.

Strategists say there would be big political advantages for the Ontario PC Party to campaign before October 2025, when a federal election is widely expected. Chief among them: the presence of a Liberal government in Ottawa, particularly if it is still led by Justin Trudeau.

Ford could benefit from Trudeau's current unpopularity and target the prime minister in much the same way that Trudeau targeted Ford in the 2019 federal campaign, when the then-rookie premier was low in the polls.

But is political advantage on its own enough justification for Ford to call the vote well before his mandate is up? Fred DeLorey, a veteran Conservative strategist at both the federal and provincial levels, says no. 

"If they're calling it [early] simply because the polls are good for them, then that's a strategic mistake," said DeLorey, who was director of operations for the Ontario PC 2018 campaign that brought Ford to power, and is now a partner with Northstar Public Affairs.

"They have to tell a story that we need this election for a reason," said DeLorey  "If you have a narrative that you're running on, and you could go to Ontarians and say, 'We need a new mandate because we want to get X, Y and Z done,' then I think the cynicism would disappear." 

David Herle, a longtime federal and provincial Liberal strategist, has a similar perspective. He says the biggest risk for Ford of calling a vote early is voters perceiving the move as cynical and self-serving.

"If it's cloaked purely in politics, you're inviting people to punish you for it," said Herle, who ran Kathleen Wynne's provincial election campaigns in 2014 and 2018.

Herle recently joined Rubicon Strategy, a lobbying firm led by Kory Teneycke, who led Ford's Ontario PC campaigns in 2018 and 2022. 

He says one reason why Trudeau's Liberals failed to win a majority in 2021 is because the party didn't give voters a compelling reason why the election had to be called at that time, during the pandemic, just two years after the previous election.

"When [an early election] works, generally it's because the government has ginned up an issue that justifies that call," Herle said.

Ontario's fixed-date election law sets voting day as four years into a government's mandate, but the law also explicitly allows the premier to dissolve the legislature and call an election at any time before then. 

While Herle and DeLorey both believe Ford will need to justify an early election, they also firmly believe the move would be to his benefit.