ONTARIO ELECTION WATCH V : Almost all sources seem to agree it’s in the bag for Doug Ford .. even if that’s not what 62% of Ontario people want !!
May 31st, 2022 | By Counterweights Editors | Category: In BriefONTARIO ELECTION WATCH 2022, CW EDITORS, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. MAY 30, 2022, 11:50 PM EDT. [UPDATED MAY 31, 3 PM EDT] : As we finally approach election day on June 2 there is some slight slippage of Ford Conservative support in all of the latest CBC Ontario Votes 2022 Poll Tracker, 338Canada Ontario, and the Toronto Star’s “2022 Ontario Election forecast tool,” The Signal.
By a similarly slight margin the Liberals have been gaining a little more than the NDP. With the actual election just two days away, however, none of the recent changes seem at all large enough to cast serious doubt on the projection by all three main poll aggregators of a Ford Conservative majority government.
It does seem possible or even likely enough that the Ford Conservatives will win a majority of seats in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario on June 2 with a percentage of the province-wide popular vote even lower than the 37.6% won by the Bob Rae New Democrat majority government in 1990. (If not quite as low as the just under 34% won by what finally became E.C. Drury’s Farmer-Labour coalition government of 1919-1923.)
338Canada Ontario still has the Conservatives at 38% of the popular vote. But the May 30 CBC Poll Tracker puts them at 36.6%, and The Signal on May 29 is even lower at 35.8%. Whatever the exact result proves to be, it will no doubt be true enough that Doug Ford’s party will form a second majority government (if they do, as widely predicted), even though this is clearly NOT what more than 60% of the Ontario people want!
Part of this is just the result of the current “Three Plus” Ontario party system. The “First Past the Post” electoral machinery Ontario has works best from the standpoint of winning majorities of the popular vote when there are only two main parties. It is also true that the last time any Ontario government won a majority of the popular vote was 1937 — before the election of 1943, as it were, introduced the modern “Three Plus” party system!
Whatever else again, it is a plain if apparently impotent truth that Doug Ford’s Conservatives remain unpopular with a majority of the electorate, and there remains a very slight chance that the anger still felt by many against him finally will express itself more aggressively on election day, and stick the self-styled “Ontario PCs” with an unworkable minority government. But if we were betting men and women we wouldn’t put any money on this prospect. What will be will be. And the time for post-mortems is after the actual deaths!
UPDATE MAY 31, 2022 , 3:00 PM EDT : Thanks to the latest poll from Mainstreet, putting the Ford Conservatives as high as 39%, the CBC Poll Tracker “Last Updated: May 31, 2022 9:44 a.m.” has Doug Ford’s Party increasing its share of the vote somewhat, while all the other parties have lost share slightly.
Meanwhile yesterday Josh Rubin, Business Reporter at the Toronto Star, was continuing to explain : “Steven Del Duca at risk of losing his own riding, while Doug Ford headed for a second majority, polls show.” It would of course be so nice if the June 2 results wound up rather differently, just to confirm that it wasn’t really a “rigged election” folks. But again we betting women and men would not put our money where that particular mouth is right now!