RANDALL WHITE, ONTARIO TONITE, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. TUESDAY, JANUARY 28, 2025. As explained by Queen’s Park reporter Laura Stone this past Friday, “Ontario Premier Doug Ford confirms early election — ‘We will be calling the election next Wednesday … We need a mandate from the people to fight against Donald Trump’s tariffs…we will not back down,’ he tells reporters.”

As independent Ottawa reporter Dale Smith (among many others) has observed : “He doesn’t need a mandate. He already has one … He’s trying to use Trump to make you forget about his corruption and mismanagement.”

As my favourite local TV has somewhat similarly pointed out, more than once, Premier Ford’s Ontario PC Party currently has, in the wake of the June 2, 2022 record low voter turnout Ontario election, 79 seats in a 124-member Legislative Assembly of Ontario — where 63 seats would be a bare majority.

What’s more, the next legislated fixed-date Ontario election is not until June 2026 — some four years after the last fixed-date election on June 2, 2022. The Ford government — elected in 2022 by less than 41% of the record low 44% of voters who turned out — currently has a 16-seat majority in the legislature. It can get whatever fresh legislation it likes in any fight against Donald Trump’s tariffs, or anything else. So why go to the considerable expense of a fresh “snap election” that is unlikely to give the provincial Government of Ontario much more of a mandate from the people (in seats in the legislature at least) than it has right now?

(1) Doug Ford’s smart political argument makes no sense legally or constitutionally

To answer this question we must go beneath the superficial surface of democracy in Canada 2025. For an assortment of reasons (including what Dale Smith calls “his corruption and mismanagement”) Premier Ford has wisely enough concluded that his Ontario PC party is more likely to win an election held now — or more exactly some four weeks hence, on February 27, 2025 — than at any subsequent time between now and the June 2026 fixed election date.

In a more rigorous and sensible version of our Canadian (and Ontario etc) parliamentary democracy than the one we have right now, the Lieutenant Governor from whom Premier Ford formally requested a dissolution of parliament and a fresh election (the Honourable Edith Dumont) might in this case have raised some very sensible objections.

Again, Premier Ford already has a strong majority in the legislature, flowing from the 2022 election. And the next legislated fixed-date election was duly scheduled for June 4, 2026 — some considerable time after the election we Ontario people who still care will now be voting in on February 27, 2025. On the higher-minded theory of our kind of parliamentary democracy a higher-minded (and public spirited) lieutenant governor might reasonably decline the kind of request that Premier Ford has officially made. On the particular grounds that while a sudden snap election at the end of February 2025 might be in the interests of Doug Ford and his Ontario PC Party, it has no similar immediate interest for the people of Ontario who vote in elections.

(There can be no doubt, eg, that “We need a mandate from the people to fight against Donald Trump’s tariffs…we will not back down” is great and probably even effective political rhetoric for an Ontario premier in the Second Winter of Donald Trump’s Discontent. But it makes no sense as a legal and constitutional argument, in a case where a government more or less in the middle of its fixed-date four-year term has 79 seats in a 124-member Legislative Assembly.)

(2) Bad enough that Ford has called unnecessary snap election in Canada’s most populous province … even worse that he will probably win??

The practical problem with the lieutenant governor’s exercising some all due and wise discretion in such cases was recently well laid out by a gentleman commenting with Steve Paikin on TV Ontario (John Michael McGrath?), on the very issue of Doug Ford’s snap election call in early 2025.

At Canada’s current stage of evolution on its old colonial “monarchy,” the only way of keeping the relationship between the lieutenant governor/governor general/head of state and the premier/prime minister/head of government democratic is to adopt the convention that the unelected head of state must always follow the advice of the elected head of government!

In the long run this relationship itself can be further democratized by abolishing the monarchy, in the spirit of such other former self-governing British dominions as Ireland and India. But that is a matter for another time and place. The practical point for the moment is that, by convention as it were, Lieutenant Governor Dumont has accepted Premier Ford’s advice without objection, and we are having a snap Ontario election on February 27, 2025.

In the end it is bad enough that Doug Ford has called an unnecessary election strictly to keep himself in office. But for another set of twisted reasons in the sad and sorry jungle of Ontario government and politics right now, he is all too likely to win this election, as he already has in 2018 and 2022 … Unless … there may be a slight chance that what happened to David Peterson in 1990 finally will give Doug Ford what he so richly deserves in 2025, and consign his Ford Nation regime to the strictly history side of Ontario political history, forever.