WTF Ontario?

Seriously, WTF? How could such a corrupt grifter like Doug Ford not only get re-elected, but get his party of lackluster cons, conspiracy cultists, Talibangelists, and ne’er-do-wells elected as the government again? It’s almost like the majority of voters in this province don’t read the news, don’t care about what he’s done, are apathetic about democracy, and are too lazy or stupid to bother to vote. Oh, wait…

The voter turnout in the 2025 Ontario provincial election was an appalling 45%. FORTY FIVE PERCENT! That means less than half of eligible voters gave a shit about voting. The percentage turnout in some ridings was even lower: Simcoe-Grey had 44.5 percent voter turnout; Ottawa-Vanier saw 39.8; Mississauga East-Cooksville where the Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie ran and lost was only 41.2; Brampton Centre was 35.6; Brampton East 34.9; Barrie-Innisfil 41.8; Ajax 41.6; Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hil 37.8; Toronto Centre 43.2; York Centre 39.7; Windsor West 38.2; Don Valley North 37.7; Etobicoke North 33.5; Humber River—Black Creek 34.7; … Huron—Bruce seems to be the highest at 55.6 percent. None I can find are more than 56 percent.

It’s almost as if Ford’s blatant enriching himself and his cronies was not merely irrelevant to the majority: it was acceptable practice. It’s almost as if destroying our public healthcare, public education, Ontario Science Centre, the Green Belt, and expropriating our precious farmland for a highway no one needs, means nothing compared to the convenience of his making booze available in corner stores and promoting online gambling. It’s almost like the majority has not paid attention to the news about the ongoing train wreck Ford has been making of the province for the past seven years. It’s almost like the majority of voters wanted more hospital closures, wanted more for-profit healthcare to bankrupt them, wanted more of their kids crammed into underfunded and understaffed classrooms, wanted the destruction of farmland and the environment.

Less than half of eligible voters. Let that sink in. The PCs won a majority with only 19.5 percent of the electorate. Fewer than one in five is not a mandate, it’s an embarrassment and Ontario’s ongoing shame.*

What went wrong? No media left to properly inform the public, to engage it, to profile candidates, platforms, and issues? I get that: most Canadian media is owned by corporate interests which have a bigger interest in shareholder returns and CEO bonuses than in keeping the populace informed and aware. Worse, some, like PostMedia newspapers are majority owned by US interests which have strong ties to the neo-fascist Trump. And thanks to a backroom deal between TorStar and PostMedia to close outlets, there is little or no effective local media left in smaller communities across the province: print media has vanished and flaccid, often conflicted digital coverage is all that remains.**

It’s hard to imagine why anyone who has waited hours in a hospital emergency department — or had their local emergency department closed because of underfunding and been forced to travel far to find one in another municipality — would not vote to save our healthcare. After all, everyone in the province knows that the CONservative as are working to kill public healthcare. Not voting only lets them continue their slash-and-burn of our healthcare system. But 55 percent of the electorate chose to let them continue.

Some media reported that Ford won because he pitched himself as the strongest candidate able to stand up to the attacks on Canada by Putin’s asset, US President Donald Trump. Ford, they reported, had the best response to the racist felon’s threat of tariffs. Al Jazeera:

Ford and his Progressive Conservative Party (PC Party) cruised to their third consecutive legislative majority on Thursday after seeking the “largest mandate in Ontario history” to protect the economy of Canada’s most populous province from Trump’s tariffs.
Ford, who often sported a “Canada is Not for Sale” hat and styled himself as Captain Canada throughout his election campaign, called the vote more than a year early, arguing that he should have a stronger mandate to navigate years of potential economic chaos under Trump.

Piffle and sloppy journalism that failed to report the hypocritical Ford signed a $100 million deal with the SpaceNazi Elon Musk’s Starlink corporation. Ford promised to cancel that deal when Trump threatened tariffs, but then reneged and the deal is still on. Also, before the threat of tariffs, Ford was very vocal in his support and affection for Trump, saying he was “100% happy” Trump won the election. Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles said Ford “showed you who he is. He says one thing when he’s out front to the microphones in front of all of you and he says another one behind closed doors.”

While it’s more of an apples-and-oranges comparison, FairVote Canada points out that the recent German federal elections saw an 82.5 percent voter turnout compared to Ontario’s miserly 45 percent. They add:

First-past-the-post stifles competition. A couple of big parties have a near-monopoly on power, and only a few parties are able to get any representation. At the local level in Ontario, many ridings are “safe seats,” where one of the parties could run a toaster and win. For example, a Liberal candidate has won every election in the riding of Ottawa-Vanier since 1971. Is it any surprise that voter turnout in the riding was 39%?

That makes me think Ontario desperately needs a compulsory voting law like that in Australia and 31 other countries which requires voters to vote or be fined. In fact, compulsory voting has been in place in Australia since the passing of the Commonwealth Electoral Act of 1918, which states: “It shall be the duty of every elector to vote at each election.” Canadians need that sort of law here because clearly, a lot of us are simply too lazy to vote without the threat of a fine if we don’t. Is this an imposition on someone’s imagined freedom or liberty? No:

One argument against compulsory voting is that voting can be an onerous imposition on some citizens. Against this it has been stated by Mr Christopher Bayliss, in a submission to JSCEM, that: “All our voting system requires is for a voter to attend a polling booth and mark some papers as they wish, approximately once every three years. This does not seem to be an insurmountable burden to be part of a democracy”.

It’s not like voters don’t have a choice: they can choose to pay the $20 fine (about CAD 18) and not vote. That’s not a big financial hardship; municipal parking lots in the GTA charge more per day than that. On the official information page about the Act, it notes:

In Australia, voting is considered a civic duty, similar to other responsibilities like paying taxes, attending school, and serving on a jury. Compulsory voting ensures that parliaments better represent the “will of the people.” This system means that governments need to consider the views of all voters when making decisions and creating policies. It also allows candidates to focus their campaigns on important issues, rather than just trying to get people to show up and vote.

Perhaps the low turnout can be blamed on the chronic underfunding of our education system by CONservative governments, which have always had a vested interest in keeping the populace uneducated, uninformed, and too lazy or preoccupied to vote (distracted, no doubt by the spread on online gambling combined with easy access to booze, both enabled and promoted by Ford’s CONservatives). Educated people vote, educated people tend to vote for liberal ideals, educated people often have that nasty “woke” virus (i.e. they are caring and compassionate) that repressive CONservatives despise.

As FairVote Canada notes, part of the problem we face dealing with rightwing populist and extremists is our “first-past-the-post” voting system that allows rightwing parties to congeal into one party:

When a country is saddled with a winner-take-all voting system and there are only a couple of governing parties, the right is often forced into one big tent party, where extreme factions inside the party’s caucus and among their voter base must be pacified and appealed to.
In the worst case scenario, an extremist can capture the leadership of a big tent party and that party can get all the power with far less than half the vote.
Proportional representation, by contrast, makes space for separate, viable parties, who are transparent with voters about what they stand for.

An article in Toronto.com created a poll asking, “If you seldom or never vote, why not?” A stunning 62.5 percent of respondents shrugged off their civic and social responsibility by saying “my vote won’t make a difference.” Translated into the vernacular, that can be read as “I’m too lazy to care.” Or perhaps: “I don’t give a shit about democracy.” And not caring about how you are governed is how the USA elected the racist felon Donald Trump and his overseer, the SpaceNazi Elon Musk. Not caring could likely get the smarmy rage-farming Trump mimic, Pierre PoiLIEvre, elected here, too. After all, as Joseph de Maistre wrote (Letter 76, 27 August 1811), Every nation gets the government it deserves.

I thought Ontario deserved better. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe when you don’t care enough to vote, you get the punishment you deserve.

Notes:

* There were 11,065,813 registered voters in the 2025 election and the turnout was almost 2 percent higher than the abysmal historic low of 2022. The Tories got 2,158,452 of them this time: 42.97 percent of those who actually cared enough about the future of this province and this country to vote, but a mere 19.5 percent of those eligible to vote. Even their 42.97 is not a majority of those who voted, just more than the others. The “I don’t care” category won again. For comparison, the 2022 provincial election, the lowest in Ontario’s election history saw only 44 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots (around 4.7 million out of 10.7 million eligible voters).

** Any media outlet that accepts advertising from a municipality or the province is in the precarious position of conflict of interest when it comes to covering political or governance issues around those governments. As a result, many digital outlets have abandoned their responsibilities as watchdogs and commentators in the public interest, by not taking an editorial stand on any issue, party, or event. To me, a former journalist and editor, that is simply cowardly. It shows a greater concern for money than for journalistic integrity.

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