Doug Day Afternoon

Ford-a ähli şöhrat!

Last week, I got to see the film Universal Language at the Playhouse. It was a smart, absurd, hilarious look at an alternate reality Canada where (it’s implied) the 1995 Quebec Referendum succeeded and Canada’s composite parts splintered off into their own countries, each with different traditions and immigration patterns. That isn’t the main focus of the film (I won’t spoil anything because you should definitely go see it at the Playhouse when you can), but that tidbit allows for one of the funniest scenes in the whole movie - an amazing back-and-forth between two characters where, despite the change in camera angle, the focus remains on an eerie and unmoving portrait of Quebec Premier François Legault.

The scene is supposed to be reminiscent of the outlandish official portraits of dictators in the Global South and post-Soviet world. After the screening last week, the film’s director, Matthew Rankin, stayed for a brief Q and A with the audience and told us that the movie imagines Quebec as a kind of “CAQuiste utopia”, meaning a place embodying the spirit of conservative nationalism advanced by Legault’s governing party, the Coalition Avenir Québec. The way they have governed is parodied in the film, though it isn’t far off from our reality: the steady subversion of conventional democratic norms and centralization of power in the hands of a single party and a single leader, advancing a kind of agenda that’s familiar, but more heavy handed than what we expect. Not frightening, like the turn toward fascism in the United States, instead just goofy and cheap.

In many ways, we have our own little version of that here in Ontario right now. Doug Ford, once again returned to office as our Premier, has been given a “mandate” to keep remaking this province into the conservative nationalist utopia only he and his small band of devotees want. It’s all so tacky and directionless, missing all feeling and coherence, awash in corner store beer, dazzled by ads for betting sites, living nowhere, driving everywhere. No policy, no heart, no inspiration. Just devotion to the leader, who governs by whim and fancy.

So you can understand, then, why I spent such a long time staring, as though hypnotized by the absurdity of it all, at this post on the r/Ontario subreddit from a few days ago. Rather than resembling a campaign office for a PC candidate, this looks like the home of a minor party official in Turkmenistan while it was under the rule of Saparmurat Niyazov, the totalitarian dictator whose cult of personality was so nonsensical that he ended up changing the names of the month of April, the entire city of Andalyp, and bread itself to his mother’s name, Gurbansoltan.

Forget Friday. Happy “Dougday” everyone.

***

Regardless, Ontario’s 44^th General Election is mercifully over. The Premier, at his most cynically opportunistic, seized on a moment of domestic and international chaos to call an election in the exact perfect window that allowed him to weaponize the threats from the United States, avoid Ontarians blaming him for their hardships because of tariffs, and sneak by before the federal Liberals hold their leadership election this Sunday and likely Prime Minister Mark Carney marches off to Rideau Hall to send Canadians to the federal polls sometime in April. He had an itty bitty tiny little window and he made it work.

Judging by the overall results and the poll-by-polls (more on those in a minute), it was a hard election for Ontario’s opposition. The NDP retained the position of Official Opposition despite placing third in the popular vote, shedding over five percent from their 2022 total and failing to earn over one million votes for the first time since 2011. Despite the loss of once-reliable Toronto-St. Paul’s and Hamilton Mountain, as well as the party’s overall inability to register with voters, there has been no major shake-up in the party as-of-yet.

The Ontario Liberals have carried on their tradition of having one of the least efficient votes of any major political party in recent Canadian history, save the “Weekend at Bernie’s-ed” corpse that was the federal Progressive Conservatives from 1993 to 2003. The provincial Grits picked up over 400,000 votes and all they managed to do was snatch three seats from the Tories (one of which was because an MPP retired) and one from the NDP. They were unable to elect their leader, though promptly all fell in line behind her, making it clear the provincial third party will have a leaderless caucus for the foreseeable future.

The election was bad news all the way down the list. The Greens, with one of the most interesting province-wide campaigns, poured their efforts into a handful of cottage country seats at the expense of some of their energized urban campaigns, leaving them with the same 2 seats they ended the last session of the legislature with and their lowest vote total in three elections. And, rounding things off, Hamilton Centre’s maverick MPP Sarah Jama was unable to hold her riding, earning fewer than 5,000 votes of the over 33,000 cast and ending with just under 15% of the popular vote.

Friends and allies

In the time since last Thursday, local right-wingers have been doing victory laps. Hamilton Mountain’s new PC MPP, Monica Ciriello - a long-time conservative activist who, like her predecessor from 2022, now-councillor Mike Spadafora, lives outside the riding - told The Spec, “The people on Hamilton Mountain did something big; residents came out in droves to send a Conservative to Queen’s Park in a riding that has bled orange and (Liberal) red for generations,” (the riding had a PC MPP from 1967 to 1977 and from 1995 to 1999). And the loyal followers of Hamilton’s right-wing outrage outlet and opposition organ, The Bay Observer, have already been, in that publication’s comments section, speculating that the great conservative wave will carry on through the next federal election and into 2026’s municipal vote, wiping out the politicians they hate (none of whom, it’s worth noting, are straight white dudes).

On the left, the results have people demoralized and confused. The only voices in the room seem to be advocating for a turn to the right, just as the Democrats are presently doing in the United States. In a letter to the Spec earlier this week, the president of the Hamilton Steelworkers Area Council had some advice for the NDP:

Oh no! The party of labour has gone woke!

The Ontario NDP’s platform for 2025 had five main priorities: fight rising costs, hire more doctors, build homes people can afford, defend Ontario jobs, and clean up corruption. The platform talked about making it easier to join a union, support healthcare workers, ensure more jobs for construction workers, bring labour to the table in a Premier’s Council on the Economy, introduce legislation to allow for 10-days paid leave, advance anti-scab legislation, overhaul WSIB in favour of workers, strengthen the mining sector, support tradespeople, expand northern highways, and freeze income taxes on working class Ontarians.

But the leader was a lady who said she’d make PrEP free and be nice to Indigenous people so I GUESS THAT MEANS THE NDP DOESN’T CARE ABOUT WORKERS ANYMORE.

The political right has fixated on pronouns and queer rights and racial justice and a whole host of fantastical strawmen for years. Hell, the decidedly centre-right Liberal campaign on Hamilton Mountain focused more on their NDP opponent’s fight for racial justice - framing it as “no money for any cops and an encampment in every yard” - than they did their own platform. But these are now and always have been nonsense distractions meant to confuse voters. Despite this, there are now voices on the left who are validating these right-wing talking points and calling on their own party to stop doing the things only the extreme right is accusing them of doing. This is in addition to those in the labour movement who have been extremely conservative for some time (those “labour traditionalists” I keep talking about) and are now seeing an outlet for their previously suppressed right-wing social views.

Labour leaders are going on the offence against “woke”, either ignorant of what they’re fighting or purposefully signing on to a thinly veiled conservative war on “diverse” communities to protect their position above standing up for all workers. All the labour-critiques of “DEI” ignore the fact that the acronym is little more than a convenient way to say “it’s cool to be racist, sexist, homophobic, discriminatory, and just a general asshole again”. It isn’t about merit or fairness or “standing up for working people”; the current anti-”DEI” push in the United States, which recently saw the scrubbing of photos relating to the bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima because it was named the “Enola Gay”, is about pushing non-white, non-male, non-straight people out of the public eye, as well as any and all positions they have ever held - political, professional, personal - based on the assumption that they were only employed because they were “diverse” and not because they were qualified (which, itself, presupposes that non-white, non-male, non-straight are inherently unqualified for anything). When labour leaders sign on to a far-right push against marginalized people, it betrays the entire point of the modern labour movement, which is to protect all people in the face of growing inequality, both social and economic. When they bend the knee to the political right, they’re undermining themselves and their movement just so they can earn favour with bosses.

I guess all those years of labour marching in Pride parades was just for exercise and fresh air?

With allies like these, who even needs enemies?

Going poll-by-poll

Rebuilding after last Thursday will take years, if not decades. And part of the process of rebuilding - for the NDP, the Liberals, the Greens, and any other progressive movement that seeks to challenge the status quo - is understanding their electoral geography.

cracks fingers, slides on shades, looks into camera, says: “Let’s do this.”

The poll-by-poll figures for the 2025 election came out with surprising speed. Elections Ontario was extremely efficient with publication, even if there were some easily-identifiable errors throughout the information (almost every vote at St. Peter’s care home in Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas was listed as “declined” in an early tally [since corrected], and there’s just no recorded data for poll 036 in the southeastern corner of Flamborough-Glanbrook - hence the ugly hatched space in the map below).

Still, these figures tell us something. They show the steady march of the Progressive Conservatives into territory once held firm by New Democrats. They show of a continued Liberal marginalization in Hamilton. And they show that, when a central party apparatus wants something, they can get it done.

Here, then, is the city-wide poll-by-poll breakdown.

Flamborough-Glanbrook

Let’s start with the easiest one: Flamborough-Glanbrook. This race was so lopsided, there isn’t even any point putting up a separate map (and the riding is huge, so see above for a visual).

Incumbent MPP Donna Skelly was able to easily fend off challenges from the other parties, increasing her share of the popular vote by just under 3.2% and falling just 0.6% short of winning a majority of votes. The Liberals were able to win just over 6,000 more votes and surpass the NDP as the second-place party. Turnout was up by just over 4,000 votes, of which 3,000 split for the Tories and the remaining 1,000 went to the Liberals, who also ate into the NDP and Green votes with enthusiasm. The Liberals won three polls, all of which were predominantly senior’s communities and retirement homes, and the NDP won a single poll at the Heritage Green Nursing Home. This was the only riding where the Tories won a significant number of polls with over 50% support. Whenever the data comes in for the missing poll, I’m sure it will follow a similar pattern. When FlamGlan sheds some of those polls to surrounding ridings in the next federal election (including all of Upper Stoney Creek to Hamilton East-Stoney Creek), that’ll be bad news for every party except the Conservatives.

Hamilton East-Stoney Creek

Next up is Hamilton East-Stoney Creek where the results were strikingly similar to in FlamGlan.

Voter turnout was up about 4,000 votes, and the main benefactor for that was Minister Neil Lumsden, who increased his share of the vote and sailed to victory. The vote split was interesting out there, though. It is possible that Liberal candidate Heino Doessing picked up some of those new voters and that the 2,400-odd folks who backed Paul Miller in his rebellious 2022 bid split between the PCs (Miller was on the right-wing of the NDP) and the Liberals.

I cannot understate the gravity of the NDP’s collapse in Hamilton East-Stoney Creek. The 17.6% of the popular vote earned by the party is the single lowest share of the vote earned by a labour party in Hamilton East in over 100 years. It is lower than when the NDP was nearly destroyed after 1995, lower than when the CCF was under attack by the city’s right-wing media, lower than ever. No CCF or NDP candidate in the history of Hamilton East and Hamilton East-Stoney Creek has ever received less of the popular vote. The NDP was only able to win a single poll in an apartment on Jerome Crescent, and that was only by three votes.

You can take a look at the raw vote totals visualized here on a Datawrapper map I put together (tried to embed it, but Beehiiv wasn’t having any of that).

In Poll 15 - along the Highway 20 and Greenhill Ave. - the party wasn’t able to crack 15% of the vote. And in the lightest coloured poll there, Poll 26 - the low-density area around Millen Road - the party earned just 85 votes for a paltry 8.3%, while the combined right-wing populist vote for the New Blue and Ontario parties was not far behind. The party’s inability to win any large polls in a riding they held just 5 years ago should be setting off alarm bells at central party headquarters and necessitating mass meetings of the party faithful to have an honest conversation about how they can stop their slide into oblivion.

Things were marginally better for the Liberals who eked out victories in Bartonville and Glenview, as well as cleaning up at the institutional polls in care facilities and retirement homes (that was a common factor this election).

One of the biggest winners in Hamilton East-Stoney Creek was Pascale Marchand, whose energetic Green Party campaign was one of the few across the province outside their target seats to actually increase their share of the vote. Marchand’s campaign secured nearly 7% of the vote in the portion of the riding west of the Red Hill Valley. This easily positions Marchand - who ran in the 2022 municipal election in Ward 4 and now works for Councillor Tammy Hwang - as a strong contender for future elections in the area.

Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas

Now over to Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas, affectionately known by its gross acronym HWAD.

Now, full disclosure, I was Sandy Shaw’s financial agent for a while and worked with the wonderful folks on her riding association during the Pandemic. I stepped back to let some other folks have a shot at running things, but I still have a lot of respect for the work done by committed party activists out west there.

As with all the other Hamilton-area ridings, HWAD saw an increase in voter turnout. Only difference is that HWAD now has the distinction of being the only local riding where over 50% of eligible voters bothered to cast a ballot after nearly 6,000 more voters participated in the election. The NDP, PCs, and Liberals all picked up support, while the Greens shed close to 700 votes. So, in this instance, it seems like the three big players reaped the benefits of increased turnout with a fair number of Greens switching (likely) to Shaw’s campaign in an effort to stop the extravagantly well-funded PC candidate, John Demik, from snatching the riding. In fact, of all the local PC candidates, Demik had the least impressive vote increase, adding under 2,000 votes to the total earned by Fred Bennink in 2022 and managing a paltry 0.12% increase in support. The Liberals were able to get out of their slump and earn over 20% of the vote for the first time since the provincial riding was created before 2018.

The NDP did lose a little support on the west mountain and in Dundas, but it seems that was because voters shifted from NDP to Liberal, allowing the PCs to win those polls with support in the mid-30% range. Take the Gurnett and Gilkson neighbourhoods on the southwest mountain, for example: in 2022, across the three polls in the two neigbourhoods between the Linc and Stone Church, the NDP won handily, taking 860 votes to 662 for the PCs and 387 for the Liberals. In this election, the NDP sunk to 800 votes and was surpassed by the Tories with 859 votes. But it was the Liberals who nearly doubled their vote, taking 625 votes - still placing a distant third, but allowing the PCs to win two of the three polls there with support in the high 30% range.

But it was Westdale and Ainslie Wood that clinched it for the NDP, with Shaw’s campaign easily winning all but two polls - institutional ones that went Tory - across the two neighbourhoods of west Hamilton. The PCs were unable to crack even 15% of the vote in Westdale, while the Liberals were unable to exceed 20%.

Even in Shaw’s weakest polls in Ancaster, the NDP was able to consistently hold about a quarter of the vote, showing the strength of the HWAD NDP’s organizing and campaign capacity. Poll 021 around Jerseyville, for example, saw the NDP earn a respectable 31% to the Tory’s 40%.

Other Hamilton-area NDP campaigns would do well to learn from their west end colleagues.

Hamilton Mountain

The upset of the night was on Hamilton Mountain where 14 years of NDP dominance was wiped out by one of the most dramatic vote splits of the election.

Once again, 4,000 more people cast ballots on Hamilton Mountain in 2025 than in 2022. Of them, it seems an extra 3,000 voted Tory while 1,000 gave their votes to the Liberals, who simultaneously grabbed around 5,000 from previous NDP voters.

Though the Tories won the riding, the Liberals performed exceedingly well, seeing their single largest increase in the share of the popular vote on Hamilton Mountain. Danko essentially doubled the Liberal vote on the Mountain and earned the best result for the party since Sophia Aggelonitis lost it to outgoing incumbent Monique Taylor in 2011. Considering the party earned a paltry 9.2% in 2018, Danko’s finish at just under 31% is impressive. The Liberals grew in every single poll, including those more right-leaning polls south of the Linc. If you’d like an interactive version of the map below, click here.

Now, full disclosure once more, but I know and respect Kojo Damptey immensely. He’s an incredible advocate for the community, works tirelessly to lift everyone up, and is always an absolute joy to talk with about anything. I was extremely sad to see so much of his vote go to the Liberals, particularly because they waged an extremely divisive and negative campaign against Damptey that framed his community work as dangerous and extreme. There were Liberal candidates across Hamilton that did not need to use those kinds of attacks to earn votes, but the OLP campaign on Hamilton Mountain leaned into scorched earth politics and were able to increase their share of the vote considerably. But that did not translate into identifiable wins, with the Liberals winning only two non-institutional polls. One of those polls - Poll 009 in Bruleville across from Lime Ridge - they only won by 8 votes over the Tories.

While the Liberals were pursuing centre-right voters, centre-left voters were left confused about who could best beat the Tories. Combined with what I have heard about how some partisan insiders approached the Mountain campaign, the whole situation made for a scattered and scrambled election that did not need to turn out the way it did. It is a massive shame that a dedicated community advocate like Kojo Damptey won’t be representing Hamilton Mountain at Queen’s Park, but I know his passion and commitment to our city means he’ll always be fighting for what’s right, no matter what.

Hamilton Centre

And now the big one. Hamilton Centre. The race everyone was watching. Would Sarah Jama hold onto her downtown seat on the power of her organizing and activist base? Would the Liberals sneak up the middle and recapture the centre for the first time since 1990? Would the NDP be thwarted by the discord in their ranks with their riding association actively supporting another candidate?

In the end, it wasn’t even close. Robin Lennox, the NDP’s candidate, won the riding handily, taking over 39% of the vote, earning 5,700 more votes than her nearest challenger, Eileen Walker of the Liberals. Jama was unable to break 15% of the vote and did not carry a single poll in the riding.

While the Conservatives and Liberals divided up the institutional polls, every single major poll (except for one) went NDP. Strathcona, Kirkendall, Stipley, Crown Point, and Beasley all gave Lennox over 40% of the vote and, throughout the North End and the Keith where Jama signs chequered the landscape, the NDP still pulled 38% of the vote.

Jama’s best polls were the social housing complexes at the corner of Hess and Main where she earned 20.4% - but just 1 vote less than the Tories. In two polls further to the east - in The Delta and in Stipley - Jama was not able to break 10% of the vote. You can explore an interactive map of Jama’s results here.

Those same far east polls showed some of the best results for the PCs, who were competitive with the Liberals for second place in many neighbourhoods. This possibly signals the continuing realignment of working class people with right-wing populists who offer easy solutions to complex problems.

Ultimately, it seems like, despite an outward show of force and claims of a fully-funded campaign warchest, it seems like the voters of Hamilton Centre weighed their options and went with someone who was willing to work within an established party caucus to advance the cause of their constituents. Jama’s brand was too tarnished and her supporters failed to make a compelling case as to why a controversial independent would be a better voice for the community than anyone else.

Takeaways

Last Thursday was a good night for the Progressive Conservatives. They picked up a riding in Hamilton, held the ones they won in the last election, and made inroads in two NDP seats. If you don’t think too hard about how the overwhelming majority of Hamiltonians voted for parties other than the PCs, then you can keep assuming things are hunky dory for them.

The Liberals bounced back, but failed to win a single seat in Hamilton for the third election in a row. A provincial Liberal has not been elected in Hamilton since 2014 and the party’s vote efficiency is so lacking that it is hard to imagine them winning a provincial seat in the area for some time. Of particular note is how the Liberals positioned themselves this election. On the Mountain, the Liberal candidate sought centre-right voters. In Hamilton Centre, the Liberal candidate said some people call her party “centre-left”.¹ The party strategically weaponized that ideological ambiguity to appeal to NDP voters and PC voters, drawing enough voters from the former to cost them seats and too few from the latter to even get their leader elected. This election, more than most, showed that the Ontario Liberals, under their current leadership, is ideologically adrift and needs to engage in some serious soul-searching.

Speaking of parties needing soul-searching: the Ontario NDP. The province’s opposition party lost support across the board. Even with higher voter turnout and former Green voters jumping to the NDP in an effort to stop PC candidates from winning, it wasn’t enough to stop the bleed to other parties. The ONDP let the PCs define them, alienated previous supporters, and, despite an impressive platform, let themselves get distracted by Queen’s Park-focused nonsense. The ONDP’s campaign was resoundingly and entirely negative, fixating on Doug Ford as though there was nothing else in the province but him. Instead of learn from the mistakes of the past (and of the 2024 Democratic campaign in the United States), the ONDP leaned into what doesn’t work and ran with it. In the moment we needed them the most, they let us down.

In this failure comes an opportunity. There are already discussions happening in progressive circles about how to ensure this never happens again. Catherine Fife, the NDP MPP for Waterloo - one of the few NDPers to increase their share of the vote this election - told the Waterloo Record she will be meeting with the president of the Liberal Party to discuss how to optimize the anti-Ford vote. Local progressives are starting to have conversations about reorienting riding associations, running for positions on party executives, and putting pressure on party leaders and candidates to stop wasting resources.

Now is the time for reflection. Sure, we’ll likely be thrown headfirst into a federal election in a matter of days, but after this provincial vote, it should be obvious the old tactics aren’t going to cut it. It’s time for change. The voters know it, partisans know it, party officials know it. Now it’s only a matter of making that change a reality.

1  _{Kate McCullough. “Party politics or doing politics differently? NDP, former party incumbent spar at Hamilton Centre debate” Hamilton Spectator, February 19, 2025 (Spec link).}