The outcome of Ontario’s election was not much of a surprise, but it still felt like a punch in the gut. Despite seven years of attacks on workers, and countless scandals, Ford won his third straight majority. How could this happen?
The knee-jerk response, like it was following Trump’s victory in November, is to blame voters or dismiss them as stupid. This is a dead end. And it avoids a sober discussion about long-standing weaknesses in the NDP and labour that contributed to this result.
In short, Ford successfully took advantage of the real fear and anger that people feel about the looming trade war with the US, and positioned himself as the best defender of jobs and the economy. His frequent trips to Washington throughout the campaign helped fuel this narrative. And the tariff threat helped obscure his real record and sidelined other urgent issues.
The results
Ford ended up winning 80 seats, three fewer than in 2022, but his share of the popular vote went up to 43 percent from 41 percent at the previous election.
Although Ford won a solid majority, it wasn’t the super-majority he thought he could win. Compared to 2018, his vote count was down by about 170,000 votes.
Voter turnout was 45.4 percent, the second-lowest in Ontario history. The lowest was in 2022, at 44 percent. That means Ford won his third majority with just 19.5 percent support of eligible voters–less than one in five votes.
This is not a sweeping mandate. Neither should it be seen as a rightward lurch of Ontario voters, nor a wholesale endorsement of what will likely be renewed attacks on workers in the coming months.
Ford’s message was “Protect Ontario”—not privatize health care or gut public services.
Steady decline
Although the Ontario NDP did better than expected, its vote share and seat count were lower than the last two elections. On Thursday, it won 27 seats and 18.5 percent of the vote. In 2022, it won 31 seats and 23.7 percent of the vote. In 2018, it won 40 seats and 33.6 percent of the vote. These results mark a steady decline.
Indeed, the 2025 campaign ranks as one of the four lowest vote shares in the party’s history. While the party held onto most of its downtown urban ridings and seats in the North, its vote share was obliterated in areas like Brampton, where not too long ago, it was competitive and won seats. This is a troubling trend for a party ostensibly aiming to be a political expression of the working class.
At 4.8 percent, the Greens’ vote share also shrunk, down 40,000 votes from 2022, or more than a percentage point. But they held their two seats, and came very close in a third riding.
Only the Liberals, among the opposition parties, managed to grow their vote share, winning more than 1.5 million votes, or nearly 30 percent of the popular vote, compared to 1.1 million votes and 23.8 percent in 2022. Despite weak leadership, the Liberals’ simple and clear focus on health care boosted their total vote.
However, the spread of Liberal support across the province meant they only picked up five seats, bringing them to 14. Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie failed to win in Mississauga East-Cooksville, but will stay on as leader—at least for now.
Although the Liberals won over 50 percent more votes than the NDP, the NDP ended up with nearly twice the number of seats. The highly efficient NDP vote, mostly concentrated in incumbent ridings, is masking its steady decline of support over the last two elections.
Weaknesses
The party’s weaknesses predate this election, but they became more visible during the campaign.
First, the NDP failed to convey a coherent and unifying campaign message that ties all their demands together. In other words, it didn’t provide a clear and accessible narrative about why there is a cost-of-living crisis, where inflation comes from, what’s behind Trump’s tariff threats, and so on.
Without its own worker-centred explanation about the state of the world, the NDP struggled to convey a compelling vision about what would fix it. Instead, its demands felt like a laundry list of random measures that offered only superficial relief.
Public subsidy
For example, its widely-touted grocery rebate did nothing to tackle food giants like Loblaws or the greed that’s fuelling high food prices. Instead, the proposal amounted to a public subsidy for the likes of Galen Weston and other billionaires.
By contrast, a more aggressive and unapologetic tax-the-rich approach could have polarized the issue on class terms, among other class-based demands that more forcefully targeted bosses, bankers, and the corporations.
The failure to stake out this terrain has left it open to Ford, who continues to portray himself as a champion of workers.
Movements
Second, the party’s hostility to social movements, especially in the lead-up to the election, closed the door to the energy and dynamism (and volunteers, donations, and votes) that can come from organic, grass-roots-led campaigns.
This was nowhere more obvious than in the NDP’s response to the rising Palestine solidarity movement in late 2023 and its shameful removal of Sarah Jama from the Caucus, a move that drew attention away from Ford’s racist censure of Jama and alienated countless party members and supporters.
Despite countless good-faith efforts by party activists to restore Jama’s relationship with the Caucus, a handful of staff, with the backing of leader Marit Stiles, blocked her from seeking the NDP nomination in Hamilton Centre, laying the ground for her defeat.
Jama nevertheless mounted an impressive and inspiring campaign, in the face of huge odds, and ended up winning nearly 5,000 votes, or 15 percent. Although the NDP took the seat back from Jama, the debate about its appalling treatment of her is far from over.
Labour
Third, the general weakness and division of Ontario’s labour movement has had a debilitating effect on the NDP, another weakness that predates this election. There are multiple expressions of it.
Like the party, labour has failed to provide a clear and accessible explanation to Ontario workers about the state of the world and the economy, in a way that builds working-class consciousness and insulates them from right-wing ideas. To the extent they engage their members at all, most unions only do this during periods of bargaining or election campaigns.
Instead of building capacity among the rank and file on an ongoing basis, and making the workplace the central site of struggle, much of the labour leadership cultivates passivity in their members by limiting their agency to voting during elections or showing up to picket lines.
Strike
Of course, there are notable exceptions—OPSEU’s approach to bargaining in recent years has been to raise workers’ demands that resonate with the wider public and to involve their own members in organizing and mobilizing each other in every action they take. The successful province-wide strike by 10,000 LCBO employees last summer, which combined their fight for better wages and conditions with the fight for good public services, is one such example.
Without a clear vision that unites the entire class, one that sees building workers’ power as the best strategy for resisting Ford’s agenda, unions have increasingly taken a sectionalist and transactionalist approach: doing whatever they think is good for their members, even if it harms other workers.
Witness the unprecedented number of union endorsements for Ford during this election. Just months ago, the leadership of UNITE HERE 75 in Toronto joined a solidarity rally with Ontario nurses in their fight against Ford’s staffing crisis and accelerating privatization of health care. By the time of the election, and in exchange for the promise of an $18 million training centre, the union called on its members to vote for Ford.
If the labour movement can’t speak to the class in its entirety, beyond its own members, the NDP will struggle to do so, too.
Now what?
The days and weeks ahead should open up space for an honest assessment about what happened during the election campaign, what should have happened in time between elections, and what should happen next.
An alarming fault line facing the new NDP Caucus is the dramatic erosion of equity in the party. Out of 27 members, only one is Indigenous (Sol Mamakwa) and only two are racialized (Doly Begum and Kristyn Wong-Tam). The rest—25 members or 89 percent of Caucus—are white, an almost unbelievable figure given the party’s base in so many diverse urban ridings.
This outcome is not unrelated to Sarah Jama’s treatment by the party leadership and apparatus; nor is it an isolated example. The demise of the five-member Black Caucus over recent years represents another serious set-back. The unfortunate defeat of Dr. Jill Andrew, ONDP MPP for Toronto-St. Paul’s, marks the end of the Caucus altogether, and means there is not a single Black member in Caucus.
This history must be central to any assessment that gets underway in the coming days and weeks. A growing chasm has opened between the party’s purported support for equity and its day-to-day practices. Closing this gap must be an urgent priority in rebuilding its base of support in every community and every part of Ontario.
Lessons
For the left, there are urgent lessons south of the border as the movements regroup and recover in the wake of Trump’s victory. Workers—union and non-union alike—are in the process of building mass protests against Trump’s destructive agenda, and not waiting for the Democrats, who continue to court their billionaire donors.
There is real potential for these protests to grow into a movement that could win meaningful demands for workers and halt Trump’s agenda in its tracks—without waiting for the next election to come along.
Similarly, workers in Ontario have their own experiences to draw from. Just over two years ago, and only five months after Ford’s last re-election, 55,000 education workers led an illegal strike that brought the province to the brink of a general strike, and that decisively defeated Ford’s landmark anti-strike legislation, Bill 28.
Struggles like these are already on the horizon. In Toronto, over 30,000 city workers, members of CUPE 79, are bargaining for a $20 minimum wage, liveable wages, safe and healthy working conditions, and better public services. A victory for these workers will embolden the wider class to raise similar demands in their own workplaces (click here to take two easy actions to support city workers and learn more about their fight).
Confronting Ford
While Ford won a third majority, we should be clear that his government will face major political challenges that it will struggle to navigate. The healthcare crisis, the housing crisis, and a potential deep economic downturn are not going away.
By building ongoing and emerging labour struggles among all workers—no matter where they take place in the province, or whether they belong to a union—the left has the chance to replicate the conditions that led to the last major confrontation with Ford, and in the process, demonstrate the best way to defeat his agenda.
That means connecting with, engaging, and involving workers—including those who may have voted for Ford—in the planning and organizing of all these fights. But activists can’t wait for labour leaders to take the lead. We need to find ways to initiate our own rank-and-file activity that builds capacity for the leaders who recognize that labour’s strength is in its members, and that pushes those that would rather focus on elections.
We can’t wait until 2029 to defeat Ford’s agenda. We need to start the fight now. And if we want a better outcome at the next election, it will only be the result of the hard work we do in our workplaces and communities long before then.
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