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Ontario Premier Doug Ford may be leading in the polls—at least for the moment—but that doesn’t mean he’s the best choice for Ontarians and their families. Here are seven reasons why he’s not:
1. Doug Ford refuses to adequately fund public services.
Many Ontarians don’t know this, but it’s a fact: Compared to other provinces, the Ford government is terrible at funding the public services we all rely on.
In 2022, Ontario’s spending on programs like health, education, and social services was 21 per cent lower than the average of the other provinces. We would have to invest an additional $3,338 dollars per person just to be average in Canada.
Frontline workers know it: our public services are starving for funds. This is costing OPSEU/SEFPO members, and it is costing the people they serve.
For example, health care is in the midst of a major staffing crisis. When Doug Ford ran for election in 2018, he vowed to get rid of “hallway health care,” but the problem is twice as bad now as it was then. On an average day in June 2018, there were 826 patients in hallways and other “unconventional spaces.” By January 2024, there were 2,000. Care is now being provided in chairs.
With not enough funding for services, it’s no wonder that folks in Walkerton lined up at 2 a.m. in the January cold for the chance to get a family doctor, or that 2.5 million Ontarians don’t have one. It’s no wonder that Emergency Room closures are now routine, especially in rural hospitals. It’s no wonder that most Ontario hospitals are facing deficits.
The situation is equally dire in education. Adjusted for inflation, core education funding in our public schools is down $1,500 per student compared to 2018, and teacher shortages are commonplace. In our universities, provincial funding per student would have to double to reach the level of other provinces. And after years of provincial underfunding, Ontario’s colleges are now closing campuses, slashing programs, and laying off staff.
The province’s neglect of virtually every area it is responsible for—from development services to justice to environmental protection—comes at a high price to Ontarians. And some of them pay with their lives: in Ontario’s underfunded child welfare system, one child dies every three days.
2. Doug Ford thinks the affordability crisis is no big deal.
The premier seems to think buying votes by sending every Ontarian a one-time cheque for $200 during an election campaign will somehow make life affordable. It won’t. The problem is much, much bigger than that.
The biggest expense most households face is the cost of keeping a roof over their heads. Housing is an area where the province has the power to do a lot, but instead, the Ford government is doing next to nothing. For those hoping to buy a home, Ford’s record on housing starts is dismal: the government hasn’t hit its own monthly targets even once, and Ontario lags far behind almost every other province. Meanwhile, costs have skyrocketed for the one in three Ontarians who are tenants: an average two-bedroom apartment costs $5,900 a year more than it did when Ford was elected. By leaving new housing construction to the private sector and weakening rent controls, the premier has made Ontarians’ biggest expense more expensive, not more affordable.
Certain very small moves by the government to reduce expenses for households—like its reduction of gasoline and fuel taxes—may help some Ontarians slightly, but here’s the problem: Every penny of that cost reduction is paid for by cuts in other areas the government is responsible for, namely, public services. What you save in one place, you lose in another.
3. Doug Ford puts profit over people through privatization.
If the Doug Ford government has one over-arching priority, it is this: to transform public services and public assets into profit opportunities for private operators.
This has nothing to do with taking good care of public dollars or delivering better services. For example, Ford’s plan to have more private delivery of surgeries and diagnostic procedures will cost Ontarians more—often two to three times more. Private staffing agencies raked in over $1 billion in 2023 to provide temporary nurses and personal support workers to understaffed hospitals and long-term care homes. This was driven in large part by underfunded hospitals and facilities finding it difficult to retain overworked employees—and turning to agencies out of desperation. During the pandemic, death rates were higher at privately held long-term care homes, yet the Ford government rewarded these for-profit companies, awarding them more than 30,000 new long-term care beds in the expanded system.
Under Ford, private profit-making is being encouraged at every level and in every sector—at the expense of quality public services.
4. Doug Ford doesn’t respect workers—or labour rights.
In 2019, the Ontario government passed Bill 124, a law whose only purpose was to push down wages for hundreds of thousands of workers in the provincial public sector. After a long legal battle, both the Superior Court of Ontario and the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that the bill violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and it was repealed in its entirety. Through hard struggle, public-sector unions like OPSEU/SEFPO were successful in winning back stolen wages in larger province-wide bargaining units, but tens of thousands of workers in smaller agencies providing vital services to their communities are still fighting hard to catch up. This hurts some of the lowest-paid and precarious workers in Ontario, and Doug Ford’s indifference is a major reason why.
Ford’s true level of respect for workers was on full display at the end of 2022 when his government passed Bill 28, a bill that invoked the rarely used “notwithstanding clause” in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to stomp on the collective bargaining rights of 55,000 education workers. Faced with united resistance from the entire Canadian labour movement, Ford backed down, but his actions had already revealed him for what he is: no friend of working people.
5. In Doug Ford’s economy, three things are up: unemployment, homelessness and food bank use.
If you’ve watched any Ontario government ads lately—the ones you paid for—you might think our economy has been booming under Ford. It hasn’t.
Ontario’s economic performance under Ford has been weak. Adjusted for inflation, economic activity per person (“GDP per capita”) is actually lower now than it was back in 2018. Unemployment is up as well. In June 2018, when the government was first elected, the unemployment rate was 5.9 per cent and there were 458,200 unemployed Ontarians. In January 2025, the unemployment rate was 7.6 per cent and there were 674,800 unemployed Ontarians—an increase of 216,600 jobless workers.
More than 80,000 Ontarians are homeless right now. More than one million Ontarians rely on food banks – a record number. If that’s what a good economy looks like, it’s frightening to imagine a bad one.
6. Doug Ford can’t be trusted with public dollars.
The Ford government just can’t stop wasting public dollars on things no one asked for.
In December, Ontario’s Auditor General reported that the redevelopment of Ontario Place, a site on the Toronto waterfront, will cost the public purse $2.24 billion. The big winner there will be Therme, a private company from Austria, which will have a 95-year lease on the spot.
This continues the government’s practice of handing public assets over to private companies, which was the whole idea behind the $8.3 billion plan to let certain developers loose on the protected lands of the Greenbelt. That plan failed when the Auditor General found the process of selecting the lands to be “not publicly transparent, objective or fully informed.” The Ford government’s action are now under criminal investigation by the RCMP.
In January, The Financial Accountability Office reported that the government’s decision to tear up its Master Framework Agreement with the Beer Store in order to get beer into corner stores 18 months faster would cost the province $612 million, not counting additional losses over the years.
Another way the Ford government wastes public dollars is by giving them away to people who simply don’t need them. In the case of the $200 cheques, there are many Ontarians who need that money badly, but there are just as many who don’t. The same is true of the government’s decision to reduce the provincial gas tax by 5.7 cents per litre. While the person delivering food in a 15-year-old Corolla probably needs all the help they can get, the driver of the brand-new Lincoln doesn’t. Similarly, the Ford government has been spending billions to subsidize electricity prices. This is good for low-income Ontarians but absolutely unnecessary for the well-to-do and their large, comfortable, well-lit homes.
The cost of all these wasteful schemes adds up; the $200 cheques alone will cost the treasury more than $3 billion. That’s money that could be put to better use—like rebuilding our public services.
Perhaps Ford’s strangest commitment to date is his plan to build a tunnel under Highway 401. While he doesn’t know how long this tunnel will be, how long it might take to build, or what it would cost, he has firmly committed to building it. The cost would certainly be in the tens of billions of dollars or even more than $100 billion. And no one asked for it.
Of course, it is entirely possible that Ford’s tunnel isn’t a tunnel at all, but a communications strategy. Because when reporters are talking about tunnels, they aren’t talking about hallway healthcare, crumbling schools, or rising unemployment.
It’s the kind of thing Donald Trump might do.
7. Doug Ford admires Donald Trump.
Prior to the recent U.S. election, most Canadians didn’t have a favourable opinion of presidential candidate Donald Trump, but Doug Ford did. “On election day was I happy this guy won?” One hundred per cent I was,” he told PC supporters in Etobicoke in early February. Ford then acted surprised that Trump had decided to impose job-killing tariffs on Canada, even though Trump had signaled his intent to do exactly that well before the November election.
Is Ford’s poor judgment of Trump what we need in a premier of Ontario?