Understanding the political durability of Doug Ford’s market populism

Abstract

The Ontario Progressive Conservative (PC) Party expanded its legislative majority in the June 2022 provincial election despite difficulties in managing the COVID-19 pandemic and seeming public apathy towards its government. We find that the PC’s durability can be attributed to a discourse of “market populism” that rhetorically addresses Ontario’s transition to a service-based economy, and the failure of institutional alternatives to present compelling counterhegemonic discourses. Elements of potentially more effective counterhegemonic discourses are discussed.

Keywords:

• Discourse analysis
• hegemony
• market populism and authoritarianism
• Ontario politics
• political economy

Introduction

In the days before the June 2, 2022 Ontario election, nearly two-thirds¹ of potential voters indicated at least moderate support for a change of government, with 50 percent feeling that it was “definitely” time for a change.² Behind this was a relatively negative perception of the government’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic,³ and in-depth mainstream media coverage of Premier Doug Ford’s government’s failings in areas such as long-term care⁴ and the environment and climate change,⁵ both before and during the campaign. Affordability issues were identified consistently as the leading concern heading into the election, and there were also strong perceptions that cost of living would rise under a re-elected Ford government.⁶ The relative antipathy that voters felt towards many aspects of the Ford government is well visualized in Figure 1.

Figure 1. From Abacus Research, “Final Abacus Data Poll: Ontario PCs lead by 13 as they head towards another majority government,” June 1, 2022, https://abacusdata.ca/june-1-final-ontario-poll-abacus-data/.

Despite all of this, the Ontario Progressive Conservative (PC) Party skated to an apparently easy expansion of its legislative majority on June 2. This result begs some explanation. How has the Ford government’s discursive and governance approach sustained political success in the face of material difficulty and seeming public antipathy? This paper aims to provide insight into both the current landscape of political discourses in Ontario and the durability of the Ford government’s populist strategy through an analysis of discourse, political economy, and hegemony.

Ontario’s transition from an economy based primarily on manufacturing and resource extraction and processing to one dominated by service- and knowledge-based economic activities has been far more positive than those of its US “rust belt” state neighbours on the south side of the Great Lakes.⁷ In contrast to the dramatic declines in economic activity and population suffered by US jurisdictions over the past four decades, the province’s macrolevel trajectories in terms of economic and population growth have remained positive.⁸ At the same time, the transition has produced a highly polarized labour market and geographically uneven development patterns that must be discursively and materially addressed by any party hoping to govern the province.

We propose that the Ford Conservatives have found success in a political discourse of “market populism” that rhetorically addresses these impacts of Ontario’s transition from a manufacturing- to service-based economy. This discourse has weathered the challenges of COVID-19 due to the incorporation of more activist elements and the failure of electoral alternatives to provide a theory of Ontario’s economic future that moves beyond the managerial discourse that the Ford government displaced in 2018.

Theoretical framework

This paper employs a Gramscian analysis of discourse and hegemony. It should be noted that “Gramscian” is meant in something closer to a “traditional” or “classical” analysis than one based upon neo-Gramscian poststructuralist analysis, as originated by Laclau and Mouffe⁹ and currently employed by a variety of discourse scholars.¹⁰ This framework allows for consideration of how certain discourses gain and maintain dominance, or hegemony, over others in response to material, political, and economic circumstances.

As noted by Winfield and Dolter, studies of Canadian public policy have tended to focus on “the roles of government agencies and structures, and nonstate actors and forces in understanding public policy debates and the resulting policy decisions,” while “ideas, norms and assumptions have tended to be dealt with through the proxies of the state and non-state actors whose actions they inform, rather than being treated as variables in their own right.”¹¹ A key premise of discourse analysis is that discourses function in service of the “reproduction of power abuse and social inequality”¹² by reinforcing the ideas and norms that underlie regimes and forms of power.¹³ As such, the shared understandings that come from discourse shape political action. Discourses matter because they condition “the way we define, interpret, and address” material conditions.¹⁴

A Gramscian analysis of hegemony brings together discursive and political-economic factors to explain how some discourses dominate others as well as legitimate regimes of political power. Gramsci starts his analysis with the goal of explaining “why those who lack economic power consent to hierarchies of social power that privilege some while exploiting others.”¹⁵ This requires an explanation of the interaction between material political power and discursive cultural power.

In Gramsci’s theory, hegemony is the unity of formal political power and cultural power, and thus is power that stems not solely from political domination, but also from cultural or discursive construction.¹⁶ Hegemony explains how a politically dominant group might rely on discursive power to maintain control of a social formation, as well as how a nondominant group might build power outside of the levers of formalized political power.

Within the civil society, or cultural, aspect of power, Gramsci proposes that hegemony constitutes the establishment of a “common sense,” or a view that is “inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed.”¹⁷ As a discourse that emerges within civil society and is ultimately socially and historically situated, such common sense legitimates political power in the cultural realm as is necessary, and is thus not necessarily “a coherent body of thought, such as we would associate with ideology.”¹⁸ Through hegemony, Gramsci provides a theory of the relationship between cultural and material political power that explains the role of each, without being deterministic or confined purely to language.

Further insight into discourse analysis can be drawn from the social theorist Michel Foucault.¹⁹ Foucault defines discourses as “ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and relations between them. Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning.”²⁰ In other words, discourses are not merely a reflection or product of what is already known or a lens through which an individual views the world, but a way of actively and continuously constructing knowledge and experiencing the world.

This theoretical understanding of discourse and hegemony implies a corresponding understanding of hegemonic crisis and transition. Owing to their interconnected nature, Gramsci proposes that a complete hegemonic transition requires both the presence of counterhegemonic discourses and crisis in the material political-economic realm.²¹ While political economy crises “constitute […] the potential for societal change,”²² discourses are also necessary for hegemonic transitions because it is “at the level of [discourse] that human beings become conscious of these[material] changes.”²³ That is to say, discourse alone does not and cannot direct politics, but has the potential to shape political action in the wake of political-economic crises prompted by material conditions.

This dynamic is nuanced by Gramsci’s concepts of the “national-popular” and “passive revolution.” These concepts help us to see that the features of any particular hegemonic transition are subject to the specificities of a particular time and space. Gramsci proposes that parties aspiring to hegemony must unite and mobilize a “national-popular collective will”²⁴—a party cannot gain hegemony simply by straightforwardly claiming to represent the interests of one class, but must transcend “the corporate interests of one class alone, presenting its goals on a ‘universal plane’” and thus create “the hegemony of a fundamental group over a series of subordinate groups.”²⁵ Within the context of hegemonic transitions, this means that a discourse or political movement must develop an appeal to the national-popular in order to attain hegemony; what constitutes the national-popular is historically and socially specific.

“Passive revolution” refers to a circumstance in which a “change in economic structure occurs but without a radical political transformation.”²⁶ Passive revolution occurs when “aspects of the social relations of capitalist development are either instituted and/or expanded resulting in both a ‘revolutionary’ rupture and ‘restoration’ of social relations.”²⁷ This is relevant to a discussion of hegemonic transitions because it is essentially the circumstance in which a material rupture is “resolved” by a discourse that upholds essential elements of the already existing social relations. However, this “resolution” is fundamentally unstable and represents a “blocked dialectic,” or failure of social relations to change in response to altered material circumstances.²⁸

For our purposes, the primary relevant categories to identify will be the “material crisis,” “hegemonic discourse/common sense,” and “counterhegemonic discourse.” These categories will allow us to identify the basic elements involved in a hegemonic transition. In this way, we will hopefully see whether the dominant common sense is able to weather a material rupture or whether the antihegemonic discourse is sufficiently compelling to prompt a hegemonic transition.

The road to 2018

The structural transition of Ontario’s economy

The material root of the political and discursive regimes discussed in this paper is the structural transition of Ontario’s economy. Ontario has undergone “substantial structural changes over time,” the most relevant to contemporary politics being the expansion of the service sector and contraction of the manufacturing sector.²⁹ As Winfield notes, the “Ontario governments that have held office since 1985 have struggled with the impact of these structural economic changes and their implications for economic strategy.”³⁰ These material changes have a played a key role in shaping the discourse adopted by the Ford campaign in advance of the 2018 election.

Dating from the time of the first oil shocks of the mid-1970s, the transition among capitalist states in the Global North from having manufacturing-based ­economies to economies based on service, and knowledge- and information-based activities is a long-noted trend.³¹ This new socioeconomic formation is most commonly referred to as a “post-industrial” society³² (as popularized by Daniel Bell), and has been documented in its specific manifestation in Canada and especially Ontario.³³ This transitional process is far from complete, but in Ontario it can perhaps be seen most simply by comparing the composition of overall production by industry in Ontario from 1997 (the earliest year for consistent provincial data) to 2020. In 1997, manufacturing constituted roughly 19 percent and service constituted roughly 69 percent of production, whereas in 2020, those numbers had changed to 11 and 77 percent respectively.³⁴

Ontario’s experience of economic transition has been far more positive than that of its “rust belt” neighbours—such as Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and western New York state³⁵—on the south side of the Great Lakes, where there have been dramatic declines in economic activity and population. At the same time, the province’s economic transition has not been without serious challenges of its own. The transition has not occurred uniformly, with considerable polarization occurring in service-sector employment and between regions of the province. Within the service sector, economic gains have increasingly accrued to “a very fortunate few [who] have benefited from high-paying jobs, [while] the major labor development in Ontario has been the downward spiral of wages and working conditions for many workers.”³⁶ This can also be characterized as the “simultaneous creation of high-paid managerial jobs at the top end of the labour market and low-paid personal service at the bottom end, with little or no creation of mid skilled manual and clerical jobs”³⁷

Canada ranks along with the United States as the most dualized and segmented labour markets among affluent countries.³⁸ This is further evidenced by research from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), which shows a “drop in the share of earnings for families in the bottom half [of the labour market], falling from 22 per cent in 2000–02 to 19 per cent in 2013–15 [and that] that income shifted from the bottom half to the top half of the income distribution: [as] the top half’s share of earnings rose from 78 per cent in 2000–02 to 81 per cent in 2013–15.”³⁹ Essentially, slow growth and increasingly precarious work from 2000 to 2015 disproportionally affected the bottom half of earners in Ontario, resulting in an increasingly unequal labour market.⁴⁰ A 2018 CCPA report adds the further insight that this persistent inequality has fallen increasingly upon racialized Ontarians.⁴¹ A 2021 report from the Public Policy Forum shows mid-skilled jobs dropping by 7.5% in Ontario since 2008.⁴²

The polarization of labour markets has not had an even geographically distribution across Ontario. A 2018 report from the Mowatt Centre observes that income decline due to de-industrialization has been “particularly acute in a number of mid-sized cities in southwestern Ontario and in an arc surrounding the Greater Toronto Area,”⁴³ and a recent article from Kerr and Qiyomiddin notes a trend towards low growth in “higher skilled occupational categories” outside of Toronto.⁴⁴

Perhaps the most indepth documentation of the uneven nature of service-sector polarization and economic growth in Ontario since the early 2000s can be found in the Neptis Foundation’s 2018 report on planning in the Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH).⁴⁵ While the full extent of the trends it identifies goes beyond the scope of this paper, the major tendency is well encapsulated in the report’s first paragraph, which notes that, since the Neptis Foundation’s previous report in 2015, “a more balanced pattern of urban and suburban employment growth has given way to the hyper-concentration of knowledge-based activities in and around downtown Toronto.”⁴⁶

Pre-Ford politics

Ontario’s political culture has long been aptly encapsulated by former premier Bill Davis’s quip that “bland works.”⁴⁷ Ontario’s political culture has traditionally been understood to be grounded in three dominant themes: loyalty, pragmatism and management, and identification with Canada.⁴⁸ These characteristics are largely attributed to the long Progressive Conservative Party dynasty from 1943 to 1985 and to the sustained period of post–World War II economic growth from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s. During this time, governance in Ontario was characterized by the pursuit of economic success, a requirement for managerial efficiency in the government, an expectation of reciprocity in political relationships, and a balancing of interests in public policymaking.⁴⁹

These themes were seen, in many ways, to be carried over through the 1985–1987 Liberal-New Democratic Party (NDP) minority and 1987–1990 Liberal majority governments led by David Peterson, and then through Bob Rae’s unexpected 1990–1995 NDP government.⁵⁰ The arrival of the Progressive Conservative-led “common sense revolution” in 1995 was, by contrast, seen as a significant break from the traditional norms of Ontario politics. The common sense revolution was “in word and proposed deeds, a militant pledge of neoliberal policies of market discipline to bolster Ontario business” through policies such as cutting taxes, spending, regulation, and the size of the public service; balancing budgets; and reforming administration to favour the privatization and marketization of the state.⁵¹ All of these directions were supported by a narrative of political polarization between “the morally upright, entrepreneurial, individual citizens of Ontario and the welfare-scroungers, unions, and collectivist state that had cost Ontario its competitive edge.”⁵² The end result of the Harris government’s tenure in power from 1995 to 2003 has been described as the transformation of the Ontario state that “consolidated a new logic of competitive austerity centred on regionally flexible labour markets, a tamed union movement, low taxes, minimal program spending, and marketized modes of public administration,”⁵³ grounded in an implicit response to the structural challenges facing the Ontario economy.

The Liberal McGuinty and Wynne governments, which governed 2003–2018, were first elected in the wake of the administrative and policy failures, and deepening political conflicts, that flowed from the common sense revolution, and they explicitly emphasized a return to “themes of civility, moderation, and competence, which had traditionally been seen to lie at the core of the success of the long PC dynasty.”⁵⁴ The Ford government, by contrast, has revived and magnified many of the breaks that the Harris government made from the province’s traditional political norms, while combining them with a new populist discourse to produce a new discursive frame to the province’s politics, which we will term “market populism.” We argue that this development can be linked to the McGuinty and Wynne governments’ failures to respond effectively to the structural transformations taking place in Ontario’s economy and society.

In particular, the geographic and sectoral polarization of labour markets was reinforced by the approach taken by the McGuinty and Wynne governments, especially in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.⁵⁵ The Liberal government elected in 2003 did undertake major new initiatives in a number of areas, such as the phase out of coal-fired electricity and the adoption of major reforms to the planning process, including the establishment of the Greater Golden Horseshoe Greenbelt. The succeeding government led by Kathleen Wynne adopted an ambitious climate change plan.⁵⁶ At the same time, the Liberal governments retained many of the changes and cuts imposed under the auspices of the common sense revolution. The government’s approach was seen to reflect its desire to “demonstrate their own commitments to fiscal consolidation and a ‘low tax’ strategy” through the pursuit of budgetary balances, budget cuts to government agencies, and an increased emphasis on public-private partnerships.⁵⁷

The tension between the Liberal governments’ progressive and neoliberal tendencies was intensified by the 2008 financial crisis. While the 2009 Green Energy and Green Economy Act could be seen as an aggressive effort to integrate economic and environmental policy,⁵⁸ and a component of the “emergency Keynesianism” employed in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, the McGuinty government then pursued a strategy by which “public sector restraint would be the means to ‘pay for the crisis.’”⁵⁹ In 2012, the provincial budget set out a strategy to eliminate the deficit by the 2017–2018 financial year, and “explicitly proposed austerity for the rest of the decade.”⁶⁰ These priorities were continued under the Wynne government, with the 2016 Budget boasting that “Ontario was the leanest government in Canada, with the lowest per capita program spending of any province […] and is projected to remain so.”⁶¹ The Wynne government’s flagship progressive initiative, the 2017 Climate Change Action Plan, although notable for its comprehensiveness, made no specific provisions for dealing with the impact of its cap-and-trade-based carbon pricing system on low income and otherwise marginalized communities.⁶²

Speaking to the political reception of this strategy, a 2018 report from the Mowat Centre polling Ontarians on the “perceptions of their economic security, as well as the ability of government to offset economic adversity through social programs” found that “a decade after the financial crisis of 2008, many Ontarians remain somewhat uncertain about the future, expressing concerns about job security and opportunities for economic mobility […] [and with] mixed views about whether government programs will be there to support them in times of need.”⁶³ This suggested that the Liberal government’s handling of the 2008 financial crisis not only resulted in further entrenchment of divisions within Ontario’s economy, but also contributed to a general decline of trust in government services.

In many ways, the political-economic circumstance of labour polarization, geographic unevenness, and declining trust in services set the stage for the 2018 election of Doug Ford’s Conservatives. Many of those areas to which Doug Ford’s populist discourse appealed most directly—rural and suburban communities—were also those areas most likely “to lack access to secure, high-wage service jobs […] in the metropolitan core.”⁶⁴

Ford’s market-populist discourse

For these circumstances, the Ford campaign presented a market-populist discourse based upon two central pillars: “respecting taxpayers” and “open for business.” This discourse combines a relatively neoliberal policy approach, like that pursued by the Harris government, with a populist focus on reducing costs to consumers (for example, taxes and hydro rates) in the short term. The approach reframes, in populist terms, traditionally neoliberal economic goals such as a reduction in the size of the state and deregulation of the economy. These were then branded as expressing what “real Ontarians” want. Slogans such as “open for business” and “respecting taxpayers” suggest a direct connection between policies that favour minimal government interference and personal economic prosperity. They imply that anything beyond minimal government action is incompatible with respect for voters—something that, within this discourse, the Liberal governments failed to show. We can see some key elements of this discourse and its primary themes in the Ford government’s first Speech from the Throne and the 2018 Progressive Conservative Party platform.

Respecting taxpayers

The “respecting taxpayers” theme was well encapsulated in a line from the 2018 speech, stating that: “Your new government believes that no dollar is better spent than the dollar that is left in the pockets of the taxpayer.”⁶⁵ Underlying this ­statement is a belief not so much that taxation should be employed responsibly, but that taxation and government expenditure themselves are perhaps illegitimate exercises of state authority.

In the 2018 Ontario Conservative Party platform entitled “A Plan for the People,” the theme of “respecting taxpayers” also arose when the Ford government identified its constituency as “the people in Ontario that have lost trust in government,” “the people that believe the Liberals are the corrupt elite that prioritize special interest groups,” “the hard-working people in Ontario that pay taxes to the political elites,” and “the people that demand respect from the Ontario government, as taxpayers.”⁶⁶ In general, “the people” are constructed as “a homogenized group of hard-working taxpayers and lower- and middle-class families in Ontario.”⁶⁷ These statements demonstrate a populist commitment to the interests of “the people” with the minimalist-state conception embraced by neoliberalism. Specifically, they link a short-term alleviation of tax burdens on “the people” to a more systematic neoliberal project concerned with reducing the state’s role in public affairs.

Open for business

The “open for business” theme can also be found in the 2018 Speech from the Throne. In particular, it can be seen in the idea that “in the current climate, creating and protecting jobs should be something that unites us all […] by lowering taxes, reducing the regulatory burden and making life easier for entrepreneurs, your government will make sure the world knows that Ontario is open for business.”⁶⁸ The theme can also be seen in the 2018 Ontario Conservative Party platform, which typifies “the elite” keeping Ontario closed as the outgoing Liberal government, guilty of systemic corruption and using their authority to enrich their close friends and colleagues.⁶⁹

The “open for business” theme again puts neoliberal ideas within a populist frame. In particular, by assuming a direct relationship between reduced regulation of industry and more economic prosperity for all, this theme links individual material wellbeing to a neoliberal agenda of deregulation. In sum, the discourse employed by the Ford government reframes traditionally neoliberal ends—notably the reduction of the size of the state and the deregulation of the economy—in populist terms by positing these ends as the organic and morally justified “general will.”

We propose that, on a general level, the discourse employed by the Ford campaign can be understood as a form of business-friendly market populism. This paper adopts an ideational approach that conceives populism as a “discourse, an ideology, or a worldview.”⁷⁰ This approach identifies populism as “a thin-centred ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps: ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the [general will] of the people.”⁷¹ As such, Ford’s ­discourse is populist to the extent that it adopts assumptions, norms, and framings that are characteristic of populism.

A key feature of this definition is that the division between the elite and the people is not necessarily based upon economic conflict, as in Marxism, nor upon the concept of the pure nation, as in nationalism, but upon a moral distinction.⁷² For the populist, “the essence of the people is their purity, in the sense that they are ‘authentic,’ while the elite are corrupt, because they are not authentic.”⁷³ This helps to explain why populists view the general will of “the people” to be “common sense,” the morally correct action, and constantly under threat of subversion by corrupt elites and “special interests.”

These developments can be seen through a Gramscian lens by understanding “the people” and “general will” of populism as a construction of a national-popular that arises when political-economic crises fail to be sufficiently addressed by the prevailing “common sense.” When put through this lens, the ideational conception of populism gives us the tools to identify populism not only as a discourse bearing particular features, but also as one that arises in particular material and political circumstances.

Ford’s discourse can be specified as “market” populism to the degree that it weds a populist commitment to the interests of “the people” with the minimalist-state conception embraced by neoliberalism. The term neoliberalism is somewhat contested, but is commonly understood as adherence to neoclassical economic theories of the market as an optimal tool for organizing society and a corresponding “antagonism towards state ‘interference’ [that is, regulation].”⁷⁴

The wedding of populism and neoliberalism was accomplished in Ford’s discourse via a distinction between the elite and the people that drew upon the polarization and uneven development in Ontario’s economy generally, and in the service class in particular, but flattened that phenomenon into a conflict between those “elites” with “good” service jobs located in the metropolitan core and “the people” with “bad/precarious” service jobs, as well as jobs in the manufacturing, construction, and resource sectors located in suburban or rural areas.⁷⁵

In this way, Ford’s market populism was able to construct an elite and a people without recourse to the xenophobia or nativism that is emblematic of a great deal of populist discourses in Europe and the United States. These directions are precluded in Ontario by the province’s ethnically diverse population and long-standing self-conceived culture of multiculturalism. In Ontario, the divide between the people and the elite is much more explicitly economic and geographic than in other jurisdictions. However, this economic divide is not necessarily based strictly on income stratification, but rather on sectors of the economy. To the degree that it is cultural, it relies on perceived differences between wealthy metropolitan elites and “real Ontarians.”

The “general will” of the people is also economic, rather than nativist or xenophobic, in Ford’s discourse. The general will of the people, and its connection to neoliberal/market objectives, can be seen in the themes that emerge across Ford’s discourse: “respecting taxpayers” and “open for business.” Both of these themes posit that “the people” desire limited government interference with everyday life and a freer rein for business development in Ontario.

The 2018 election

Having analyzed the nature of the Ford government’s discourse, we now turn to why it prevailed over the alternative offered by the Wynne Liberal government. We can understand the McGuinty/Wynne Liberal governments’ managerial approach to governance as the hegemonic discourse in Ontario politics prior to the 2018 election. Closely related to the governance style employed throughout much of the PC “dynasty,” and the Peterson and Rae governments that followed it, this discourse emphasized balance among competing interests and agendas and stressed administrative competence and moderation as primary political values.⁷⁶ The Liberal government, which held power for approximately 15 years, drew strongly on these same traditional discursive orientations.⁷⁷

The obvious counterhegemonic discourse is the Ford PCs’ market-populist approach. This discourse clearly presented an “alternative” understanding of politics in Ontario, appealing to those who were “left behind” or “forgotten” by the Liberal government. The political-economic crisis can be seen in the increasing and geographically uneven development of inequality and service-sector polarization within Ontario, exacerbated by the 2008 economic crisis. But in Ontario’s case, this was not so much a crisis in the sense of a “rupture,” but rather the “coming to a head” of the unaddressed consequences of the ongoing structural economic transition.

An examination of each discourse’s response to this crisis shows that the Ford PCs pitched a more compelling path forward that “brought to consciousness” the political-economic crisis. In many ways, the hegemonic Liberal party discourse had no way of addressing this political-economic development, and in fact contributed to it through austerity measures in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The Liberal government’s most notable response was perhaps the uptake of the discourse from the Martin Prosperity Institute’s 2009 report “Ontario in the Creative Age.”⁷⁸ The Martin report generally argued that economic transition policy in Ontario should focus on the “creative class” by making investments in developing “creative skills and industry” and raising “talent attainment.”⁷⁹ At the same time, the strategy largely failed to consider the current Ontarians who were not part of the creative class, other than as supports for the creatives.

The Ford PCs, by contrast, employed a discourse that did more to recognize economic polarization in Ontario and located that polarization in the contradictory nature of the Liberal government’s governance approach. As such, it was able to provide a discourse that explained both why the economic circumstances of Ontarians outside of the metropolitan core were “the Liberals’ fault” and how a Conservative government would provide a better way forward by “respecting taxpayers” and “opening for business.”

This understanding is supported by a finding that support for then-Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, who employed a very similar discourse to that of his brother Doug, was correlated with perceptions of “personal financial stress.”⁸⁰ Specifically, those who reported experiencing greater “personal financial stress,” regardless of income, were more likely to be conservative and more likely to have a favourable view of Rob Ford.⁸¹ As such, while we might generally consider neoliberal policies most appealing to high-income individuals—people interested in retaining more of their earnings—we can understand the Ford Conservative’s market-populist message as a more broadly aimed “narrative of striking vengeance against an out-of-touch state that seems […] prepared to sap money from hardworking people.”⁸² This discourse neatly ties together a number of threads by presenting difficulties in Ontario’s economic restructuring as a product of the Liberal government’s corruption and preference for metropolitan “elites” over “real hard-working” Ontarians. The preferable course presented, through a populist framing, is neoliberal minimization of the state and greater reliance on markets and business. Thus, the Ford government was able to construct a “national-popular” that synthesized the interests of business elites and “real Ontarians” by putting traditional neoliberal ends within a populist pitch to short-term individual prosperity.

A comparison of the election results maps for 2014 and 2018 shows that the most prominent trend was the overwhelming shift from the Liberals to PCs among voters in suburbs surrounding the City of Toronto (often referred to as the 905 region because of its area code), and in the outer suburbs (that is, the former cities of Scarborough, North York, and Etobicoke) of the city itself. Consistent with data reviewed earlier, these are some of the areas hit hardest⁸³ by service-sector ­polarization and increased concentration of work in the downtown Toronto core. It is not difficult to understand the appeal of Ford’s discourse among those who saw both economic decline and less reliable access to social services under the McGuinty and Wynne governments.

In sum, leading up to the 2018 election, the Liberal government struggled both to effectively govern Ontario’s economic restructuring, especially the polarization of the service-class, and to provide a discourse that explained that difficulty. The Ford government was able to capitalize on this by providing a market-populist discourse that appealed to those who considered themselves underserved and overtaxed by the Liberal government.

Market populism’s endurance through COVID-19 and the 2022 election

Tracking the nature of the Ford government’s market-populist discourse after the 2018 election, and its ultimate success in the June 2022 election, necessitates an understanding of how that government responded to and discursively framed the COVID-19 pandemic. The economic impact of COVID-19 reinforced, in many ways, the broader economic trends of deindustrialization and labour market polarization identified earlier. The manufacturing industry was heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and, within that sector, auto and transportation manufacturing were hardest hit.⁸⁴ Further, among the service industry segments, it appears that accommodation and food, transportation and warehousing, retail trade, and wholesale trade were heavily affected, while segments such as finance and insurance, real estate, and public administration were almost untouched.⁸⁵ In effect, the pandemic further reinforced the polarization between high-earning and low-earning service jobs in the province.

The Ford government’s discursive response to the COVID-19 pandemic retained most of the elements that preceded the pandemic, adapting slightly to accommodate increased government action, as necessitated by the pandemic. This was accomplished by retaining the two market-populist themes discussed above—respecting taxpayers and open for business—while adopting two additional themes, which this paper will call “reopening for business” and “get it done.”

Reopening for business

The “Reopening for Business” discourse understands the removal of public health restrictions to ensure economic prosperity to be the primary role of the Ontario government in the COVID-19 pandemic. This creates an implicit zero-sum framing of the relationship between economy and public health. This discourse can be seen in a number of Premier Ford’s and the government’s statements.

For example, the 2021 budget, entitled “Protecting People’s Health and Our Economy,” summarizes the government’s approach to post-COVID economic recovery in the statement: “We are choosing a different path, because anyone who claims higher taxes or fewer public services are inevitable is forcing a false choice. Growth is the […] path […] that our government intends to pursue […] While we create the conditions, it will be the people and employers who create the actual growth.”⁸⁶

This can be further seen in statements that frame alleviation of public health measures in terms of their economic impact with headlines such as: “More People Can Get Back to Work as Additional Businesses and Services to Reopen This Week,”⁸⁷ “Ontario Supports Job Creators as People Start Returning to Work,”⁸⁸ and in continual reference to the easing of public health measures as “reopening the economy.”⁸⁹ The Ford government has provided a market-populist twist to many of the more activist economic measures taken during the pandemic by emphasizing measures that aid small business and “job creators.”⁹⁰

In this discourse, activist government measures, usually understood as anathema to neoliberal governance, are justified to the extent that they secure economic prosperity, especially economic prosperity conceptualized as business profitability. The populist tenor of the Ford government’s discourse is instrumental in this task because it provides popular appeal to economic measures that would normally be outside of the general public interest. By connecting business profits to a populist appeal to general economic wellbeing, the Ford government is able to undertake “market-deepening” and “profit-securing” policy in the name of “the people.”

Get it done

A further pandemic recovery discourse emerged in the run-up to the 2022 election under the slogan “get it done,” emphasizing the assertive, if not authoritarian, exercise of state power. More activist or permissive measures—such as the aggressive use of discretionary planning orders,⁹¹ rewriting planning rules⁹² to circumvent local governments and benefit development interests,⁹³ the evisceration of the province’s environmental assessment process,⁹⁴ and granting provincial agencies, such as the Metrolinx transit agency, extraordinary legal powers to ensure the completion of infrastructure projects⁹⁵—might be understood as part of a project to secure profits rather than removing regulation. The government’s behaviour was increasingly accompanied by violations of long-accepted democratic norms, especially procedural requirements for consultation and civil participation, including the invocation, for the first time in the province’s history, of the section 33 override clause of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms³⁰ and the temporary suspension of the province’s Environmental Bill of Rights.⁹⁶ Ultimately, these more assertive uses of state power retain the base interest of Ford’s market populism in benefitting entrenched business interests and appealing to short-term individual economic prospects, while discursively justifying these actions as emergency measures required for economic recovery.⁹⁷

Although these more authoritarian elements of the Ford government’s conduct might seem to break with the “laissez-faire” orientation often associated with neoliberalism, we contend that they can be linked to a market-populist orientation. Beginning with the link between populism and authoritarianism, Mudde and Kaltwasser propose that “it is important to think not only about regimes of [liberal] democracy, but also about processes of democratization [and de-democratization] and that, viewed in this way, “populism has a different effect on [democratizing processes and de-democratizing processes].”⁹⁸ In particular, they propose that in the context of a liberal democracy, populism will tend to re-enforce a de-democratization process, through democratic erosion, including “incremental changes to undermine the autonomy of those institutions that specialize in the protection of fundamental rights, such as diminishing judiciary independency, jettisoning the rule of law, and weakening minority rights.”⁹⁹ On this interpretation, populists will tend to support democratic erosion and oppose democratic deepening because “they support an interpretation of democracy based on unconstrained popular will”¹⁰⁰ and “an extreme majoritarian model of democracy that opposes any groups or institutions that stand in the way of implementing ‘the general will of the people.’”¹⁰¹

In specific reference to market populism, Albo and Fanelli link authoritarianism to the maintenance of a neoliberal economic orthodoxy. Specifically, they propose that because the core principles of neoliberalism necessitate “the privileging of market freedoms above democratic practice”¹⁰² and “disciplining dissent […] to defend capitalist markets,”¹⁰³ this implies the maintenance of free markets through “restrictions on the exercise of oppositional claims that infringe on market activities and the exercise of rights over private property.”¹⁰⁴ By prioritizing the security of markets and profits, market populism can imply an authoritarian disposition towards political activity that jeopardizes that security.

In the context of Ontario, Tom McDowell has made the link between neoliberalism and de-democratization by noting that “parliamentary procedures and practices have been gradually reformed to accommodate politically contested retrenchment policies by limiting the capacity of a legislature to scrutinize the actions of the executive branch.”¹⁰⁵ This is linked to neoliberalism because “neoliberalism has required a reformed parliamentary apparatus, which can overcome legislative opposition to the implementation of its most controversial policies” and avoid the most deliberative elements of parliamentarianism. In theoretical terms, this is because “neoliberal political theory emerged from the standpoint that the supremacy of parliament constitutes a dangerous encroachment upon individual liberty.”¹⁰⁶ As such, based on McDowell’s analysis, de-democratization has played an essential role in the establishment of neoliberal governance in Ontario and its continued functioning.

In effect, market populism is connected to authoritarianism to the extent that it links individual prosperity to the safeguarding and establishment of market mechanisms and then portrays threats to the security of markets as obstacles to the realization of the “general will of the pure people.” By connecting business profits to a populist appeal to general economic wellbeing, market populists are able to undertake rather authoritarian measures, such as shirking procedural rights and democratic norms, in the name of “the people.” This helps to explain some of the specific ways that market-populist impulses manifest as authoritarian de-democratization measures in the Ford government’s recent discourses and political action.

All of this points to the status of the Ford government’s strategy as what Gramsci termed a “passive revolution” in which political-economic transformation has been “revolutionary,” while also reinscribing existing social relations. While the Ford government’s discourse arose from the Liberal government’s failure to address structural transformations in Ontario’s economy, its primary impact in power has been to reinforce the power of already advantaged actors.

The failure of the alternatives

Although polling signals for the Ford government leading into the 2022 election seemed to spell trouble, in the end the PC government was re-elected with a strengthened majority. Neither the NDP nor the Liberals emerged as the clear alternative to Ford’s government; the Liberal Party was unable to recover official party status and the NDP saw a contraction in both its vote share and number of seats in the legislature. Even the Green Party showed only a small gain in its total vote. None of the new Right-wing populist parties, such as the “Ontario” and “New Blue” parties, that emerged during the election captured a significant portion of the vote and none won a seat in the Legislature. All of this, in conjunction with low voter turnout, would seem to indicate a general dissatisfaction with the alternatives, with no party having been able to capitalize on the drops in the Ford government’s popularity.

The New Democratic Party of Ontario

As the official opposition, the Ontario NDP is the most prominent electoral alternative to the Ford government. The NDP have generally employed a discourse that advocated a more activist response to the COVID-19 pandemic with a greater focus on public health. However, they mostly, although not exclusively, did so not by rejecting the Ford government’s general orientation towards, and framing of, the problem, but rather by adopting a managerial discourse that the NDP would have “managed the crisis better” and paid more attention to the needs of “everyday” Ontarians. Most messaging from the NDP proposed specific policy alternatives and a more activist approach to governance, but it did not necessarily propose a break with current understandings of governance in Ontario. Instead, the NDP claimed that it would be a better manager within the current political paradigm.¹⁰⁷

The Liberal Party of Ontario

In general, under the leadership of Steven Del Duca, the Liberal Party of Ontario adopted a very similar strategy to that of the NDP, pitching itself as a “better manager” of the COVID-19 pandemic.¹⁰⁸ As in the case of the NDP, these statements are related to individual policy differences, and seemed to propose that, within a public-health/economy zero-sum, the Liberal party would have done a better job managing the balance.

The Green Party of Ontario

Although it had only one elected member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, the Green Party did develop a different discursive approach from the focus on managerial competence that underlay the Liberal and NDP platforms. Instead, it adopted a “green recovery” discourse,¹⁰⁹ which linked inadequate management of COVID-19 to inadequate management of the environment by arguing that “the path we were on was not sustainable or just. It didn’t adequately care for the people and places we love.”¹¹⁰ In this manner, the Green Party effectively linked the Ford government’s shortcomings on COVID-19 management and the environment to a core problem of discursive focus, namely unsustainability and inadequate care. This differed from the Liberal and NDP platforms by not only pinpointing decisions the Green Party would have managed better, but also by saying that the central problem with the Ford government is not its incompetence, but its misrecognition and misprioritization of relevant political values. Despite its potential appeal, the Green’s framing did not translate into any significant gains in the 2022 election.

New Right-wing populist parties: “Ontario” and “New Blue”

Potential alternative discourses to those of the Ford government also emerged from the Right in the lead up to the 2022 election. February 2022 saw the arrival of a number of “freedom convoys” across Canada.¹¹¹ These protests began as a movement against COVID-19 vaccine mandates and evolved into an expression of general discontent with all COVID-19 health measures—including vaccine mandates, mask mandates, and school closures, among many others¹¹²—some of which were directed vaguely at the Ford government itself. Several new alternative Right-wing parties, such as the New Blue and Ontario Parties, emerged out of these protests, advertising themselves as the choice for antimandate voters.

The discursive framings from these parties were sometimes only vaguely developed, but their disposition seemed the result of the contradiction between the Ford government’s discursive focus on individual freedom (as instantiated in its most populist and neoliberal elements in the “respecting taxpayers” and “open for business” discourse) and the realities of managing an administrative state during a pandemic.¹¹³ In particular, their demands for the end of COVID-19 health measures might be seen as the perceived “general will of the pure people” against elite and unelected health officials and the state.

Ultimately, we suggest that the Ford government’s discourse retained its hegemony throughout the crisis prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic because it did a satisfactory job of absorbing and explaining challenges accompanying COVID-19, and because the institutional discursive alternatives were unable to provide a compelling counterhegemonic discourse that moved beyond the facilitative-managerial discourse the Ford government displaced in 2018. Claims to an ability to “manage the crisis better” were easily linked to the elite management and “infringement of individual freedoms” that has proved anathema to the Ford constituency. A return to a managerial strategy did very little to address the deficiencies of the previous Liberal governments’ discursive approach upon which the Ford conservatives had capitalized.

Nevertheless, the 2022 election outcome did point to potential vulnerabilities for the Ford government. The election saw the lowest voter turnout in the province’s history at 43 percent, suggesting a high degree of voter apathy rather than enthusiastic support for the PC government. This point was reinforced by the consideration that Ford’s party drew nearly 415,000 fewer votes than it did in 2018,¹¹⁴ and the reality that less than 18 percent of eligible voters actually voted PC.¹¹⁵

Conclusions

This paper set out to investigate both the nature and resiliency of the Ford government’s discourse and governance approach. This was accomplished through the operationalization of political discourse analysis, political economy, and a Gramscian analysis of hegemonic relations.

It found that the Ford government’s discourse in general can be characterized as market populism. The Ford government’s discourses could be encapsulated in two emblematic themes: “respecting taxpayers” and “open for business.” These discourses form a populist basis for neoliberal governance and pitch a zero-sum relationship between elite interests and popular economic prosperity. It also found that the Ford government’s resilience can be attributed to two factors. First, the market-populist discourses have done a satisfactory job of absorbing and explaining the challenges accompanying COVID-19, specifically by recourse to the additional pandemic recovery discursive themes of “reopening for business,” and “get it done.” Second, the electoral discursive alternatives failed to provide a compelling counterhegemonic discourse that moved beyond the managerial discourse the Ford government ­displaced in 2018.

Within the terms of the Gramscian approach that has framed our analysis, the Ford government’s discourse remained hegemonic or “common sense” within the electoral sphere throughout the material crisis prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic because the electoral alternatives failed to construct a counterhegemonic discourse that coalesced a “national-popular collective will” around an alternative understanding of the crisis and required governmental response. Instead, the electoral alternatives defaulted to an historic “managerial” approach that had already been made obsolete by the progression of the Ontario economy’s structural transformation and the Ford government’s market populism.

Unseating the Ford government will require providing an alternative basis for addressing the labour market polarization and economic geographic divisions in Ontario, something that has, so far, been absent from its discourses. Such a discourse would need to move beyond both neoliberal and populist assumptions that underpin Doug Ford’s political appeal. This is not to say that the task ahead is purely discursive. Any successful counterhegemonic discourse will have to be paired with material action, or risk failure. A compelling counterhegemonic discourse within the electoral sphere is not a sufficient condition for building a counterhegemonic move­ment, but it is a necessary one.

The specific content of a more effective counterhegemonic discourse is a topic for further discussion that goes beyond this paper’s aim. As we argue elsewhere, however, the environment and climate change remain key points of vulnerability for the Ford government, particularly because they speak to his government’s reactive governance style and lack of forward vision.¹¹⁶ Further, the recent successful mobilization of organized labour against the Ford government’s proposed use of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms’s notwithstanding clause to impose a contract upon education workers,¹¹⁷ and the broad civil society and institutional response resulting in the reversal of the fall 2022 removal of lands from the Greater Toronto Area Greenbelt,¹¹⁸ both point to a growing potential for counterhegemonic movements outside electoral politics. The question of who actually wins under Ford’s form of market populism must also loom large for electoral actors hoping to unseat the Ford government—“the people” or certain well-connected interests such as developers, resource industries, and incumbents in the energy and for-profit health care sec­tors?¹¹⁹ These questions might form the basis for a general postmarket-populist counterhegemonic strategy.

Disclosure statement

The authors report that there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council under Grant #611-2020-0166.

Notes on contributors

Peter Hillson

Peter Hillson is a graduate of the Master in Environmental Studies (MES) program at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, and of the Juris Doctor (JD) program at Osgoode Hall Law School, at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Mark Winfield

Mark Winfield is a Professor of Environmental and Urban Change, coordinator of the MES and MES/JD programs, and co-chair of the Sustainable Energy Initiative at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Notes

1 Coletto, “Final Abacus Data Poll.”

2 Coletto, “Final Abacus Data Poll.”

3 Coletto, “Ontario PCs and Liberals Tied.”

4 Oved, Wallace, and Tubb, “Doug Ford Is Spending Billions.”

5 The Toronto Star, “On Climate.”

6 Coletto, “Final Abacus Data Poll.”

7 Neumann, Remaking the Rust Belt.

8 Robinson, “Five Things to Know;” Ontario, Ministry of Finance, Long-Term Report, Chapter 1.

9 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.

10 Howarth, “Power, Discourse, and Policy”; Howarth and Stavrakakis, “Introducing Discourse Theory”; Martin, “Political Logic of Discourse.”

11 Winfield and Dolter, “Energy, Economic and Environmental Discourses,” 2.

12 Djik, “What is Political Discourse Analysis?” 11; see also Dryzek, Politics of the Earth, and Glynos et al., Discourse Analysis.

13 Djik, “What is Political Discourse Analysis?” 11.

14 Djik, “What is Political Discourse Analysis?”12.

15 Stoddart, “Ideology, Hegemony, Discourse,” 192.

16 Fusaro, Crises and Hegemonic Transitions, 49–55.

17 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 333.

18 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 202.

19 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge; Foucault, “Subject and Power.”

20 Weedon, Feminist Practice, 10.

21 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 70.

22 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 70.

23 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 70–71.

24 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 131.

25 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 182.

26 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 105–20.

27 Bieler and Morton, “Interlocutions with Passive Revolution,” 14.

28 Bieler and Morton, “Interlocutions with Passive Revolution,” 14.

29 Winfield, Blue-Green Province, 14.

30 Winfield, Blue-Green Province, 14.

31 Hirschhorn, “Post-Industrial Economy,”19; OECD. “The Service Economy.”

32 Bell, Coming of Post-Industrial Society.

33 Lavoie, Roy, and Therrien, “Growing Trend,” 827; Hudson, “Seismic Shift”; Florida, Shutters, and Spencer, “Pathways to Ontario’s Knowledge Economy”; Livingstone and Watts, “Changing Class Structure,” 79.

34 Data from Ontario Economic Accounts retrieved from: https://data.ontario.ca/dataset/ontario-economic-accounts.

35 Neumann, Remaking the Rustbelt.

36 Peters, “Ontario Growth Model,” 43–76.

37 Peters, “Ontario Growth Model,” 62.

38 LaRochelle- Côté et al., “Income Security and Stability.”

39 Block, Losing Ground.

40 Block, Losing Ground.

41 Block and Galabuzi, Persistent Inequality.

42 Speer and Bezu, Job Polarization in Canada.

43 Parkin, Different Ontario, 14.

44 Kerr and Qiyomiddin, “Employment.”

45 Blais, Planning the Next GGH.

46 Blais, Planning the Next GGH, 4.

47 Bill Davis 1980 quoted in Malloy, “Bland Works.”

48 Malloy, “Bland Works,” note 87.

49 Noel, “Ontario Political Culture,” 53–54.

50 Malloy “Political Parties.”

51 Albo, Divided Province, 20.

52 Albo, Divided Province, 20.

53 Albo, Divided Province, 22.

54 Winfield, Blue-Green Province, 152.

55 Albo, Divided Province, 3.

56 Winfield, “Environmental Policy”; Winfield and Kaiser, “Ontario and a Changing Climate.”

57 Albo, Divided Province, 23.

58 Winfield and MacWhirter, “Competing Policy Paradigms.”

59 Winfield and MacWhirter, “Competing Policy Paradigms,” 26.

60 Winfield and MacWhirter, “Competing Policy Paradigms,” 27.

61 Ontario, Ministry of Finance, 2016 Ontario Budget.

62 Wilson et al., “Energy Justice & Poverty.”

63 Thirgood and Parkin, Economic Security, 2.

64 Parkin, Different Ontario, 94–95.

65 Ontario, Office of the Premier, “Government for the People”; Zambito, “Plan for the People.”

66 Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, “Plan for the People”; Zambito, “Plan for the People.”

67 Zambito, “Plan for the People,” 35.

68 Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, “Plan for the People”; Zambito, “Plan for the People.”

69 Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, “Plan for the People”; Budd, “People’s Champ.”

70 Mudde and Kaltwasser, Populism, 3–4.

71 Mudde and Kaltwasser, Populism, 6.

72 Mudde, “Populism: An Ideational Approach,” 29.

73 Mudde, “Populism: An Ideational Approach,” 29.

74 McCarthy and Prudham, “Neoliberal Nature,” 276; Brenner, Peck, and Theodore, “Variegated Neoliberalization”; Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism.

75 Tufts, “Geography of the Ontario Service Economy.”

76 Malloy, “Bland Works.”

77 Malloy, “Bland Works.”

78 Martin and Florida, Ontario in the Creative Age.

79 Martin and Florida, Ontario in the Creative Age.

80 Kiss, Perrella, and Spicer, “Right-Wing Populism.”

81 Kiss, Perrella, and Spicer, “Right-Wing Populism,” 1040.

82 Kiss, Perrella, and Spicer, “Right-Wing Populism,” 1040.

83 Elections Ontario, “Election Results Map.”

84 Ontario, Ministry of Finance, Ontario Economic Accounts, Table 15.

85 Ontario, Ministry of Finance, Ontario Economic Accounts, Table 15.

86 Ontario, Ministry of Finance, “2021 Ontario Budget.”

87 Ontario, Office of the Premier, “More People.”

88 Ontario, Office of the Premier, “Ontario Supports Job Creators.”

89 Ontario, Office of the Premier, “Declaration of Emergency Extended.”

90 See note 84 and Ontario, Office of the Premier, “Ontario Provides Urgent Relief.”

91 Winfield, “Giving Developers Free Rein”; Kyle, “COVID-19 in Ontario,” 17–26.

92 More Homes for Everyone Act S.O. 2022 c. 12.

93 Winfield, “Giving Developers Free Rein”; Kyle, “COVID-19 in Ontario,” 17–26.

94 Lindgren, “Concerns Raised.”

95 Building Transit Faster Act, 2020, S.O. 2020, c. 12.

96 O. Reg.115/20.

97 Winfield, “Why Doug Ford is Stumbling.”

98 Mudde and Kaltwasser supra note 70, 86.

99 Mudde and Kaltwasser supra note 70, 91.

100 Mudde and Kaltwasser supra note 70, 90.

101 Mudde and Kaltwasser supra note 70, 91.

102 Albo and Fanelli, Austerity Against Democracy, 15.

103 Albo and Fanelli, Austerity Against Democracy, 19.

104 Albo and Fanelli, Austerity Against Democracy, 25.

105 McDowell, Neoliberal Parliamentarianism, 4.

106 McDowell, Neoliberal Parliamentarianism, 5.

107 See, for example, Ontario NDP, “Ford Turned Away”; Ontario NDP, “Horwath Says”; Ontario NDP, “Doug Ford Must Mandate Vaccinations.”

108 See, for example, Liberal Party of Ontario, “Ontario Liberals Call”; Liberal Party of Ontario, “Ontario Liberals Release Plan.”

109 Green Party of Ontario, “Greener and More Caring.”

110 Green Party of Ontario. “Greener and More Caring.”

111 Vieira, “What Is the Freedom Convoy?”; Hogan, “Ottawa Convoy.”

112 The Toronto Star, “‘Freedom Convoy’ Protests.”

113 The Toronto Star, “‘Freedom Convoy’ Protests.”

114 Elections Ontario, “Election Results Map.”

115 Rubin, “18% of Ontario Voters.”

116 Winfield and Hillson, “Understanding Doug Ford’s.”

117 Mazerolle, “Ontario’s Use of Notwithstanding Clause.”

118 Gee, “Doug Ford Backing Down.”

119 Yalnizyan, “Too Many Dangers.”