With Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives seeking re-election on a slogan of “Protect Ontario,” it’s worth examining whether they made good on their last campaign slogan: “Get It Done.”
The Ontario PC campaign promises in 2022 focused largely on building, in particular housing, hospitals, highways, transit and long-term care homes.
A promise-tracking project run by a group of Canadian universities assesses that Ford’s government kept or was “in progress” of keeping the bulk of the party’s 2022 promises when he called a snap election with more than 15 months left in his mandate.
“Overall I would say it’s a relatively good performance,” said Geneviève Tellier, a political scientist at the University of Ottawa, in an interview.
Peter Graefe, a political scientist at McMaster University, says while Ford may have acted on many of his specific promises, it’s questionable whether those actions actually solved the bigger problems they were supposed to address.
Here’s a detailed look at what Ford’s PC government got done since winning the 2022 election campaign.
U.S. President Donald Trump says he will implement a 25 per cent tariff on Canadian goods starting Saturday. As CBC’s Lane Harrison reports, Ontario’s party leaders have been addressing the news while on the campaign trail.
Housing supply
- The promises: “Keep costs down for families by building the supply that meets home-ownership demand” and “build 1.5 million new homes over the next 10 years.”
During the 2022 campaign, polling repeatedly showed the high cost of housing was among the biggest issues for voters.
Since then, Ford’s government has brought in some measures aimed at speeding up municipal approvals for housing projects and reducing costs for home builders and land developers.
Despite those measures, new-home construction in Ontario since 2022 has stalled. It’s nowhere near the pace needed to hit that 1.5 million target, development applications have dropped and the government’s own forecasts show no sign of the pace accelerating significantly by 2027.
“Ontario is one of the least successful provinces in meeting its housing targets,” said Graefe in an interview.
Graefe said Ford kept certain pledges related to housing, “but he didn’t really get it done at the level of the overarching promise.”
Ford insists there’s time to fulfil his promise of 1.5 million new homes by 2031.
“We’re going to continue making it attractive for companies to invest, for builders to build, municipalities to get approvals as quickly as possible and we’re going to work collaboratively with all three levels of government to get that done,” Ford said at a news conference last week.
Building public infrastructure
- The promise: “We will build highways and key infrastructure, including Highway 413 and the Bradford Bypass.”
Building highways, hospitals and schools is something that provincial governments of all stripes have done for decades. Ford’s PCs, however, made this work the showpiece of their “Get It Done” campaign and pitched their plan as accelerating the pace of construction.
Opposition parties point to evidence that Ontario’s school-repair backlog and hallway medicine crisis in hospitals are now both worse than when Ford took office in 2018.
Construction has not begun yet on either the promised Highway 413 or Bradford Bypass. However, both projects are moving forward, despite lingering questions about whether the 413 is worth the cost — a cost that Ford has repeatedly refused to state publicly.
In Toronto, home to the province’s biggest transit system, construction on the Ontario Line subway is well underway. However, there is still no firm date for the Eglinton Crosstown LRT to begin operating.
Construction began on the Crosstown in 2011. That means Ford’s PCs have been in power for almost half of the project’s nearly 14-year timeframe.
Ford’s government has been on a post-pandemic construction blitz in the long-term care sector, but still has far to go to keep its promise of 58,000 new or renovated beds by 2028. The latest figures from the province say 21,579 new and redeveloped beds have either been completed, begun construction or have received ministry approval for construction.
Health care
- The promise: “Hire more doctors, nurses and personal support workers.”
The vagueness of this promise made it particularly easy for the PCs to keep, argues Graefe.
While it’s technically true that “more” healthcare workers have been hired, there’s been a surge in closures of emergency rooms, some 2.5 million Ontarians don’t have a family doctor and the government’s own projections show healthcare staffing shortages are expected to worsen.
All that suggests the PCs were “maybe not getting it done in the way that citizens might have expected,” said Graefe.
“As the people of Walkerton saw the other week when they were lined up in the hope of getting a family doctor, for a lot of Ontarians, the healthcare system is not measurably better than it was three years ago,” he added.
More than 1,000 people lined up in the snow in Walkerton, Ont., on Wednesday to try to get a family doctor — but only the first 500 would be successful.
Making life more affordable
- The promise: “Keeping costs down.”
This promise was almost exclusively aimed at keeping costs down for drivers.
The specific pledges were scrapping annual vehicle registration fees, cutting the gas tax by 5.7 cents per litre and removing tolls from two highways in the eastern part of GTA.
The government followed through on each of these promises, although tolls remain on the provincially-owned portion of Highway 407, as well as the privately owned 407 ETR.
Critical minerals and EV battery plants
- The promise: “Unlock the economic potential of the Ring of Fire and northern minerals.”
Successive Ontario premiers have been talking about dramatically expanding mining in the so-called Ring of Fire for about 15 years. While a few First Nations support the idea, several are vehemently opposed.
During the 2018 campaign, Ford vowed to “hop on that bulldozer myself” to get roads built to the Ring of Fire. Seven years later, while there are some agreements in place and consultations ongoing, the road project — estimated to cost at least $1 billion — remains just a plan.
With help from the federal government, Ford’s government has made significant progress on the promise to attract electric vehicle battery plants to Ontario, potentially providing key markets for critical minerals from the Ring of Fire.
However, uncertainty now surrounds future demand for EV batteries, with U.S. President Donald Trump dismantling the Biden administration’s electric vehicle mandate.
Ontario’s political leaders hit the road for the second day of campaigning and talked about their commitment to the electric vehicle sector. CBC’s Lane Harrison has the details.
Things PCs did that they didn’t promise
There are also several things that Ford did not talk about doing during the 2022 campaign, but did anyway in his second term:
Arguably the biggest broken promise of Ford’s second term dates back to a very clear promise he made in his first campaign, in 2018: “We won’t touch the Greenbelt.”
Just five months after the 2022 election, Ford and his government gave a select group of landowners the power to build homes in the protected area, inflating the potential value of their properties by $8.3 billion, according to Ontario’s auditor general.
After nearly a year of insisting the Greenbelt carve-outs were needed to build homes, Ford reversed course and scrapped the plan.
Do voters care about keeping promises?
Voters tend to be relatively myopic in their assessments of governments, says Tellier, mainly focusing on what has happened in the past six months to a year.
Tellier says this means voters don’t typically base their decision on whether a government fulfilled campaign promises made three or four years ago.
The promise-tracking project shows that Ford’s government had a relatively poor record of keeping its 2018 campaign pledges during its first term in office, yet won re-election anyway in 2022 with an even bigger majority.
Tellier adds that voters have become cynical about parties keeping their promises, and this has prompted parties to shift what they promise during a campaign.
“When they present promises, they want voters to believe that those will be implemented,” she said. “They will hesitate before promising something they know will be impossible to attain.”
The nature of many of Ford’s 2022 promises — at times vague, narrow or long-term — made it easy to fulfil them or at least show progress, she said.
Last Tuesday, just hours before Ford triggered the election that marks the end of his second term in office, this reporter asked the PC leader what his government had achieved in the two and a half years since campaigning on that “Get It Done” slogan.
“If you have two and a half hours, I’ll tell you what we got done,” Ford quipped.