This post is best viewed on Sandford Borin’s Website, but has been re-posted here with permission.
Like the former op-ed writer and fellow economist Paul Krugman, I’ll start this post with a wonk alert. It is based on quantitative analysis, but no calculus, only arithmetic.
Many organizations and pundits were urging supporters of the Liberal, NDP, and Green parties to vote strategically to deny the PC Party a majority. Obviously, that didn’t work out.
In one riding, Eglinton-Lawrence, the NDP candidate even dropped out and encouraged her supporters to vote for Liberal Vince Gasparro. The Liberal vote increased from 16000 in 2022 to 19000 in 2025, with the increase approximately equal to the number of NDP voters in 2022. But the Conservative vote increased from 16500 in 2022 to 19500 in 2025. Green voters didn’t get the message and, despite Gasparro’s strong environmentalist record, their number remained at 1400. PC Party candidate Michelle Cooper was elected with a narrow margin of 160 votes. Thus, strategic voting didn’t work in the riding where it might have been expected to.
Whose Minority Government?
If strategic voting had deprived the PC Party of a majority, what would have happened? Would the NDP and Liberals have agreed to defeat the PC Party in a confidence vote, as happened in a similar situation in 1985, or would the PC Party have been able to govern with the support of either the Liberals or NDP on specific pieces of legislation, as was the case in 1975?
In 1985, the Liberals, led by David Peterson, and NDP, led by Bob Rae, reached an agreement whereby Peterson formed a government with NDP support for two years. Would Bonnie Crombie and Marit Stiles have been able to reach a comparable agreement?
Doug’s Agenda
In his victory speech Doug Ford claimed that the voters had given his party support both to fight the Trump Administration’s tariffs and to pursue his agenda within the province. He rhymed off the names or numbers of every planned highway project, including what Bonnie Crombie referred to as the “fantasy tunnel.” Ford’s anti-tariff agenda will have broad support, his “build baby build” agenda not so much.
A Big Tent Left-of-Centre Party
The start of a potential four-year mandate is a propitious time for the opposition parties to imagine a way forward. The proponents of alternatives to first-past-the-post such as proportional representation and ranked ballots face the fatal obstacle that the PC Party will never agree to scrap a political system in which one right-of-centre party confronts three left-of-centre parties. There is an alternative the three left-of-centre parties could undertake on their own. They could join to create a big tent left-of-centre party to contest the next election. Four years would provide considerable lead time to work out a vision and platform for the party as well as key elements of its organizational structure. For example, it could decide to choose its leader by a vote of the membership.
Now, here’s the wonkish part. To examine the potential of a big tent left-of-centre party, as well as the likely conservative response, I performed a simulation using the numbers produced by last week’s election. I chose a name for the party – Ontario Renewal – that doesn’t include the word “progressive,” which was long ago taken by the Progressive Conservatives. I chose the name PC+ to indicate that the PC Party would respond to the emergence of the Ontario Renewal Party by trying to expand its own tent to include small right-wing fringe parties such as New Blue, the Ontario Party, the Libertarian Party, and independent MPP Bobbi Ann Brady.
For each riding I totaled the votes for the Liberals, NDP, Greens, and high-profile left-leaning independents, on the one hand, and for the PC Party, New Blue, Ontario Party, Libertarians, and high-profile right-leaning independents, on the other hand. The result shows a small minority for the left-of-centre party. The legislative outcome closely mirrors their popular vote shares: the Ontario Renewal Party elected 56 percent of the MPPs (70/124) with 53 percent of the popular vote, and the PC+ Party elected 44 percent of the MPPs (54/124) with 45 percent of the popular vote. The Ontario Renewal Party ran up big margins in central city constituencies, the PC+ Party big margins in rural constituencies, and many suburban constituencies were close fights.
I undertook a test of the influence of the smallest parties in each coalition. I determined the number of constituencies in which Liberal plus NDP votes were sufficient to form a majority and the number of constituencies in which the left-of-centre party needed Green Party votes to form a majority. I did likewise with the PC Party alone and the PC Party plus New Blue, Ontario Party, and Libertarians. It turns out that 53 of the Ontario Renewal Party’s seats could be won with NDP and Liberal votes alone, but 17 required the votes of Greens as well. For the PC+ Party, 47 seats could be won solely with PC Party votes, but 7 also required votes of the small right-leaning parties. This demonstrates that in these big-tent parties, small players – the Greens with 5 percent of the total vote and the right-leaning parties with 2 percent of the total vote – have influence that exceeds their numbers. (I am happy to share my spreadsheet with fellow wonks.)
I recognize that this is only a simulation. For example, there might be centrist Liberals who would be uncomfortable in a big tent with the NDP and Greens, and who might therefore prefer a big tent dominated by the PC Party. Also, turnout in the 2025 election was only 45 percent, and the emergence of two big tent parties could substantially increase turnout and affect the outcome in unpredictable ways.
Uncomfortable Questions
Now is a good time for the opposition parties to ponder their future. We will have four more years of Doug Ford, but do we want eight more years? Will Ford by then have transformed the province in ways they the opposition parties and their supporters find intolerable? Do the Liberals and NDP seriously think they can win enough votes to form a government in the next election, or will they keep splitting the left-of-centre vote? Does the Green Party want to continue as a pressure group, or does it want to be part of a government? Asking these questions could lead to a big-tent left-of-centre alternative to the first-past-the-post status quo.
March 7, 2025; Sandford Borins
Numbers from right after the election using unofficial polling numbers from Elections Canada and Wikipedia. Rounded to the nearest hundred, except where results were too close. PC + adds the vote of small right wing parties to the PC’s vote. Added the Liberal and NDP vote in the third column and Liberal, NDP, and Green vote in the fourth.
The last column compares the votes of the PC, PC+, Liberal + NDP, Liberal + NDP + Greens (Ontario Renewal Party) to determine a winner. There are some constituencies where Liberal + NDP is sufficient to win and others where the winner is PC+ or Liberal + NDP + Green. Calculations not shown.