Ontario is at the polls today for the provincial elections and a sweeping win is predicted for Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative party, according to polling data from 338 Ontario with an estimated 91 seats.
When focusing on the concerns of Ontario voters, an Ipsos poll shows the number one concern, for 45 per cent of voters, is healthcare.
This, along with other voter concerns high on the list, has been a point of mass bumbling and failure for the provincial government, which led to large protests by healthcare workers.
Polling data shows the Liberals under Bonnie Crombie as the most trustworthy group to fix this concern, the party is only expected to grab 12 seats despite having around 27 per cent of the expected vote.
This illustrates a larger issue with the first-past-the-post form of voting. The voters’ view isn’t properly reflected in the distribution of seats in the legislature. But that’s for another day.
The Ford government has failed to grow per-person spending in healthcare and has only pumped money into private clinics, while Ontario sits with the least amount of beds per 1,000 people out of any province and some of the most overcrowded hospitals in the developed world.
This should strike concern for those who care about how political control of the province affects our lives both day-to-day and in the long term.
The current party holding office in the province has a track record that resembles a comedy of errors over a list of accomplishments in the area that most concerns Ontarians yet is gaining seats.
Voters largely seem to be aware of their issues but not of who is responsible for perpetuating them or failing to address the cause of them.
Second on the list is help with cost for day-to-day needs with a third of voters listing it as a concern.
Conservatives lead among those surveyed when addressing those issues despite the cost-of-living crisis continuing to grow among Canadians in general, and all four parties making a promise of some form of tax rebate or cut.
Ford has also affiliated himself with the Weston family, who has been heavily targeted by anti-price gouging protesters and other movements which solely seek to address the grocery aspect of cost-of-living.
The economy and jobs are also seen as a concern to one in five voters as Ontario’s unemployment has risen since 2019, sitting at 6.6 per cent, not having fully recovered since it hit almost 10 per cent due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ontarians favour Ford’s party as the one with the solutions to the problem, largely due to the steady decline in unemployment since recovering from the pandemic.
Luckily for Ford, who seems caught in a quarterly corruption scandal, integrity in the government and its leaders is only pressingly important to 1 in 20 voters polled.
Despite the publicity of the Greenbelt scandal and the subsequent RCMP investigation and his closeness to the robber barons who benefit most from his continued privatization of Ontario’s resources, no large-scale flack has been levied against Ford.
A failure to hold the Conservatives responsible for their past actions and an understanding of how their actions have both benefited and harmed the Ontario population through the responsibilities of the provincial government under the civic code has largely led to these opinions being formed.
Journalists as a whole, including those working for American-owned and Ford-friendly media such as the National Post, Toronto Sun or Ottawa Sun, need to be held accountable for their failure to fully inform the public about these issues and exactly who is causing them.
The attitude that many of these issues are caused federally and not provincially is directly a result of the framing in the media of these issues.
The voters deserve better.
