With the Ontario election campaign about to start, consider all the ways in which the province directly influences your life — from education to health care to transit.
Just over 100 years ago, in the 1923 Ontario election, a lot of people didn’t vote, as torrential winds, rain and lightning kept turnout down to a paltry 54.7 per cent, a record low to that time, and one that held for 84 years. In fact, The voter turnout in Ottawa East in 1923 was only 36.2 per cent (a result, perhaps, of only two candidates — both Liberals — contesting the riding).
It wasn’t until 2007, when Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty easily glided from one majority government to another, that the 1923 record for voter no-shows was worsted, with just 52.8 per cent of eligible Ontarians finding their way to the polling stations.
Electoral engagement with the province has mostly only declined since then.
In the four Ontario general elections since 2007, only one saw a turnout higher that 52 per cent. That was in 2018, when a surge of anti-Liberal sentiment pushed 56.7 per cent of eligible voters to give then-premier Kathleen Wynne the bum’s rush and install current Premier Doug Ford and the Progressive Conservatives.
In the most recent election, in 2022, voter turnout plummeted to 44.06 per cent, the sort of apathy typically reserved for municipal elections. With Ford comfortably ahead in recent polling, will the snap election that he is to call Wednesday see turnout drop to below 40 per cent?
I hope not, for it’s at the provincial level that so many decisions affecting our day-to-day lives are made.
The power rests at Queen’s Park
The heady triumvirate of health care, education and housing are all provincial responsibilities (yes, housing is a bit of a mish-mash of all three levels of government, but it’s chiefly a provincial bailiwick). So, too, are natural resources, labour, child care and social services. If you’ve ever waited for hours in a hospital emergency room, or can’t find a family doctor, or find yourself wondering why there are so many kids in Johnny’s class, these are questions you should raise with your MPP.
Evening Update
That’s not to say that such federal oversights as fisheries, national defence, international trade, Indigenous rights and veterans’ affairs aren’t important — of course they are — but the share of eligible voters that federal elections typically draw — more than 60 per cent in nine of the last 10 elections — seems outsized when put alongside Ontario’s measly figures.
The importance of the province in our daily lives becomes even more stark when you consider that municipalities fall under the province’s purview, and that Ontario has considerable influence over what they can and cannot do, and the funding to do or not do it.
A 2020 paper by Ontario 360, a think-tank at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, showed how much municipal spending actually comes from the province, largely through conditional, or specifically directed, transfers.
The report, In It Together: Clarifying Provincial-Municipal Responsibilities in Ontario, showed that 41 per cent of ambulance costs, for example, were shouldered by the province. Forty-six per cent of municipal spending on long-term care came via provincial transfers, as did 61 per cent of public health spending, 71 per cent of social assistance costs, and 86 per cent of child care expenses.
Meanwhile, as we’re discovering through Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe’s “Fairness for Ottawa” campaign, provincial decisions regarding such matters as, say, transit funding, have an enormous effect on the property taxes and user fees that make up most of the city’s available revenue. What happens at Queen’s Park affect us all deeply.
Bill 5, a.k.a. The Better Local Government Act, was one example, when the province in 2018 reduced the number of wards, and councillors, in Toronto from 47 to 25, effectively doubling the number of residents that each councillor represented.
The province also treaded on municipal toes when it issued numerous minister’s zoning orders (MZOs) that bypassed municipal planning in order to expedite development. It overrode municipalities’ decisions again when it mandated urban boundaries, including Ottawa’s, a decision that was later reversed.
Ontario granted certain cities, including Ottawa, “strong mayor powers,” which, if used, would undermine councillors’ influence for the benefit of provincial priorities. Last fall, meanwhile, the province announced legislation that would remove some bike lanes in cities and make creating new ones more difficult.
The province in just the past few years has done other things, such as cut and freeze university tuitions; turn over more powers to pharmacists to prescribe medications; experiment with different funding models for medical procedures; increase speed limits on 400-series highways; put beer and wine in corner stores; and so on. All things that may well have affected your family directly, or will.
How you feel on these and other issues isn’t the point. What matters is that you feel something, and act on it. Provincial politics, more than any other level of politics, is where our daily lives are shaped. You probably didn’t vote in the 2022 provincial election. Most people didn’t. But when you consider the sway that the province has over your life, you might want to think about whether you should get to a polling booth this time.
Mark Feb. 27 on your calendar and, the weather be damned, get out and vote.
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