Ontario’s Doug Ford pulls a John Horgan and wins big. Will David Eby follow suit?

VICTORIA — Premier Doug Ford’s win in Ontario this week established another precedent for ignoring fixed election dates, the reform that got its start here in B.C. two decades ago.

Ontario, like B.C., has a law that mandates an election every four years. In Ontario, the next scheduled date was June 2026.

Ford took advantage of the escape clause. Nothing precludes a premier from asking the lieutenant-governor to dissolve the house for an early election, advice that the viceregal representative is almost certain to take.

The Ontario premier took advantage of the opening provided by U.S. President Donald Trump and his threat to whack this country with 25 per cent tariffs.

“I want to make sure I have a strong mandate to outlast President Trump,” said Ford in pleading with the electorate to grant his government “the largest mandate in Ontario’s history.”

The voters didn’t go that far. The preliminary results gave Ford pretty much the same seat count as he’d held going into the election.

But neither were the voters inclined to punish the premier for what the Opposition parties branded an unnecessary and cynical election call.

Ford came away with a better-than-50 seat lead over the second-place NDP and a secure hold on a third term, something no Ontario government has managed to do since the 1950s.

The outcome somewhat recalls what happened in B.C. when then Premier John Horgan called a snap election in 2020.

B.C. was the first province in the country to go with a fixed election date. B.C. Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell enacted the measure after taking power in 2001.

He argued that it would bring certainty to the electoral cycle, and remove the arbitrary power of premiers to call elections when the opinion polls favour their re-election and catch the Opposition off guard.

The measure was copied in most provinces across the country. Campbell stuck to the four-year cycle with elections in 2005 and 2009.

His successor, Christy Clark, toyed briefly with the idea of seeking a fresh mandate in a snap election. In the end, she stuck to the schedule set down in law for elections in 2013 and 2017.

Clark lost her legislative majority in the latter election. The New Democrats took over with John Horgan as premier in a power-sharing agreement with the Greens.

Horgan initially respected the idea of a fixed election date, even enshrining it into the agreement with the Greens. But when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in 2020, he was guided by Winston Churchill’s dictum that leaders should “never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Horgan repudiated the power-sharing agreement and called a snap election for Oct. 24, a year earlier than the date mandated in legislation.