Doug Ford is Ontario’s next premier

The province of Ontario is now a Ford nation.

Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford capped an improbable rise to power Thursday, winning the Ontario election with a majority government and banishing Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals into political oblivion after almost 15 years in office.

“This is incredible. My friends, this victory belongs to you. Tonight the people of Ontario have spoken. You have come together around one common vision of Ontario,” Ford, 53, told cheering supporters in Etobicoke.

“We will work every single day for a better Ontario,” said the rookie leader, who only took the helm on March 10 after the resignation of Patrick Brown.

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath will be the leader of the official opposition in a radically changed legislature that will feature dozens of new Tory, New Democratic, and Green MPPs.

“From the very start of this campaign, people wanted change and I could not be more proud that we offered a positive vision. Change for the better,” Horwath, 55, told loyalists in Hamilton.

Wynne’s party, in power since her predecessor Dalton McGuinty defeated the Tories in 2003, was reduced to a tiny rump, falling short of the eight seats required for official status in the legislature.

Ontario’s first female premier, who succeeded McGuinty in February 2013, took the unusual step of conceding defeat last Saturday in a desperate attempt to salvage Liberal seats.

“This is a difficult night,” said Wynne, 65, who is stepping down as Liberal leader.

“There is another generation and I am passing the torch to that generation,” she said.

Still, there are few to grasp it — numerous members of Wynne’s cabinet were defeated, including Finance Minister Charles Sousa.

Surviving ministers Michael Coteau, Marie-France Lalonde, and Nathalie Des Rosiers are mentioned as potential future leaders.

One prominent Liberal casualty was Jim Bradley, St. Catharines MPP since 1977.

Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner, who turns 49 on Saturday, made history, though, becoming his party’s first MPP by winning in Guelph.

“I’m ready to take my seat at Queen’s Park,” said Schreiner.

In some ways, Ford is an accidental premier. Until Brown’s departure, he planned on a rematch this October against Toronto Mayor John Tory, who beat him municipally in 2014.

But the most eventful provincial campaign in decades was upended Jan. 24 when CTV News aired a report alleging sexual impropriety against Brown involving two women.

While he denied the allegations — and is now suing CTV, which stands by its story, for $8 million — he was forced to resign early on Jan. 25.

That triggered an expedited Tory leadership race that Christine Elliott, who had finished second to Brown in 2015 and third in the 2009 contest, was expected to win. Even though Elliott received the most votes and won more ridings at the party’s chaotic March 10 convention, Ford narrowly edged her in the party’s convoluted “points” tally.

It was a stunning rebuke of the party elites by an outsider that Brown’s Tories had not even wanted as a local candidate.

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They felt his reputation at Toronto city hall, where he was a key figure in the tumultuous mayoralty of his controversial late brother, Rob Ford, would undermine the modern, inclusive party they were building.

At the PC policy convention last November, the one-term Toronto councillor was a solitary figure hovering alone at the back of the hall during the then leader’s speech.

But since taking the reins, he has brought Elliott into the fold along with another former leadership rival, Caroline Mulroney, the daughter of former prime minister Brian Mulroney.

Both women will sit at Ford’s cabinet table. Also expected to be ministers are the newly elected Rod Phillips and Peter Bethlenfalvy and MPPs Vic Fedeli, Lisa MacLeod, Steve Clark, and John Yakabuski.

Having what was seen as a deep potential ministerial bench was critical to Ford’s success.

After Horwath narrowed the gap in public opinion polls following his shaky performance in the three leaders’ debates last month, he scrambled to showcase his team, which he maintained was “ready to govern” in contrast to the NDP.

Many New Democratic candidates, he insisted, were “radical downtown Toronto elites,” who should not be given the keys to Queen’s Park.

However, voters may have handed Ford a blank cheque. He has promised to cut spending by $6 billion and vowed to do it painlessly without slashing even one public-sector job. “Not one,” he repeatedly said without specifying where he would find such massive “efficiencies.”

His platform, never fully costed despite promises it would be, consisted of a series of populist planks like a 10 cents a litre reduction in gasoline taxes, lowering the floor price of beer to $1, selling beer and wine in convenience stores, and reducing personal and corporate taxes.

On the campaign trail, his handlers limited media exposure and the freewheeling Ford from Toronto city hall was recast as a carefully scripted politician behind a teleprompter.

Still, he weathered a bevy of problems, including revelations he attended a political fundraiser in April even though that’s against the new campaign finance law, that he appeared to have flouted PC rules to sell memberships for candidate Kinga Surma, and that one of his former candidates was linked to the alleged data breach at the 407 ETR that compromised the personal information of 60,000 motorists.

As well, Rob Ford’s widow filed a $16.5 million lawsuit Friday alleging Doug Ford and older brother, Randy Ford, had cheated her and her children out of her late husband’s inheritance. Doug Ford denied Renata Ford’s allegations, which have not been proven in court.

Yet none of these potential landmines hurt the first victorious Tory campaign since Mike Harris was re-elected in 1999.

For Wynne, defeat appeared to have been preordained with Liberal insiders pointing to 2015 as the year when the wheels began to fall off.

That was the year of the Sudbury byelection debacle that saw Wynne’s deputy chief of staff charged with bribery and then exonerated in 2017.

It was also when the premier decided to sell the majority share in Hydro One, the provincial transmission utility, using the proceeds to bankroll transportation infrastructure.

Both Ford and Horwath successfully conflated the partial privatization with rising electricity bills even though that is a separate issue. Ford has even promised to fire Mayo Schmidt, the highly paid Hydro One CEO he derided as “the six million dollar man.”

And in 2015, Wynne injected herself into the federal election campaign, helping Justin Trudeau defeat Stephen Harper to become prime minister, but appearing in the public’s eyes as just another partisan politician.

“Our (poll) numbers started to decline then and we never recovered,” confided one senior Liberal, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal strategy.

While Wynne returned to her social-justice roots, raising the minimum wage to $14 an hour from $11.60 — and promised to make it $15 next year, a raise Ford has said he will cancel — as well as introducing free prescription drug coverage for everyone under 25, it was not enough to save the Liberals.

For up-to-the-minute results, visit the Star’s Ontario election page