The inside story of how Doug Ford beat the NDP — and destroyed the Liberals — in the Ontario election

“Are we going to win?”

Doug Ford wasn’t pulling any punches as he sat with his advisers on the Progressive Conservative campaign bus a few days before Ontario’s June 2 election.

The premier was confident in himself, in his tour team and in his “Get It Done” re-election push that promised tens of billions of dollars in new highways, public transit, hospitals and long-term care homes.

His party had leased a three-storey office building for three months in Toronto’s Distillery District as a campaign headquarters — complete with a fully equipped television studio in case another COVID-19 wave necessitated virtual electioneering.

Bankrolled by a $25-million campaign war chest, some 200 staffers were working there in a high-tech “war room,” backstopping local candidates, fielding media queries and responding rapidly to attacks from rival parties.

There was also a sophisticated digital advertising blitz featuring more than 150 different spots to micro-target voters on news websites, social media sites and podcasts, as well as ads on smartphone apps like Waze.

Yet there were nagging, niggling doubts, even in the final week.

“You always question yourself,” said one party insider, who, like several others interviewed, spoke confidentially in order to recount private discussions.

“You see these (publicly available) polls and this media narrative about ‘Liberal momentum’ and you can’t help but worry and think, ‘Are we missing something?’ because we couldn’t detect any of that.”

Ford, who has lived through the highs and lows of political life over the past dozen years, was poring over the polling aggregators throughout the campaign and questioning why they showed the race to be far closer than the party’s more detailed internal research indicated.

His concerns were exacerbated by skittish Tory candidates, who were studying that same public polling and messaging him late at night with their concerns.

As a populist who likes to be liked, Ford is attuned to public opinion and deeply concerned about Ontarians’ views on issues of the day.

What Ford did not know was that his team was so bullish on its chances that it had already sent the Liberal war room on Bloor Street West an elaborate $375 standing spray funeral wreath to say “Sorry for your loss.”

Taking the campaign gallows humour in stride, the Liberals gamely told their Tory rivals they would have preferred the money had been spent on six cases of beer to drown their sorrows.

A little more than one year earlier, it appeared as if the Progressive Conservatives might be the ones on the receiving end of such taunting electoral pranks. This is the inside story of how Ford, a polarizing figure who provokes strong opinions across the political spectrum, won the election by appealing to voters from all walks of life in every region of Ontario.

The first-term PC government that campaigned on getting it done could easily have been one-and-done.

While Ford’s initial handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has left 13,367 Ontarians dead, had been better than expected, the rural right-wingers in his caucus were urging him to reopen the economy faster — just as the Delta variant was surging and before vaccines were widely available.

Those MPPs and cabinet ministers were feeling pressure in their constituencies from small business owners who were unhappy with lockdowns and from parents who were fed up with their children doing school online.

“You want to know when the turning point of this election was?” another senior Tory confided this week.

“It was last April (2021). We dropped from 42 (per cent in the internal polls) to 34 because we opened up too fast and people did not like that,” the insider said.

“We made a mistake and the premier recognized we made a mistake and moved to correct it.”

But that led to an embarrassing overcorrection on April 16, 2021.

After a nine-and-a-half-hour cabinet meeting, the Tories unleashed measures designed to limit Ontarians’ mobility and curb the spread of COVID-19, including the closure of playgrounds and the enhancement of police powers for random spot checks.

The next day, facing defiance from police and outrage from parents and civil libertarians, the premier flip-flopped, amending the regulations to stop the carding and keep the playgrounds open — although golf courses, basketball and tennis courts, soccer fields and other outdoor recreational facilities were still shuttered.

Ford, who had been trying to appease Dr. David Williams, then the province’s chief medical officer of health, and Steini Brown, dean of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto and co-chair of the advisory “science table,” was chastened.

At the same time as right-wing Tories were urging Ford to loosen restrictions, the scientists had implored him to keep Ontarians at home as he had done with some success in March 2020 to prevent the health-care system from being overwhelmed.

The premier decided it was time to bring in reinforcements to bolster his most trusted aides — chief of staff Jamie Wallace and principal secretary Amin Massoudi, among others — who had been working seven days a week since the pandemic began 13 months earlier.

Kory Teneycke, the Ottawa lobbyist instrumental in helping Ford become PC leader in 2018, and pollster Nick Kouvalis, who managed the winning mayoral campaigns of John Tory and Rob Ford, were enlisted to help full time.

Armed with Kouvalis’s exhaustive Campaign Research polling that showed Ontarians overwhelmingly favoured a cautious approach to the pandemic — including keeping many lockdown measures in place and schoolchildren learning remotely — Teneycke advised the premier to ignore the right-wing squawkers.

Ford, who had already ejected MPPs Belinda Karahalios and Roman Baber from the Tory caucus for opposing his earlier COVID-19 restrictions, decided to move one step further. He shuffled his cabinet last June 18, turfing five ministers and heralding a new era at his executive council.

Mindful of the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines, two months later he decreed that all Tory MPPs and candidates would have to be fully vaccinated or he would not sign their nomination papers.

While that led Ford to eventually part ways with three Tory members, it sent a signal that all Ontarians should get their shots and effectively neutralized vaccination as a provincial political issue.

Given that vaccination mandates continue to bedevil the federal Conservatives in the midst of their leadership contest, it was smart public policy and shrewd political strategy, noted another PC insider.

“That’s why what happened to (former Conservative leader) Erin O’Toole (in the last federal election) didn’t happen to us. It was very smart of Kory and Nick to push that and for the premier to do it,” said the official, who was privy to the decision-making process.

“It wasn’t easy phoning up (veteran MPP) Rick Nicholls and telling him he needed to get his shots or else, but Ford did that. You think O’Toole could have done that? He didn’t even know how many … (Tory MPs) were vaccinated.”

(Indeed, Nicholls, who lost his Chatham-Kent-Leamington seat as a candidate for the fledgling Ontario Party, confirmed to the Star last summer that the premier “called me and said, ‘Rick, I need you to do me a favour. I need you to get vaccinated. I want you to think it over.’”)

At the same time as COVID-19 was dominating the public discourse, Ford and his team, including PC party president Brian Patterson and executive director Mike Crase, were thinking ahead to how they could expand their voting coalition beyond traditional Tories in suburbs and small towns.

That led them to recruit more candidates reflecting Ontario’s diversity — the morning after the election, Ford, whose Etobicoke North riding has a large Black population, proudly enthused “we have three candidates from the Black community that got elected.”

They will join a caucus that also includes MPPs of Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Tamil, Iranian, Korean, Chinese, Jewish, Armenian, Greek and Italian heritage — a far cry from the WASP-dominated Tories of Ontario’s trillium white yesteryear.

Even though he is the scion of a wealthy family, Ford has always been more comfortable with blue-collar workers than those he dubs “elites” — at fancy galas, he has been known to spend as much time chatting with servers and kitchen staff as with posh guests — so he peppered his advisers with questions about why the Tories couldn’t appeal more to working-class voters in places like Hamilton and Windsor.

At the premier’s behest, Monte McNaughton, the first Tory labour minister to march in a Labour Day parade in living memory, delivered sweeping workplace reforms last year.

Those included raising the hourly minimum wage and improving the rights of gig workers, which helped secure campaign endorsements from eight private-sector unions.

Efforts by Ford and McNaughton even resulted in former union leader Patrick Dillon, a key architect of the Working Families coalition whose attack ads helped the Liberals win four elections between 2003 and 2014, backing the Tories.

“Some heads exploded,” admitted one veteran insider, recalling how much the Conservatives once feared and loathed Dillon.

“But the party was wrong in the past (to vilify unions). There is so much common ground. It isn’t rocket science but it takes work, time and no ego,” said the Tory, adding the “Big Blue Collar Machine” initiative to attract working-class voters “aligned with the premier and who he is.”

Still, most public-sector unions, such as those representing teachers or health-care workers, endorsed the New Democrats or Liberals.

To those who questioned the strategy — and some right-leaning Tories remain uncomfortable with courting unionists because soaring inflation will mean higher private- and public-sector wage settlements — Ford fired a salvo.

“It gives you a real snapshot of … how the party is changing, no matter if it’s union workers voting for us or (those in) other areas that people never voted for us before,” he said of the election results.

“Now, they’re voting for us, so we’re changing the landscape of the Progressive Conservative party for many years to come.”

A senior New Democrat confirmed to the Star’s Rob Ferguson that they believe Ford poses a major challenge for the left-leaning party.

“We gave up the working class to get the chattering class — and we do great with the chattering class,” the NDP official said, referring to the downtown Toronto ridings the party held.

Behind the scenes in the Conservative camp, however, there were tensions over Ford’s recalibration of the party.

While Wallace, Massoudi, Teneycke, Kouvalis, McNaughton and others agreed with his centrist push, some in Ford’s orbit resented the premier’s embrace of the Tories’ big-spending “party of yes” mantra that promised new highways, subways and hospitals, mostly benefiting the Greater Toronto Area.

“We can’t pretend to be more liberal than the Liberals,” sniffed one Tory insider, who was also leery of the premier’s close working relationship with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.

A different party operative wryly pointed out, “Doug Ford’s not a Conservative, he’s a populist.”

Ford doesn’t disagree with that assessment.

“I’m not big into these political stripes. I don’t care if you’re from the red, blue, green or orange party,” the premier said the day after his re-election garnered the headline “Déjà Blue” on the front page of the Star.

In an interview, Teneycke — whose Rubicon Strategy colleagues are registered lobbyists for Torstar, the Star’s parent company, on matters involving the federal government — said Ford has created a “reimagined Conservative coalition” that would be challenging for another Tory to replicate.

“He is not a partisan or ideological guy at his core. He’s comfortable working with people who have traditionally been in the other side of the fence. He doesn’t have any hang-up about working with people in unions,” said the campaign guru.

“There are whole swaths of ridings across Ontario that we’re only competitive in because of his brand.”

It was that ideological flexibility that made Ford so difficult to target for the NDP’s Andrea Horwath and the Liberals’ Steven Del Duca, who both resigned on election night.

Accusations that the Tories were slashing services appeared not to resonate with voters.

In part that could be because the PC government is spending record amounts — 25 per cent more this year than the previous Liberal administration of premier Kathleen Wynne in 2018 — and is running massive deficits.

Even Green Leader Mike Schreiner was unable to exploit what was arguably Ford’s greatest vulnerability: his environmental record.

To the frustration of Horwath, Del Duca and Schreiner, the premier’s touting of Highway 413 — a proposed 60-kilometre freeway between Milton and Vaughan that would raze 800 hectares of farmland, pave over 160 hectares of Greenbelt land and cut through 85 waterways — proved popular with voters.

“The Liberals would have done a lot better in Mississauga and Brampton if they had just said they would await the result of the (ongoing) federal environmental assessment of the 413,” said a Tory strategist. “They just needed to be noncommittal.”

Grit insiders acknowledge they were flying blind, because they lacked the money to do the kind of polling and voter-identification efforts that the better-funded Tories and New Democrats were undertaking.

Using a new smartphone app they gave their canvassers, the Tories identified one million voters they could then contact to remind them to vote.

That’s why on election day, PC and New Democratic officials were so livid with Elections Ontario’s computer problems that prevented them from receiving the constant updates of who voted for five hours.

“We spent millions of dollars on voter contact and GOTV (get out the vote). The phones and our ground game won it in maybe 15 ridings where things were close,” said a Tory official.

“That’s why all this talk of low voter turnout helping us is total bull--t. We won (about) 41 (per cent of the popular vote) with 43 per cent turnout and if it had 50 per cent turnout, we might have won 42 (per cent of the vote),” he said.

“We wanted to get more of our voters to the polls but Elections Ontario f--ed that up. If turnout was 100 per cent, we might have won 100 seats instead of 83.”

While New Democrats echoed the sentiments about the Elections Ontario computer crash, Liberals privately conceded they were “not freaking out” about it because they weren’t contacting voters in the same way.

That failed GOTV effort probably cost the Liberals four closely fought contests, lost by fewer than 900 votes, that could have garnered them the dozen seats needed for official party status in the legislature: Eglinton-Lawrence, Humber River-Black Creek, Etobicoke-Lakeshore and Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte.

“We just couldn’t get our vote out,” said a dismayed Liberal.

“The low turnout just killed us. People just weren’t that angry and motivated to vote Ford out,” the Grit insisted, agreeing the Tories and New Democrats were more effective at ensuring their identified supporters voted.

“It felt like more like a byelection than a provincial campaign.”

Another source of frustration for the NDP, Liberals and Greens was that Ford didn’t suffer any self-inflicted wounds at the live televised debate.

While he was mocked by opponents for insisting on bringing his briefing binder to the dais, there were no major gaffes or stumbles during the 90-minute encounter.

“No one cared about the binder. It was a one-day thing,” said a senior Liberal strategist.

In contrast to his shaky performance in such forums during the 2018 campaign, Ford was not tripped up by his rivals.

“Deb Hutton deserves a lot of credit for helping us with debate prep,” a campaign official said, referring to the former top aide to premiers Mike Harris and Ernie Eves.

Hutton, who played Horwath in Ford’s mock debates, kept the preparation team on its toes with detailed notes anticipating the lines of attack from the three opposition parties.

Similarly, strategist Michael Diamond, who portrayed Del Duca in the practice sessions, was an effective sparring partner, debating the premier more aggressively than the Liberal leader ended up doing in the main event.

Teneycke said Ford was successful at the debate, which was moderated by the Star’s Althia Raj and Steve Paikin of TVO’s The Agenda, because “he put in the hours.”

“The guy works hard. That’s why this victory belongs primarily and overwhelmingly to Premier Doug Ford,” he said.

Teneycke also hailed Kouvalis’s polling, which drilled down more deeply than nearly all of the publicly available media polls.

“Nick’s research was the best. These other polls inflated the Liberal numbers because they only polled on party brand and not on the leaders’ names,” he said, adding that “blurring” also effectively lowered the Tories’ percentages in those surveys.

That meant some confused poll respondents gave Del Duca an artificial Trudeau bump, while Ford’s number suffered from being wrongly linked to the divisive federal Conservative leadership contest.

Kouvalis, for his part, said while Teneycke, Wallace and Massoudi ensured the findings in the research were acted upon, the premier deserves the most credit.

“You can have the best strategy, the best team and the most money, but all of that doesn’t work if the leader doesn’t show up,” said the veteran pollster, who has also done research for the Star dating back to 2014.

“The premier showed up every day despite all the noise and the drama of a campaign,” he said.

“This win is all his.”

Robert Benzie is the Star’s Queen’s Park bureau chief and a reporter covering Ontario politics. Follow him on Twitter: @robertbenzie