Marit Stiles addresses a press conference at Queen’s Park in Toronto on Feb. 1, 2023.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles is expected to tell a rally for supporters at a downtown Toronto hotel on Saturday that her party is ready for any early election call, the latest sign that Premier Doug Ford’s refusal to rule one out has put his opponents on a war footing.
A party e-mail this week invited members and donors to attend what was expected to be a stump-style speech, as well as to hear from the NDP’s election-preparation committee. Their leader’s message to Mr. Ford will be simple: “Bring it.”
But Ms. Stiles has a problem. Despite being Official Opposition Leader for more than a year and spearheading the outcry that resulted in a damning Auditor-General’s report on Mr. Ford’s aborted move to allow development on the province’s protected Greenbelt lands, she is not exactly a household name.
And Mr. Ford almost never mentions her. Instead, the Progressive Conservative Premier has focused his attention – and his party’s TV attack ads – on Ontario’s new Liberal Leader, former Mississauga mayor Bonnie Crombie.
Ms. Crombie, who leads a party with just nine seats, has no seat of her own. But most published opinion polls have her Liberals a few percentage points ahead of the NDP. Still, both parties lag well behind Mr. Ford’s PCs.
The NDP Leader, in a recent sit-down interview at her Queen’s Park office, says her party was already in pre-election mode. And she insists that the NDP is the most likely to take down the Premier, whenever a vote is called. The Liberal brand is weak at the moment, she says, thanks to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“Honestly, I’ve heard Conservative strategists say that their strategy is not to say my name, not to refer to me. Because they know if my profile goes up, that’s a problem for them,” said Ms. Stiles, a former school trustee and union policy researcher and the MPP for the central Toronto riding of Davenport.
“Frankly, I am just happy for them to go off and do their own thing and worry about Bonnie Crombie while we build our own vision, define ourselves,” she said.
The NDP plans to focus on the many ridings where it placed second, Ms. Stiles said. But she also says she will spend time in areas where it has long been weak, such as Eastern Ontario. She says the plan is to offer practical, short-term solutions to voters, focusing on the housing crisis, the ailing health care system and making life more affordable.
Ads that reintroduce Ms. Stiles – who was acclaimed leader in February, 2023 – to voters are also in the works.
She says she will present a hopeful vision in the coming campaign, but added that she wouldn’t stop accusing the government of being “corrupt,” predicting more to come on the Greenbelt deal.
Her party has boasted that it was close to victory before. However, it failed to capitalize in the past two elections under Ms. Stiles’s predecessor, Andrea Horwath, in campaigns in which the competing Liberals barely had a pulse. The NDP hasn’t formed government in Ontario since 1990, when Bob Rae surprised the province with a majority after Liberal premier David Peterson called an unpopular early election.
In her speech to supporters on Saturday, according to a copy of her prepared remarks, Ms. Stiles will warn the current Premier that if he goes to the polls before the next scheduled vote in June, 2026, he will suffer the same fate as Mr. Peterson and be replaced by an NDP government.
The practical solutions Ms. Stiles plans to offer voters, she said in her interview, include calls to ease the paperwork faced by family doctors, so they can see more patients and ease the physician shortage. She would also set up a provincially owned agency to fund “non-market” affordable housing.
But divisions in her party over other issues have surfaced in recent months. Ms. Stiles faced fire from her own party’s left flank for removing Hamilton Centre MPP Sarah Jama, who had defied her leader after failing to immediately condemn the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel in a social-media post.
More recently, the NDP Leader ended up mired in a drama over the Speaker’s ban on the keffiyeh scarf, worn by many Palestinian supporters. She eventually dropped the issue after the Speaker modified his ruling to allow the scarf to be worn in the corridors at Queen’s Park but not in the chamber.
In addition, the NDP has faced attacks from the PCs in the past few years over which party actually speaks for the working class. The governing party routinely touts its support from several construction unions and claims that the NDP has lost touch with working people.
Ms. Stiles says this PC charm offensive toward unions is only skin deep, and points to the unity the labour movement showed when it forced the government to rescind its move in 2022 to strip an education union of its right to strike using the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause.
“Over and over again they have shown they don’t respect workers’ rights,” Ms. Stiles said of Mr. Ford and his ministers. “It’s like labour cosplay.”
All politicians are facing an increasingly cynical electorate, she says, noting anger over inflation and the rise in Canada, the U.S. and elsewhere of far-right populism.
“There’s a lot of fear out there right now, for people. And fear tends to push people in a certain direction. Sometimes it’s a conservative direction,” Ms. Stiles said.
“I think our path isn’t to focus on complaining and problems, it’s to focus on the solutions that are going to help people and a more hopeful vision.”