Ontario party leaders hit campaign trail as snap winter election begins

TORONTO — Ontario’s political party leaders are fanning out across the province today for their first official day on the snowy campaign trail.

Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford triggered the snap election more than a year before the next fixed date, plunging the province into a rare winter campaign that opposition parties say is unnecessary.

Ford has said he needs a new mandate to deal with U.S. President Donald Trump’s new administration and to spend tens of billions of dollars in response to threatened tariffs.

To highlight that issue, Ford is set to launch his campaign in Windsor, a city more keenly aware than many of the connections between the Ontario and American economies, as it sits across the river from Detroit and is home to auto and parts workers.

NDP Leader Marit Stiles is starting her day at a community hub in Toronto’s Regent Park neighbourhood.

Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie is set to launch her campaign in Barrie, where she is expected to talk about health care and in particular a plan to increase the number of family doctors.

The Liberal candidate in Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte is Rose Zacharias, an emergency and family doctor as well as past president of the Ontario Medical Association. The party is touting her as one of its star candidates and named her as campaign co-chair. 

She is running in a riding where the Liberal candidate in the 2022 election, former Barrie mayor Jeff Lehman, came within a few hundred votes of besting Doug Downey, who has served as the Progressive Conservative government’s attorney general.

Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner will hold a news conference at the legislature then head to his riding of Guelph to address volunteers and shore up support for the Greens’ candidate in the surrounding riding of Wellington-Halton Hills.

Later in the evening, he is also set to hold an event with Aislinn Clancy, the only other Green elected official in the last provincial parliament. Clancy won the riding of Kitchener Centre in a byelection in the fall of 2023.