EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
The NDP will once again take up the mantle as the official Opposition at Queen’s Park.
As of 11 p.m., with only a few polls yet to report, the NDP was on track to win 26 seats compared to the Liberals’ 14, enough to clinch second place and official Opposition status in the legislature.
“Our job is to hold this government to account,” NDP Leader Marit Stiles told a packed house at The Great Hall in Toronto, after taking the stage to Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!”
“And it’s a job that we are going to do with our usual fight and our determination but also with love and hope and optimism,” she said.
“I heard from people — you want a government that’s going to stand up for you, and one day I will deliver it,” she said.
Stiles’ speech was briefly interrupted by a protester who yelled that Stiles had a “legacy of genocide” and was physically dragged out of the room.
Stiles thanked her candidates, the voters of her riding, her family, and the labour movement, which she called the “foundation” of her party.
She also took a shot at pollsters, many of whom predicted the Liberals would take over as Opposition while boasting about her party’s ground game.
“Can I just say, I think that possibly the pollsters are going to have to go back and take another look,” she said. “Because if there’s one thing we know, it’s that New Democrats, our volunteers, the people who want the kind of change we’re offering, they show up every time.”
Throughout the campaign, Stiles said she was focused on flipping blue seats orange to take government. That didn’t happen, but a shift to defence in the final days of the campaign appears to have mitigated what some were predicting would be a disastrous election for the party. The NDP focused on areas with their own incumbents, such as Niagara, Hamilton, Toronto, London and Waterloo. The PCs were gunning for several seats along the Niagara-Hamilton corridor, and the NDP appears to have beaten them back.
The NDP’s strategy for the campaign was to use areas of strength like southwestern Ontario and Toronto as a “beachhead” to pick up nearby Tory seats, according to party-aligned talking heads.
Success, according to NDP media relations director Shirven Rezvany, would be holding onto about as many as the 28 seats it came into the election with. By that metric, it appears to have been a success.
Jared Walker, a former Ontario NDP speech writer now at the Broadbent Institute, noted before results started rolling in that his party has a more efficient vote than the Liberals. This played out in the NDP’s favour in 2022, when it remained the official Opposition while the Liberals did not gain party status, despite the Liberals winning more votes overall.
It appears to have worked out in the NDP’s favour again. The NDP won only about 18 per cent of the popular vote, while the Liberals won 30.
“A lot of their candidates are going to be running second to the Tories in Liberal-Tory races in, say, the 905,” Walker said.
Stiles began the campaign by focusing heavily on the threat of U.S. tariffs. She positioned herself as the best leader to negotiate with President Donald Trump, arguing that Ford had a history of signing bad deals, like the Therme spa in Toronto, which the auditor general said would cost $2.2 billion in taxpayer dollars.
However, tariffs were Ford’s stated reason for calling the election, and he made them his bread-and-butter issue throughout the campaign. Public polling found the PC leader was by far the most trusted leader to take on Trump.
Stiles shifted her messaging throughout the campaign to focus on affordability.
