With election day looming in Ontario, opposition parties are in uphill fight against Doug Ford

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An Ontario Liberal TV ad, which debuted during the fraught U.S.-Canada hockey final last week, depicts a shivering woman on a gurney being left in a hospital parking lot. It asks viewers: “What happens after the hallways fill up? Stop Doug Ford before we find out.”

It’s unclear whether the unusual spot – which was only 14 seconds long and contained no images of Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie – had any impact on Ontario voters before Connor McDavid fired the puck home to defeat the Americans in overtime.

The province’s election campaign is now entering the final minutes of its own third period, with voting set for Thursday. And the Liberal ad was just one of many pucks the opposition has tried to aim at Mr. Ford, the Progressive Conservative Leader who has effortlessly blocked almost every shot he has faced, with polls suggesting he could win a historic third majority government.

Both Ms. Crombie and NDP Leader Marit Stiles have had their work cut out for them. Both are rookie leaders, facing a snap election in the dead of winter that left them scrambling to nominate candidates and draw up complete platforms, which they both just released in the last few days. They are also facing an electorate fixated on U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to impose tariffs and use “economic force” to take over Canada – threats that Mr. Ford has made the central focus of his campaign.

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His slogan is “Protect Ontario.” His slick TV ads call him a fighter, while making use of jump-cut clips of his appearances on U.S. news networks. The PC Party picked up the tab for his trips to Washington to lobby lawmakers there, amid complaints they were unfair photo-ops.

Mr. Ford’s focused campaign on the tariff threat has made it next-to-impossible for Ms. Stiles and Ms. Crombie to shift to other issues, such as the crisis in the province’s health care system, where they feel Mr. Ford is more vulnerable. His opponents also point to the current RCMP investigation into Mr. Ford’s aborted move to open up parts of the protected Greenbelt to select developers, accusing him of calling an early election to get ahead of any potential charges.

But Mr. Ford has remained the first choice for Ontario voters, by double-digit margins in most polls for months – long before he took up his anti-tariff fight and despite public-opinion data also showing low approval ratings for him personally. Nothing in the campaign has significantly moved the needle, not even his “hot mic” moment, when he admitted on camera he was “100 per cent” happy last November when Mr. Trump won the U.S. presidential election.

The resulting campaign has seen Mr. Ford’s two main rivals throw a variety of attacks at the PC Leader, while also setting their sights on each other.

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The 65-year-old Ms. Crombie, who won her party’s leadership in December, 2023, has faced an uphill struggle to revive Ontario’s Liberals, often jokingly called the “minivan party” because they had just nine seats in the legislature after two disastrous elections.

But she rejuvenated the party’s fundraising and insisted on tacking less to the left and more to the centre-right. She has been taking increasingly aggressive shots at Mr. Ford, calling his notion of a $60-billion to $120-billion tunnel under Highway 401 “dumb” and a “fantasy” in the televised leaders’ debate. She has also made fixing health care her main theme, promising everyone in Ontario access to a family doctor in four years and saying she’d spend $3-billion to do it.

And she has pledged a broad-based tax cut – something Mr. Ford said he would do in 2018 but never delivered.

From almost the moment she stepped into the role, the former mayor of Mississauga and former federal Liberal MP has faced a relentless campaign of PC Party attack ads. Mr. Ford routinely calls her the “queen of the carbon tax,” though she now says she disapproves of the federal fuel charge.

Recently published opinion polls have shown her pulling ahead of the NDP in the popular vote, but still well behind Mr. Ford’s PCs. Her campaign, hurt by a rush to vet and nominate candidates, has hit some rough spots. She was forced to jettison her Oshawa candidate over an inflammatory and homophobic 2023 social-media post about the killing of B.C. Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

Ms. Crombie, who did not have a seat in the legislature, is running for one in Mississauga.

In last week’s leaders’ debate, she pleaded with NDP voters to back the Liberals, saying she was the only leader who could beat Mr. Ford. Ms. Stiles dismissed it as a desperate ploy as the Liberals seek to regain the 12 seats required for official party status in the legislature.

The Liberals are also running geographically targeted digital ads in close ridings, making the same appeal to NDP supporters thinking of switching. One Toronto NDP candidate, in Eglinton-Lawrence, had already dropped out on her own to support the Liberal there.

Ms. Crombie has also tried to connect to voters by sharing her life story. Speaking to a Canadian Club business luncheon at the Royal York hotel last week, she pointed to rising homelessness under Mr. Ford and announced a commitment to fully fund mental health care. And she choked up as she recounted the alcoholism, homelessness and early death of her own estranged biological father in a Toronto shelter.

“My dad was living at Seaton House, not far from here,” she said, pacing the stage. “And he was dying. His addiction that had taken his family, and his home, and was now claiming his life.”

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At the same time last Thursday, Ms. Stiles was giving a pep talk to about 40 volunteers jammed into the storefront serving as headquarters for the NDP candidate in the Liberal-held east-end Toronto riding of Beaches-East York.

The Newfoundland-born Ms. Stiles, 55, is Ontario’s Official Opposition Leader – but for how long depends on election night. The NDP had 28 seats at dissolution, compared to the Liberals’ nine. In 2022, the NDP captured about four times as many seats as the Liberals, despite the two parties tying in the popular vote with 24 per cent. But recent polls show the NDP trailing Ms. Crombie’s party.

Ms. Stiles, a former union policy adviser and school trustee who was acclaimed to her current post in 2023, says her party is still running to win. She says the NDP is focusing on what she calls “orange/blue” ridings, in Niagara, and Southwestern and Northern Ontario – where she says her party is in head-to-head battles with the PCs.

Liberal campaigners charge that Ms. Stiles, MPP for Toronto’s Davenport, is actually focused on saving existing NDP seats threatened by the inroads Mr. Ford has made through winning the endorsement of construction and skilled trades worker unions. The NDP accuses the Liberals of similarly focusing on its traditional toeholds.

“I think Bonnie Crombie and the Liberals have kind of given up the fight. Doug Ford quit as premier. I never give up. I will not stop fighting. I will not quit,” Ms. Stiles tells reporters before hopping over the snowbanks on Danforth Avenue to climb back aboard her orange campaign bus. “I am running to be the premier of this province.”

Her party usually enjoys an advantage in attracting volunteers, including from its union supporters, that could help it get out its vote in what is expected to be a low-turnout election.

While decrying Mr. Ford’s deals with “insiders,” her campaign has largely focused on trying to present Ms. Stiles as a trustworthy, down-to-earth leader who would fight to protect Ontario jobs from Mr. Trump while putting billions more into health care and schools.

On housing, she has promised to get the government involved directly in building affordable homes and enforcing strict rent controls. She has also pledged to hand out monthly grocery-price rebate cheques for low- and middle-income families, and vowed to make the privately run and tolled Highway 407 free – without explaining how.

With promises squarely aimed at voters’ wallets, both opposition leaders have in some ways borrowed from the playbook of Mr. Ford, who rarely misses a chance to crow about the licence-plate sticker fees he cancelled in 2022, or his distaste for road tolls.

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The 60-year-old PC Leader, who launched his hastily conceived 2018 campaign for his party’s leadership from his mother’s basement, is now on the verge of winning three majority governments in a row – which would make him the first Ontario premier to do so since fellow Tory Leslie Frost in 1959.

After running the U.S. branch of the family label-printing business, Mr. Ford rose to prominence as a Toronto city councillor during the tumultuous mayoralty of his brother Rob Ford, who made global headlines a decade ago for erratic behaviour and alcohol and drug abuse, and died of cancer in 2016.

After unsuccessfully taking over his ailing brother’s re-election run, Doug Ford soon turned his sights to provincial politics, when then-PC leader Patrick Brown was forced to resign in a scandal. Mr. Ford would lead the PCs to victory over then-Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne in 2018, and he would win again in 2022.

While he has claimed he needed a snap election to secure a new mandate to deal with Mr. Trump, Mr. Ford and his advisers had been mulling an early election since at least last spring, when he announced hundreds of millions of dollars to speed up the introduction of beer sales in corner stores. In the fall, he laid more groundwork, announcing that he would send out $200 cheques to most taxpayers despite still running deficits.

His campaign has been relentless in its focus on fighting the threatened tariffs and boosting the economy, including pledges to spend billions to cushion the blow for Ontario companies. Some seat projections based on polling data last week suggested he could win more than 90 of the legislature’s 124 seats, up from his current 79.

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Mike Schreiner, Leader of the Green Party of Ontario, is hoping to hang on to the party’s two seats.

One common enemy all the campaigns have faced is the weather.

Over the roar of traffic on a snowdrift-lined street in Etobicoke, Liberal candidate John Campbell says Mr. Ford’s snap election in February seems aimed at keeping people from voting at all.

“It’s hard to put up signs. It’s hard to make your way along sidewalks. People don’t want to have the door open,” says the former city councillor, who is taking on PC cabinet minister Kinga Surma. “It’s anti-democratic, really, to have it at the worst time of year.”

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With a report from Laura Stone