Why Doug Ford proved immune to COVID-19 criticism with voters

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OTTAWA—It was Ontario’s second spring of COVID-19 darkness when Doug Ford gripped a lectern in a sunny backyard and started to cry.

The premier was trying to apologize, after his Progressive Conservative government was swamped with criticism over its alleged failure to heed the warnings of a stark and deadly third wave of the pandemic, and then fueled the outrage by seeming to overcorrect with an order to close playgrounds and increase police powers to enforce health measures.

Reading a prepared apology on live television, Ford’s voice broke when he got to a line about how restrictions meant people couldn’t hold hands with their dying loved ones.

“Hold on, folks,” Ford said with an embarrassed chuckle, then reached to gulp from a glass of water before finishing his speech.

It’s moments like that, according to experts like the pollster Greg Lyle, that helped keep the pandemic crisis low on voters’ priority lists and contributed to Thursday’s election victory for Ford and his PCs.

Even though the province — like Canada and the rest of the world — is still grappling with the pandemic after more than two years, the government’s handling of the worst public health crisis in living memory was not the election’s defining issue. That’s despite more than 13,000 deaths, and an economy and hospital system that convulsed under lockdowns and surges of sickened patients through successive waves of the pandemic.

A big reason for this is that Ford did not enter the contest bearing the burden of blame — at least in enough people’s minds — for how Ontario has fared, said Lyle, who is president of the polling firm, Innovative Research Group. Instead, Lyle said his surveys suggest Ford was seen by enough voters as responsive to criticism amid a fast-moving crisis, and willing to change tack if he made a mistake.

For example, a poll of 1,000 Ontarians by Lyle’s firm just before the campaign found Ford was the top choice when respondents were asked which party leader “cares about people like me.” Ford also placed first on strong leadership, competence, and being best placed to deliver “changes that will benefit me.”

“I’ve just never, ever, ever seen — ever — in 30 years of Canadian politics, federally and provincially, an incumbent premier winning on change. I’ve also never seen a Conservative leader win on caring,” Lyle said.

For Lyle, these perceptions were already “baked in” before the campaign, and the Liberals and New Democrats were unable to shake them out of enough people, despite their efforts to slam Ford for failing to help strained hospitals and prevent thousands of deaths in long -term-care facilities.

David Coletto, chief executive officer of Abacus Data, agreed that the pandemic has not been top-of-mind for Ontarians during the campaign, even as it lurked, and continued killing and infecting people every day.

According to an Abacus poll published May 23, only 15 per cent of respondents to a survey of 1,500 Ontarians put the “responding to the COVID-19 pandemic” in their top three issues. That ranked far behind the 64 per cent who put “reducing the cost of living” in their top three, 42 per cent who chose “housing affordability,” and 37 per cent who selected “improving the health care system.”

It’s not that the pandemic has had no impact. Coletto said his research shows there are swaths of the population who were unhappy with how the Ford government handled the crisis, including those “deeply unhappy” with restrictions and vaccine mandates that the Ontario Party and New Blue party tried to mine for votes.

But Coletto said the Ford government’s pandemic performance did not “become that divisive wedge issue” that would have diminished the PCs’ re-election chances.

“I don’t think there are a lot of people who look at the last two years and say, ‘look, they fundamentally screwed this up,’” he said.

And that might have helped them win Queen’s Park, again.

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