The province of Ontario is now a Ford nation.
Doug Ford’s Conservatives defeated Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals and Andrea Horwath’s NDPs. The Progressive Conservative party won a majority government in Ontario on Thursday night, ending more than 15 years of the Liberal party running the province.
“I’m very grateful to the people of Ontario,” Ford said as he left his mother’s house Thursday evening on his way to PC election headquarters at the Toronto Congress Centre.
Ford won his seat in Etobicoke North, and Horwath held her seat in Hamilton Centre, where she has served as an MPP since 2004. Wynne was re-elected after a tight battle for her riding of Don Valley West, but she did announce her resignation as the leader of the Liberal Party of Ontario. She was elected in 2014, following the resignation of then-premiere Dalton McGuinty and became the first female premier and the first openly-gay premier in Canadian history.
In Guelph, Mike Schreiner made history becoming the first Green Party candidate to win a seat in an Ontario election.
An often controversial figure, Ford served on Toronto’s city council along with his late brother, Rob Ford, the former mayor of Toronto who made international headlines after he admitted to smoking crack cocaine.
Ford’s improbable run to be the next premier began on March 10 after winning the PC leadership in a hotly contested race following the resignation of Patrick Brown amid sexual misconduct allegations.
His campaign drew both praise and criticism. But, despite not releasing a fully costed campaign platform, something he had promised to do for months, Ford swayed voters throughout the campaign by making a number of expensive promises and promising to find billions in government “inefficiencies”. To date there have been no details on how his government will pay for his campaign promises or what he considers government “inefficiencies”.
