While Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative Party pulled off a rare third majority win in Thursday night’s Ontario election, Marit Stiles and the NDP managed to pull off another sort of unusual win.
In Thursday’s election, the Liberals managed to break back into official party status and surged ahead of the NDP in the popular vote. Yet they still won about half as many seats.
Unofficial results show the Liberals won 30 per cent of the popular vote, translating into 14 seats. Yet the NDP, who won less than 19 per cent of the popular vote, won 27 seats.
“I don’t think I can ever recall a spread as significant as 11 or 12 percentage points that was entirely overcome and eclipsed by vote concentration and vote efficiency,” CTV Political Commentator Scott Reid said. “I mean, it’s a jaw-dropping development. I think you could flip a coin 100 times and not have it land on its side this way.”
On a basic level the discrepancy can be explained by our electoral system, says Professor Laura Stephenson, chair of the Department of Political Science at Western University.
“We’re quite accustomed to the fact that vote share doesn’t equal seat share, but it’s actually distribution of support throughout an area,” Stephenson said.
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Looking at the map, NDP support was concentrated in urban centres, as well as Northern Ontario. The party won in places like London, Hamilton, Niagara, Waterloo, Northern Ontario, downtown Toronto, and Ottawa.
Stephenson points out that in the 2022 election, the two parties were tied at around 24 per cent in the popular vote, but the seat difference was even greater, with the NDP winning 31 seats and the Liberals winning just eight.
“You’d expect them to turn out to be the same, but we don’t have a proportional representation system, so that’s not the way it works,” Stephenson said.
She said that while the Liberal seat count may have turned out lower than the NDP, the party has nonetheless demonstrated that they are still in the game.
“So this time around, I would say the Liberals have shown that they actually do have support among the public,” Stephenson said.
Still, Reid said it is likely “a splash of cold water” to see 30 per cent of the vote translate into so few seats in the legislature.
He said the outcome is likely a reflection of the fact the party has been “in the wilderness” for seven years without the resources necessary to mount a strong campaign.
“(It) reflects a lack of get-out-the-vote infrastructure targeting all the sinew and muscle of election campaigns that aren’t that exciting to a lot of people, but obviously matter enormously,” Reid said.
“Because they didn’t have money, because they didn’t have infrastructure, because they didn’t have staff, because they weren’t a going concern for seven years – that left them vulnerable to this kind of circumstance.
With official party status, Reid said, the party will now have the staff and resources necessary “to build the undercarriage required to carry your car further” in the next election.
Although the outcome showed the Liberals still have more work to do, it is also a cautionary moment for Stiles, Reid said.
While the NDP benefited from more concentrated support and managed to win more seats than the Liberals, they are down both in the popular vote and in their seat count compared to the 2022 election, in which they won 24 per cent of the popular vote and 31 seats.
“I would be almost paralytically relieved if I was Marit Stiles, because the prospect of dropping to third place, the prospect of internal warfare with the hard left coming at her – all of that seemed like it was very real until the polls closed,” Reid said.
“So I’m sure she’s basking in the triumphs she received, but quietly and over time, they are going to have to address the narrowness of their appeal.”
Calling the NDP’s high seat count despite its relatively small share of the popular vote a “pink elephant,” Reid said Stiles now has a reprieve to make sure her party is better positioned in the next election.
“That lightning ain’t gonna strike twice,” he said.
Unofficial numbers from Elections Ontario show that voter turnout stood at 45.4 per cent according to early numbers, slightly better than the last provincial election in 2022 when it hit an all-time low of 43.5 per cent.
