Doug Ford takes his Ontario election campaign to Washington, DC

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National Post’s Chris Selley and National Post contributor Anthony Furey discuss the latest in the 2025 Ontario election. Watch the video or read the transcript.

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Chris Selley: Hello, I’m Chris Selley, columnist with the National Post. I’m here with Anthony Furey, contributor to the National Post. And now we’re going to talk about Doug Ford’s trip to Washington. He started off Tuesday morning with a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is an incredibly influential group. I had no idea. It’s the second biggest lobbyist on Capitol Hill in terms of spending, something like $75 million last year. So this is a place where Doug Ford should be speaking, for sure. And then later in the day, he was taking meetings with a couple of border state Republicans, a Michigan congresswoman and a senator from North Dakota. And that’s also what he should be doing. Border state Republicans are exactly the sort of people with whom Canadian politicians should be trying to inveigh themselves, I think. These are both Trump allies, too. It’s just a weird dynamic because, of course, he’s there in his capacity as premier of Ontario, but he’s also campaigning to be premier of Ontario. And so you have this strange situation where the party is paying — the Progressive Conservative Party — is paying for his private jet down there, paying for the hotels, but taxpayers may also be on the hook for some of the other costs. And that would be fine if it was just him as premier, but it does seem to lend some credence to me to the opposition charges that this is really a kind of a crazily opportunistic election and, you know, if it’s so important that he lead us through this, why not just go ahead and lead us through this? Do have any qualms about this trip, Anthony?

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Anthony Furey: Well, I think you laid it out pretty well, Chris, because the whole reason we’re having this election, according to Doug Ford, is he needs a strong majority to respond to the tariff situation and to respond to Donald Trump. And yet, that is not entirely something that you do just knocking on doors with people throughout Ontario ridings. You have to go and do the sort of engagement with U.S. business leaders and U.S. politicians. So, in some sense, this is the most sort of foreign affairs that Doug Ford has ever done in terms of spending time in the U.S. with the U.S. Chamber; he’s on CNN; he’s on Fox News. I mean anyone would love to have media during a campaign but normally you want to have it here in Canada, domestic media. To have this media is a little different, and it’s not accessible to Bonnie Crombie or to Marit Stiles or the Green Party leader, because nobody there cares to hear from them, because they’re just running for the job — they’re not decision makers. Yet, this is also one of the biggest events that Doug Ford has faced in his time as Premier. It just happens to fall at the time of an election. So, all the criticisms are valid, but at the same time, none of them are applicable because this is what’s going on, and if he did not do this, it would be a dereliction of duty. So, I almost think he’s having his cake and eating it too, and I don’t hold it against him.

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Selley: Yeah, no, and the problem, of course, is it’s a really tricky thing for the opposition to try to campaign to win an election that they insist shouldn’t be happening. It’s just a fundamentally odd thing. Every now and again over Canadian history, voters have rebelled against opportunistic politicians, but it’s not something you can sort of game out and make happen. It’s just either going to happen, or it isn’t going to happen. So, yeah, I think that’s a good description, having his cake and eating it, too. He hears the criticisms. He doesn’t care. But it sure would be nice, I think, if all his attention was focused on this and not the election.

Furey: No, and that’s an argument to be had for not having the election. And I do think that if we were in normal times and we were just talking about domestic issues, there would probably be a narrative shift that could see Doug Ford suffer, downgraded to a minority or whatnot and, you know, a massive change happens because we see politicians get punished for calling early elections and things get lost and they lose their grip on the narrative. But there’s no opportunity here for the Liberals or the NDP to get any space and any traction because the conversation isn’t about them. It really has nothing to do with them and the issues they’re dealing with. It just has to do with Doug Ford’s discussions about what’s going on in the U.S.

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Selley: Yeah, well, and I mean, I thought it was — I was sort of amused to see and kind of a bit surprised actually at how many Queen’s Park reporters made it down to Washington for this event. So, you know, he’s not just diverting the attention to Washington, he’s dragging all the reporters to Washington as well. And one of the interesting observations that a couple of them had was that this room at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was, you know, they were really struggling to find American business people to talk to in there. It was a very Canadian heavy crowd, which I thought was an interesting sort of development because maybe if Trump — or sorry — maybe if Ford had been down there just in his capacity as premier, not during an election, there wouldn’t have been that much scrutiny. So, I don’t know. I think he might want to lay off. I think this might, he might want to make this his first and last election junket to Washington.

Furey: Yeah, from the sources I have spoken with, I do know that Ford and the cabinet ministers who are with him are going and actually meeting with a lot of policymakers in the U.S. They’re jamming their schedule, you know, hour by hour, minute by minute. So, he is doing the work on the ground. I guess the question is how will the voter respond to it? So far, they’re liking it.

Selley: Yeah, it doesn’t seem to be doing him any harm. All right, why don’t we leave it there?

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