What if they called an early election and nobody came?
What if the party in charge of calling the election, Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives, barely even made an appearance? It’s almost as if Team Ford didn’t get the memo that there’s a campaign going on, has been going on since the beginning of the month with voting day being this coming Thursday, February 27th.
For his part, Doug’s been doing his Captain Canada photo ops in Washington D.C. Millions of dollars of ads have flood the zone including over the American airwaves, for some reason, even on the Trump loving Fox News Network, according to the Globe and Mail’s Laura Stone:
The Ontario government sponsored Fox News host Sean Hannity’s prime-time interview with Donald Trump and Elon Musk, part of the multimillion-dollar advertising campaign the province is rolling out as the U.S. President repeatedly threatens to impose tariffs on Canadian goods.
While the campaign is expected to cost tens of millions of dollars, the province is refusing to say exactly how much money is being spent on the ads, including the one for Hannity, one of the highest-rated U.S. cable news shows.
And the party has been pushing out waves of text messages from dubiously acquired contact lists, ‘blah, blah, blah, Reply > Yes if you’ll vote Ontario PC’. And madly scouring their opponents’ social media feeds in an attempt to uncover any damning and damaging foul tweets or Facebook likes.
But it’s a campaign at a remove from actual flesh-and-bones voters.
Ford did put in a couple perfunctory debate performances over the course of a long weekend although he skipped both media question sessions afterward, the media being pretty much radioactive to him for the better part of a couple weeks now. But that’s more than can be said for many of his candidates who are ducking local debates like in Walkerton where, just last month, hundreds of residents lined up in the hopes of securing the services of a family doctor. The incumbent PC MPP, Lisa Thompson, decided to take a powder on a scheduled debate there, citing ‘other campaign obligations’. 
They’re out there, knocking on doors, we’re told, talking directly to the people.
Essentially, an aerial airwave bombardment from above and a boots-on-the-ground campaign, where messaging can be delivered uncontested and mistakes minimized to one-on-one encounters, a single porch at a time. Wider engagement with the electorate, an estimated sixty percent or so of what in conservative circles might be considered a hostile audience, kept to the barest of minimums, for fear of having to defend a record in government that by almost every measure is little more than 6+ years of broken promises and a severely degraded public sector. Don’t move. Keep quiet. And maybe no one will notice.
After the lowest voter turnout in Ontario’s history in the 2022 campaign that delivered them up an increased majority, Doug Ford and crew seemed determined to repeat the feat this Thursday. Calling an early election during an ongoing national/international crisis, with a short timeline in the dead of a Canadian winter and then merely going through the motions, almost pretending as if there’s not even an election going on has all the earmarks of a party banking on people not showing up to vote. Hiding behind a protective shield of technology, enabled by a hyperfocus on fundraising amongst the deep-pocketed, in order to project both competence and a certain inevitability of victory, Doug Ford is hoping to coast to a third straight, quite possibly, even bigger majority, on a big wave of distraction and manufactured disinterest.