Watch: National Post’s Chris Selley and National Post contributor Anthony Furey discuss the latest in the 2025 Ontario election
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.
Chris Selley: Hi there, I’m Chris Selley, I’m a columnist at the National Post. I’m here with Anthony Furey. We’re talking the day before the Ontario general election, which has not caught fire. And I was having an interesting conversation with someone the other night, a woman I would say probably in her early 30s. Had an interesting collection of opinions. She likes Pierre Poilievre, and she doesn’t like Doug Ford, and she doesn’t like any of the other candidates — any of the other party leaders in Ontario, either. And she was sort of saying she wasn’t sure what she should do, and she decided that she was going to go in and decline her ballot, which I thought was a very sort of honorable kind of old school thing to do. For people that don’t know it just means you can go in, and they can hand you your ballot and then you can give it back and say, “No thank you, I don’t want it.” And that gets recorded. And I noticed in my writing all of 18 people did that last time around. So that’s one approach, but I wonder anyway, what do you think? I mean some people say we have a civic duty to vote. What would you say to people who just don’t see anything worthwhile?
Anthony Furey: Well, I have a hard time blaming them for a number of reasons. I think, generally speaking, our political parties are relatively closer in terms of their perspectives than has been the case in past moments in history and also in other countries in the world. So it’s comfortable situation to be in. Generally speaking, when people feel the urgency to get involved in an election, they do. And that happens. The spoil the ballot thing is very interesting, because it’s people who do feel the civic duty, but are also not particularly passionate about the election. It’s one of the reasons why I’m still in favour of paper ballots. And this is a bit of a quirk, but you can spoil your ballot by writing, I just like all of you, or you can scrawl some sort of message on it. And then when the scrutineers open the ballots, they look, and they can be shocked and pass the smelling salts and read the message on the ballot, and it doesn’t get counted. It doesn’t get put into the Liberal or into your Conservative pile, of course. So I think a low voter turnout, and a lack of voter engagement is a problem, but it’s a good problem to have.
Selley: Yeah, I guess, you’re absolutely right that Canadian politics is much more clustered around the center than in most countries. I would argue that maybe that’s part of the problem that people who really want to see some kind of radical thinking don’t really have access to it. But you know spoiling a ballot is something, is an interesting one. That’s different than declining your ballot. I always find that the problem with spoiling your ballot is that it gets counted with the people who aren’t smart enough to realize how to mark an X, right? Like they’ve somehow screwed up the process, and I don’t want that. What I’d love to have is a none of the above box just to be able to say “Hey no like I’m here, but none of you, please,” and I think that would be kind of an elegant option.
Furey: Yeah, and in a past election, someone did register a none of the above party, and they managed to get themselves on a bunch of ballots. The irony is you’re not voting for none of the above there, you’re voting for that individual. You’re having to say, you support this person should they inadvertently win. And I think you’re right, when we see politicians that inspire by going in different directions, it kind of tweaks the turnout and tweaks the traditional voting patterns. Donald Trump is a prime example of that, where he motivated people to vote for him, to vote against him, and it wasn’t necessarily in the clean lines that the pollsters and traditional thinking taught us would happen. And you see that in other countries as well, when someone who comes out and sort of deviates from the polite structures does. So would that be healthy for Canadian democracy? I think there are people who would be very much against those particular candidates and what they bring forward, but at least it gets them talking, and at least it riles people up for and against.
Selley: Well, that’s one of the arguments that you often hear in Canada, including from Justin Trudeau, against proportional representation is that it would encourage these extremist parties. But of course, those extremist parties. I mean, first of all, I don’t think there’s that many extremist opinions waiting to form political parties in Canada. But, you know, it forces people to get into a room and discuss things after the election. We’re not used to that. But I do think that we could stand to have more diversity of opinions, and maybe it would get more people to the polls, because I think people can see that a lot of the back and forth between the party leaders is just sort of kabuki theater, right? They disagree on not that much, and yet they were supposed to believe that they hate each other.
Furey: Yeah, and I think the person you spoke to who said she’s a Pierre Poilievre supporter but won’t support Doug Ford maybe falls into that category of people who are conservatives and don’t like Doug Ford because he’s not conservative enough, which speaks to the fact that we maybe have three parties that are just kind of mushy in the middle altogether, although Ford is the most conservative one. The NDP has a couple quasi socialist proposals. They’re the ones who most want to increase taxes on higher brackets, but they’re also not as NDP right now as the party has been in past decades. So we’re suffering from a blob effect right now in the Ontario election.
Selley: All right, well, that’s a nice little get out of the vote message there to end on. Thanks to everyone for listening, and happy election day.