Chris Selley: If there's a 'bunch of yahoos' in Ontario politics, it's certainly not Project Ontario

The group is best thought of as conservatives alarmed by some of Ontario’s fundamentals and uninterested in being in power for its own sake.

(Link to article in the National Post)

“I imagine we’re all here for the ‘yahoo’ summit?” quipped one attendee at the Project Ontario launch Tuesday evening at Toronto’s Gardiner Museum of very fine ceramics, as he pressed the elevator button for the third floor.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has branded this amorphous new conservative group with the scarlet Y since it heaved into view in June, and has called them “far right” as well. By Monday, on the eve of the launch, Ford either hadn’t bothered looking into the group, or hadn’t changed his mind, or just thought such vocabulary was the best way to discredit them — which it might actually be, but that doesn’t speak very well of Ford.

“I don’t even know who these guys are. They sound like a bunch of radical rights,” he told reporters in Hamilton.

It’s very dumb, whatever his calculus. The announcement of Tuesday night’s event featured a murderer’s row of inoffensive conservative names: strategist Ginny Roth; Josh Dehaas, counsel for the Canadian Constitution Foundation; real-estate developer and self-described “YIMBY advocate” Chris Spoke; Conservative MP Jamil Jivani, whom Ford not so long ago deemed qualified to head up his Council on Equality of Opportunity; Adam Zivo, columnist for this newspaper, whose reporting on the opioid crisis and the excesses of harm reduction Ford’s government has certainly noticed and acted upon. The list of perfectly salubrious names goes on.

Roth told the audience of perhaps 150 people that the “project’s” next steps are to be decided. For now, Project Ontario is best thought of as a loose assembly of conservatives who are alarmed by some of Ontario’s fundamentals and unconvinced of the value of being in power for its own sake.

Time was that might have been good enough. Economist Tim Sargent, a former federal bureaucrat and director of the domestic policy program at the Macdonald Laurier Institute, recalled a time when Ontario was (or at least was thought of) as “the strong heart of the Canadian economy” — insulated from the sort of booms and busts that roil Alberta. It was sort of the index fund of the federation.

The status quo bloody well shouldn’t be good enough now, and the Project Ontarians explained some of the reasons why:

– Ontario’s GDP per capita relative to many other jurisdictions is rubbish: $62,338 in 2023, adjusted for purchasing-power parity, Agence France-Press reported earlier this year, which was good for fifth wealthiest among provinces. Only five U.S. states were lower on the same table. Ontarians are not in the habit of benchmarking themselves against the likes of Alabama and West Virginia.

Ontario’s GDP is barely rising half as fast as Quebec’s, never mind Alberta’s or Saskatchewan’s or Newfoundland’s.

– Ontario now disburses more corporate subsidies than Quebec does. That shift began right when Ford, who promised to do away with corporate subsidies entirely — you know, like an actual conservative — took office. The kindest thing you can say about the return on investment is that it is very much to be determined.

– As recently as 2019, Statistics Canada reports Ontario was bringing in more people from the rest of Canada than it was dispatching there: 42,000 net in-migration over five years. In the next five years, under Ford, the province has seen 140,000 in net out-migration. That’s a fairly astonishing 484,000 people who have left over that time.

– Certainly related: Ontario can’t build housing, despite Ford making it a conspicuous priority. And as Spoke, a real-estate developer, told the audience, that is getting way worse, all the time.

“In the first six months of 2025, construction began on only 27,368 new homes in Ontario — a staggering 25 per cent drop compared to the same six-month period in 2024, and 35 per cent below the first half of 2023,” Fraser Institute analyst Austin Thompson reported recently. “In fact, Ontario saw more housing starts in the first half of 2020 (33,588) despite disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

– Also certainly related: While Canada’s total fertility rate has cratered in recent years — it was 1.7 children per woman in 2008; it was 1.25 in 2024 — Ontario’s has cratered even more dramatically (1.21). Only four provinces and one territory are lower.

Ontario is treading water at best, to sum it all up. And especially in the absence of an effective opposition, Project Ontario can serve a very important role — whatever it ends up being — precisely because the Progressive Conservative party of Ontario doesn’t seem interested in fixing what to their minds isn’t broken.

“Mike Harris famously said when he left power that he wished he had done more faster,” Roth noted.

“And now we have a room full of people who want to do more faster, and we’re branded yahoos and far-rights,” lamented National Citizens Coalition director and conservative commentator Alexander Brown, another advertised guest at Tuesday night’s event.