Who are the major party leaders in the Ontario election? Everything you need to know in three profiles
Ontario's provincial election is set to take place on June 2.
After four years as premier, Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford wants to return to office with a new mandate. His challengers include Liberal Leader Stephen Del Duca and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath.
The Star's politics team has compiled profiles on these three leaders, providing a look at each candidate's background, personality and beliefs.
Steven Del Duca, the Ontario Liberal Party leader, is an unlikely political star. Bookish. Family-oriented. Suburban dad. He draws inspiration from the biographies of great American political leaders, and yet is still trying to define his own story.
After spending most of his life in and around Ontario politics - as a Liberal campaign volunteer organizer, manager, staffer, MPP and cabinet minister - he knows what it will take to win. Yet more than half of Ontario voters do not know who he is or what he stands for.
The global pandemic made introducing himself as party leader all that much harder.
Read the full story by Tonda MacCharles.
Doug Ford's first term as premier was upended by a pandemic. Will his response earn him an encore?
Straighten your act out, and you have an opportunity.
It's an expression Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford has said he used to hear from his father when he and his three siblings were growing up in Etobicoke.
It's also one that has new relevance today as he prepares to make the case to Ontario that he deserves re-election as premier after a four-year term that played out in two acts: how he governed pre-pandemic and how he governed during.
Elements of Ford on display over the last two years - a man who personally delivered masks to a hospital, who helped shovel out strangers during a snow storm, and who stands shoulder to shoulder with a Liberal prime minister he once personally disparaged, in order to deliver billions in spending to the province - is the candidate his party hopes voters will back.
Read the full story by Stephanie Levitz.
Ontario New Democrats hope that Andrea Horwath's combination of fire and experience - her nickname is the Steeltown Scrapper" - will help finally elevate their leader into the premier's office after this spring's provincial election.
At 59, Horwath is spearheading her fourth campaign as Ontario NDP leader, a position she's held since March 2009. Back then, she predicted it would take at least a decade for the provincial New Democrats to form government again at Queen's Park, something they've only accomplished once, under Bob Rae in 1990.
Thirteen years later, Horwath and those around her project confidence that - despite lagging behind the Liberals and governing Tories in public opinion polls - the party is primed to make a solid run at power. The New Democrats boast of a well-stocked campaign war chest, thanks to a strong recent stretch of fundraising. They will try to use their Official Opposition status, with the second-most seats, to argue that they - not the Liberals - are the true alternative to Doug Ford's Progressive Conservatives. And they believe the past two years of pandemic crisis have fostered an appetite for social democracy in the province, setting the table for true-orange policies like expanded health care and increased taxes on the rich.