For nearly 30 years, Adam Oldfield has been a lonely Conservative in the Ontario riding of Hamilton Centre, a longtime NDP stronghold.
But in last month’s election, the riding went Liberal. The Conservatives placed second, and the NDP third.
Oldfield says the results may be a sign of a “dynamic shift of mindset” in a city once known for its ties to steel manufacturing and unions.
“I think the NDP got extremely comfortable in ignoring this area, assuming they’d always get the vote,” said fellow neighbourhood resident Terry LaCorte, who also voted Conservative. While she is not happy with the election of Mark Carney as prime minister, she is happy to see a change in local representation.
In the federal election, Ontario voters deserted the NDP. The party lost all five of their seats and captured just less than five per cent of the vote.
Green Party and independent candidates were also shut out, meaning only Liberals and Conservatives won in Ontario.
“I think there are a lot of NDP voters who felt that this time, in this circumstance, they had to go with Carney, and some, admittedly, went Conservative,” said Drew Fagan, a professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. “They just got squeezed.”
Flipped seats
Christopher Martin-Chan, a senior consultant at New West Public Affairs, says the Conservatives “over-performed” in Ontario. The Conservatives took 53 seats, up from 38.
Specifically, the Tories did well in southern and southwestern Ontario ridings outside of the Greater Toronto Area. Most of Toronto proper remained Liberal.
In Cambridge, a city an hour west of Toronto, Conservative Connie Cody narrowly beat Liberal incumbent Bryan May. Two of the three ridings in nearby Kitchener flipped to Conservatives, narrowly defeating incumbent Green and Liberal candidates. Kitchener’s third seat remained Liberal.
Elsewhere, the former NDP riding of London-Fanshawe flipped Conservative.
For Martin-Chan, the Conservatives’ success in the region is due to the party’s focus on cost of living and crime. These concerns were a “very strong driver of votes in some of the suburban communities in the GTA and further out,” said Martin-Chan, who was formerly a staffer in provincial and federal Conservative governments.
The party needs to keep focusing on these issues if it wants to win the next election, he says. The federal party also needs to repair its fractured relationship with Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives.
While Martin-Chan does not think that division was a factor in the Tories’ loss, he does think it was an unnecessary distraction.
Mike Morrice, the former Green member of Parliament for Kitchener Centre, says many of the riding’s residents are worried about cost of living and the impact of tariffs.
Morrice, who lost to Conservative Kelly DeRidder by fewer than 400 votes, says the results show a need for electoral reform. The riding was a tight race with the Conservatives capturing 34.2 per cent of the vote, the Greens 33.6 per cent and the Liberals 29.3 per cent.
“Every vote should count,” he said, noting that more than 60 per cent of the riding’s voters wanted a more progressive candidate than the one who was elected.
‘Identity crisis’
But perhaps one of the most shocking election results in Ontario came in Windsor. The city borders Detroit, Mich., and is a hub of Canada’s manufacturing sector. The Conservatives won both ridings in the city and surrounding municipalities, unseating Liberal MP Irek Kusmierczyk and NDP MP Brian Masse. Masse fell to third in the Windsor West riding.
Kusmierczyk, who lost his seat by 77 votes, has asked for a judicial review.
The local Conservative candidates were not as well-known as the Liberal and NDP incumbents, says Lydia Miljan, a political science professor at the University of Windsor. But the party’s focus on cost of living resonated with Windsor residents’ concerns, she says.
“The Conservatives were much more attuned to the bread-and-butter issues that people in Windsor have to deal with,” said Miljan. “That’s probably what resonated with Windsor voters more so than the fears about Trump and tariffs.”
She also thinks the Conservatives have done a good job of appealing to blue-collar workers — the demographic the NDP traditionally attracts.
In Martin-Chan’s view, the NDP is going “through an identity crisis.”
The party needs to decide who it represents: upper-class Toronto residents or working-class voters in southwestern Ontario cities. “They don’t know,” he said.
Oldfield, of Hamilton, agrees. In his view, the NDP’s focus on issues like the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza failed to address concerns in his local community.
In a statement released May 7, the NDP acknowledged a need to re-engage with working class voters.
“This party was built by and for working people to fight for fairness, dignity, and opportunity,” the party’s interim leader Don Davies said in the statement. “That’s the foundation we will rebuild together.”
According to the statement, the NDP plans to thoroughly review the election results and make sure “workers and communities” are its priority.
Fagan, at the University of Toronto, says the election results should not be seen as a death knell for the NDP.
The party has suffered massive defeats before. In 1993, the party was reduced to nine seats; by 2011, it was the Official Opposition.
“They need to change with the times, like any party,” Fagan said. “But this is not a fundamental repudiation, although it looks like it on the surface, of the party and its values.”
Back in Hamilton, Oldfield feels “invigorated” by a change in the local representative, even if his favoured candidate lost. He has plans to meet with his new Liberal member of Parliament. He wants to tell him how, despite its rough reputation, he loves the community in his neighbourhood. In this neighbourhood, people will stop and help in a crisis.
Oldfield hopes the election outcome will make things better for his neighbourhood. And he suspects that future elections could see the Liberals and the Conservatives in a tight race in the riding.
“I think this could be a dynamic pendulum shift.”
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