Ontario NDP 'failed to connect with voters' in 2022 election, report finds

Marit Stiles speaks to supporters after her Ontario NDP leadership is confirmed in Toronto on Saturday February 4, 2023. Stiles has been confirmed after a majority of party members voted in favour of the lone candidate. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

The Ontario NDP failed to connect with voters during the 2022 elections, a new report admits as the party looks to rebuild their brand with a new leader.

In a report released this month by the NDP campaign review committee, the official opposition blatantly outlines what went wrong in their last pitch for governance.

Despite external factors such as COVID-19, which they argue made it difficult for former leader Andrea Horwath to stay in the news cycle, the blame, the report found, lies with the party itself.

“At a deeper level our campaign simply failed to connect with voters or engage their interest. Many of our voters stayed home,” the report found.

“The remarkable 13-per-cent drop in turnout across the province came mostly at our expense.”

The report makes mention of the fact that the NDP, while still able to clinch the position of official opposition for a second term, lost nine seats and 813,000 votes.

This despite the fact that the 2022 campaign was the “best financed and most resourced campaign ever put in the field by the ONDP.”

“It was not enough just to be against Doug Ford,” the report reads. “Our focus on strategic voting was a call for change without providing compelling reasons for making that change. In a province with a three-party system, it is not enough to say no to the other two parties; we must provide reasons to say yes to us.”

The 2022 election loss led to Horwath’s resignation as leader.

The six-month review concluded the party needed to start their campaign efforts much earlier, work on better communicating with volunteers and riding associations, and conduct a major overhaul of its candidate nomination process.

“No matter where we looked, we were almost certain to hear someone suggest we should have started sooner – candidate search, leaflets, assigning campaign staff, research, etc., the report found.

“We had thought at one time to simply report our findings as ‘Start Everything Sooner’.”

Speaking at the Legislature, current NDP Leader Marit Stiles welcomed the report and said she personally doesn’t put blame for the party’s poor standings on any one person.

“I think that elections are evolving and campaigns need to evolve. And I think there's some great and very important lessons coming out of that one and some recommendations that we'll be able to work on,” she said. “What I think is that people in this province have been told for too long that this is as good as it gets.”

“I want to inspire people to believe that that we can change things and to hold their elected leaders to a higher standard.”

A similar “debrief” was put together for the Ontario Liberals in which members said they felt like the party was “trying to be too much of everything.”

The party put a lot of onus on former leader Steven Del Duca, who they say failed to “showcase his brand and his position on policy issues that were top-of-mind to Ontarians.”

Del Duca also resigned on election day after the Liberals failed to get enough seats to be given party status.