The last time Ontario voters went to the polls to pick a new government, school was about to let out, the air was sweet with the smell of spring and the ground was littered with fallen cherry blossom petals.
This time, they could be trudging through 50 centimetres of snow.
Welcome to Ontario’s first wintertime general election in decades. The last one technically occurred with one day left in the season, back on March 19, 1981. Before that, the last one was in January 1905. And Ontario hasn’t held a general election in February since 1883.
That means candidates are trading skirts and golf shirts for parkas and mittens, bracing themselves for the challenges of campaigning in sub-zero temperatures.
“There’s no fashion show happening here,” jokes Lisa Vizeau Allen, the NDP candidate for Sault Ste. Marie. “I’m very thankful that I’m limber and I can scale snowbanks and things like that, but instead of investing in a nice business-casual wardrobe for public presentation, you have to invest in really good boots, hat, coat, and snow pants, right?”
Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner agrees.
“The first thing I did was buy a new pair of snow boots,” he laughs.
Volunteers are also looking a little different than they would in a spring election.
“The swag certainly has shifted from T-shirts to toques,” Schreiner says, adding that the change has actually been helpful because people know straight away at the door that they aren’t there soliciting.
All of the parties say they’re doing what they can to meet the task of engaging voters in the dead of winter – a task whose challenges were laid bare this week when most of the province was slammed with a winter wallop that made getting around treacherous.
“Signs has been the biggest challenge,” Schreiner says. “There’s been a few times – especially in Parry Sound-Muskoka… We’ve had to climb up, up onto the top of the snow drift to be able to then put the sign down into the snowdrift. It’s been interesting.”
In some cases, those snowdrifts are higher than he is, Schreiner laughs.
Like Schreiner, PC candidate Steve Clark has seen a few winter elections.
“I’m telling you, it is different in February than it is in a nice summer campaign,” he says with a chuckle.
Clark volunteered on the campaign of late MP Gord Brown back in January 2006, and was himself elected in a byelection in March 2010 where he had to campaign through most of February.
“We tend not to use wooden stakes (for signs),” Clark says. “We use rebar instead, and we actually use a drill to drill into the ground to place the rebar, and then we put our lawn signs up on the rebar using zip ties.”
Bahoz Dara Aziz is press secretary for the Ontario Liberal Party. She’s also spent a fair bit of time out canvassing with Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie.
“I’ve probably never seen any politician knock doors quite like her. So she gets a lot of sign requests,” Aziz says. “Every door she knocks, they want her to put up a sign in their yard. But unfortunately, the yards are all frozen. It’s essentially like tundra ice.”
That means Crombie sometimes has to let her team come in with drills to get the sign into the stubborn ground.
All the while, candidates say, they have to be careful to avoid obstructing snowmobile paths or snowplow routes.
Keeping volunteers warm and safe is another concern.
“It also is a special type of political volunteer that will door knock in minus 20 conditions,” Clark says. “You can’t send them out on a three-hour canvas like you could in 2022 in a June campaign. You send them out for smaller periods of time, give them time to warm up.
“My wife made a pot of chili on Saturday and it was gone, like, within 10 minutes.”
While volunteers – typically the lifeblood of campaigns – may be enthusiastic, there is no doubt that sometimes bitterly cold temperatures are testing their resolve.
“People feel very motivated with us, and I think they want to get out there,” Aziz says. “But let me say this; everyone is freezing.”
She says staying geared up in this campaign means having lots of hand and toe warmers around.
“We did some mainstreeting on Church Street the other day and we stopped at a hardware store, and I just picked up a bunch more hand warmers to make sure that we were stocked up,” Aziz says.
Keeping up the volunteer count during a winter campaign might also mean remote work instead of having everybody meet at a central location some days.
“The software that we use, people can do it (make phone calls) from their homes,” Vizeau Allen says. “So instead of having this big office with, like, a phone bank there and all those things, it’s definitely different. So there’s less people in the office, but just as many people working on the campaign, just differently.”
She says some cans of coffee donated to her headquarters may even go unused because so many volunteers are working remotely.
“It’s kind of funny, yeah.”
While candidates might be willing to mount snowbanks and brave the frost, another concern for the parties is whether voters cozied up at home will open their doors to a blast of cold air so they can hear a political pitch, especially after it gets dark around 5:30 p.m.
Schreiner concedes that there was some concern around “are people going to open the door when it’s this cold and are they going to want to talk to us?”
However he says he’s been pleasantly surprised so far.
“I’ve actually been finding more people home than usual. Maybe people aren’t going out as much,” he says. “People have been more than willing to have conversations at the door, so that hasn’t been as much of a challenge as I thought it was going to be.”
Despite the chilly weather, most candidates say they’ve been receiving warm responses at the door. They’ll find out on Feb. 27 whether those responses translate into votes.
