Only 365 days of campaigning to go.

The one-year countdown to the Ontario election has begun with all the major party leaders looking ahead to the vote on June 7, 2018.

Premier Kathleen Wynne, whose Liberals have been in power since 2003 and trail the Progressive Conservatives in most polls, will spend the coming months touting pharmacare, higher wages and transit improvements.

“We’ve brought in the first balanced budget in Ontario in almost a decade, and so we are in a position now to make some of the investments that will help people in their lives on a day-to-day basis,” Wynne said Monday.

That includes the $465 million “OHIP+” program, which provides prescription drug coverage for everyone under 25 starting Jan. 1; a minimum wage that jumps from $11.40 an hour to $14 next year and $15 in 2019, and billions in transportation spending ranging from a proposed high-speed rail link between Toronto and Windsor to a boost in TTC services.

Wynne’s government is also pouring billions into reducing electricity rates for homeowners and small businesses by an average of 25 per cent, thereby turning down the temperature on an issue that was burning the Liberals.

The premier, who last week put to rest Tory-fuelled rumours about a snap summer election, hopes soaring hydro bills will be a distant memory by this time next year.

While PC Leader Patrick Brown is striving to keep electricity prices on the front burner, he is being careful not to make any platform commitments so far out from the election.

Brown, whose party brought in about $10 million more than the Liberals last year before a ban on corporate and union donations took effect in January, wants to protect any lead he has in public-opinion polls.

“Voters are tired of promises by a government that it has no intention of keeping. We’re going to give you the truth,” said Brown. He added that was the formula for Ross Romano’s stunning win in Thursday’s Sault Ste. Marie byelection, wresting away a 13-year Liberal stronghold for the first PC victory there since 1981.

“We spoke honestly to voters while the Liberals and NDP made pie-in-the-sky promises.”

But the one pledge Brown has made — a vague assurance that a Tory government would impose some form of carbon pricing to tackle climate change — is causing him problems with his base.

The fledgling Trillium Party, which now has a sitting MPP thanks to Jack MacLaren’s departure from the Tories on May 28, is appealing to other disaffected Conservative voters by opposing any form of carbon taxation.

Social conservatives, who backed Brown’s leadership in 2015 only to have him renounce them last year when he flip-flopped and endorsed Wynne’s updated sex-education curriculum, are pouncing on the carbon tax issue.

His advisers, however, believe his outreach to cultural communities in and around the Greater Toronto Area will more than offset any votes that bleed to the Trillium Party.

A wild card for both Brown and Wynne is NDP Leader Andrea Horwath.

Horwath, who led her party into both the 2011 and 2014 elections, has been pushing universal pharmacare coverage for all Ontarians for 125 drugs compared to the Liberals’ plan to offer it only to those under 25 for 4,400 medications.

Still, the byelection defeat in the Sault was a setback for the NDP, which had put a lot of effort into winning a seat they held until the Liberals won it in 2003.

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“The much bigger fight lies ahead,” said Horwath.

“Just a year from now, the people of Sault Ste. Marie — and all Ontarians — will be given a choice not just to change a seat in the Assembly, but to change governments,” she said, taking a swing at the policy-light Tories.

“We’ll give Ontario the choice to elect a government that’s focused on people. A government with the courage of conviction to create the first universal pharmacare program, a drug plan that covers everyone, no matter how old they are or how much money they make.”

With files from Rob Ferguson

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