As Doug Ford’s Tories celebrate the first anniversary of their election victory this week, the jubilation in federal Conservative backrooms at the return of their party to power in Canada’s most populous province has given way to trepidation.

Barely a year into his term, Ford has become more unpopular than the chronically unpopular Liberal premier he replaced last year. So far, Ontario’s experiment with a populist government is a dud.

The last quarterly Angus Reid report on provincial approval ratings was published before the Alberta election. It pegged Ford close to the bottom of the list, below Rachel Notley whose NDP has since been returned to opposition.

The most recent string of Ontario polls on voting intentions suggests that in a provincial election held this spring, enough voters could have been willing to walk the talk of their dissatisfaction to similarly send the Tories back to the opposition benches.

Ford’s poor standing is really Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer’s problem.

The Ontario premier is three years away from an election, an eternity in politics. But time is running out before his federal ally faces voters and a potential backlash against some of Ford’s policies.

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At the time of the 2004 federal campaign, Paul Martin’s Liberals had the misfortune of canvassing voters on the heels of an Ontario budget that introduced an unpopular health levy. The measure had nothing to do with their government. That did not prevent their candidates from getting an earful on the province’s doorsteps.

By the time the federal campaign gets in high gear later this summer, a new school year will be upon Ontario. For many parents, it will be the first opportunity to take the measure of some of the cuts introduced by the Ford government — starting with larger class sizes.

Teachers are hardly the only constituency the Progressive Conservative government has mobilized against it over its first year in office.

Toronto Mayor John Tory has become one of the most familiar faces of the resistance to Ford’s agenda.

Tory’s profile is much closer to that of the centrist voters the federal Conservatives need to win over next fall than that of the premier, who has made himself the nemesis of Toronto city council.

While Conservative party fortunes have risen in the national pre-election polls over the first half of this year, Ontario has been significantly slower to jump on the bandwagon than, for instance, Atlantic Canada.

Even in ridings such as Markham-Stouffville, where Jane Philpott is set to run as an Independent, a 338Canada/Mainstreet poll published on Thursday gives Trudeau’s Liberals a clear edge over both the former minister and the second-place Conservatives. In the past, the riding has tended to alternate between the two main parties.

With the Conservatives lagging far behind the Liberals in Quebec, Scheer needs a strong showing in Ontario if he is going to lead his party to government in October.

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Between now and then he will have to walk a fine line, keeping his distance from Ford without antagonizing the premier’s loyal following.

The fact that the Ontario legislature will not sit again after this week until after the Oct. 21 federal vote is bound to help — or at least it will help as long as it does not mean the premier has more time on his hands to hit the federal hustings.

In light of the above, Scheer wisely chose Alberta over Ontario as the venue for what his party billed as a major address on federal-provincial relations earlier this week.

The speech was the fourth in a series of five designed to set the table for the fall campaign.

With Alberta Premier Jason Kenney looking on, Scheer described the state of federal-provincial relations under Justin Trudeau as the coldest in generations — a depiction that veterans of past first ministers’ conferences might find to be at odds with their recollections.

It was not so long ago that Ontario, Quebec and Alberta under Mike Harris, Lucien Bouchard and Ralph Klein butted heads with then-Prime minister Jean Chrétien over health transfers.

And who can forget the deep divisions that surfaced over the course of the first ministers’ constitutional negotiations under both Brian Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau?

When it comes to first ministers’ conferences, love-ins are the exception, not the rule, as a Scheer government devoted to expanding Canada’s pipeline network over the objections of Quebec and British Columbia would soon discover for itself.

Scheer is hardly the first aspiring prime minister to claim that he would have a more productive and harmonious partnership with the provinces than the incumbent.

The promise has been a staple of just about every past federal opposition platform, including Trudeau’s. But the Conservative leader may be one of the first to scare more voters than he attracts by promising to deliver a federal government more aligned with the premiers.

These days, more than a few Canadians — particularly but not exclusively in Ontario — find the prospect of electing a prime minister liable to walk in lockstep with Ford more disquieting than reassuring.

Chantal Hébert is a columnist based in Ottawa covering politics. Follow her on Twitter: @ChantalHbert

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