The mood in staunchly conservative Eganville is likely to put a smile on Doug Ford’s face.

The picturesque town of 1,300 people nestled in the Bonnechere Valley, 110 kilometres west of Ottawa, may not count for much in terms of raw votes, ranking 286th on Statistics Canada’s list of Ontario population centres.

Yet it is no accident that Ford made a beeline for the electoral district on May 9, the day campaigning began. Progressive Conservative strategists are banking on rural ridings like Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke serving the coup de grace when the returns are counted in Thursday’s election, ultimately painting an evenly divided province in majority blue.

“The overriding mood is anger,” said Gerald Tracey, publisher of the Eganville Leader. “Anger at hydro rates, anger at the sell-off of Hydro One, anger at government spending that is saddling our kids with crippling debt. There is no question in my mind: in rural Ontario, this government is finished. And around here, that means Progressive Conservative victory.”

A rout of historic proportion now appears imminent, with the ruling Liberals, who have held power as long as the province’s youngest voters can remember, at risk of losing official party status.

“A sobering reminder that elections always matter” is how Chatham Daily News columnist Peter Epp framed the scenario this week. “No majority government in Ontario has ever lost their party status following an election. And no majority government in this province has ever been reduced to one or two seats following a general election.”

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Polls, if we dare trust them, suggest a near dead heat between Ford’s PCs and Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats — as stark an electoral choice as once middle-loving Ontario has ever seen.

But the devil is in the drilled-down details, with data analytics suggesting that the PCs command an enormous advantage, their support more evenly distributed. CBC’s Ontario Poll Tracker, as of noon Friday, showed the NDP slightly ahead of the PCs, 37.6 per cent to 36.9 per cent — yet the CBC model nevertheless projected victory for Team Ford, with an 82.9 chance of winning a majority government.

A few percentage points could well change everything. All that appears certain is a defenestration of the status quo. What follows the Liberals is still up for grabs, as candidates scramble to mobilize the 20-or-so ridings on which the outcome will swing.

And while the outcome in places like Eganville is not in doubt, Conservative victory is likely not to hinge on Doug Ford but perhaps to come in spite of him. The PC leader’s failure to table a coherent, costed platform, relying instead on populist bromides like buck-a-beer, has shifted the conversation away from leadership altogether, settling instead on the relative merits of local PC candidate John Yakabuski.

“John has held office since 2003 but always on the opposition bench and he’s gained support with every election,” said Tracey. “We know he’s cabinet material. He’s local and he’s likable. So that’s the biggest piece for us — people around here see a chance for a major voice in the next government.”

Displeasure with the ruling Liberals, defenders of Kathleen Wynne argue, is a contempt bred by both familiarity and longevity. They contend she deserves better than her numbers suggest. But in too many voters’ eyes it’s a 15-year-old story she is selling. And Ontario is not buying. Not this time.

Another portion of Wynne’s support clearly is hemorrhaging not so much to spite the Liberals but rather to bolster Horwath, whose NDP now offers left-leaning Ontario voters the only chance to stop a policy lurch to the right under Doug Ford.

“There definitely seems to be a ‘throw the bums out’ impulse in play right now, people just wanting change for the sake of change. That’s always a risk that for majority governments, once a sense of impunity sets in,” said Réal Lavergne, president of Fair Vote Canada.

“But it is also important to remind people that even if the Liberals are reduced to a single seat, that doesn’t mean their share of the vote will have collapsed to zero. Right now they are polling around 20 per cent and yes, under our system 20 per cent can translate into one seat. But that says as much or more about our first-past-the-post system than it does about the Wynne government.”

Too much can be made of Ontario’s rural-urban divide. But it’s there, in the aggrieved sense of neglect and decline that permeates blue-leaning Ontario. One statistic that sears is the uneven distribution of opportunity over the past decade, with eight out of 10 new jobs in the province created in the Greater Toronto Area, where just half of Ontario lives. Ontario’s top 25 cities are growing communities, registering population increases with each census — yet hundreds of smaller cities and towns have flatlined or are actually shrinking.

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“We can’t all be herded into cities. But one of the biggest challenges in rural Ontario is getting sufficiently reliable high-speed internet,” said Eganville’s Tracey.

“With an injection of advanced technology, we’d be in a position to compete very nicely. Until then, our next best industry is attracting retirees. We’ve been able to achieve nice, slow growth in our community by appealing to people from the GTA or the Ottawa region with nice pensions who don’t want to spend the rest of their lives at a goddamn red light. It’s the cleanest industry you can get — retirees. And they can move right into a brand new townhouse for $1,400 a month.”

Ford, who has routinely voiced disdain for “Toronto elites” in his bid for rural support, sounded uninformed on northern issues during a leaders debate in Parry Sound. When the leaders were queried on whether they would support an immigration pilot program similar to that now underway to battle population decline in Atlantic Canada — an idea already under serious discussion in shrinking northern communities — Ford answered with nativist reluctance, saying he would “take care of our own first.

“Once we take care of our own and we exhaust … every single avenue, and we don’t have anyone that could fulfil the job, then I’d be open to that,” Ford said.

Horwath, after what was arguably her strongest debate performance of the campaign, told reporters that she thought Ford had simply missed the point of the question. Northern voices, she said, are already looking for help in attracting newcomers.

“The point of the question was that these municipalities, they need more population, they need new people to come and live here,” she said. “They are opening their communities to immigration and they want the provincial government to step up to the plate and negotiate these agreements with the federal government to get these kinds of skills and newcomers to come north.”

But that exchange rings today like sobriety itself compared to the increasingly desperate, at times cartoonish messaging driving the campaigns to the finish line. Whatever thoughtful debate we got is long gone, supplanted now with fear-mongering all around.

As Horwath’s NDP surged, nosing ahead in the polls, Team Ford screamed economic Armageddon. “With the NDP — there won’t be any large companies left to tax, because they will all be going south of the border,” Ford tweeted. “The NDP will annihilate the middle class, we’ve seen it before.”

In lockstep with Ford this week was Kathleen Wynne, who, absent hope of remaining premier, still can play spoiler, warning a Horwarth government would be entirely bad for business. “Are we ready to turn Ontario’s economy over to the NDP? We believe the risk would be too great,” Wynne said.

Simultaneously, the Liberals followed with days of conservative-style attacks chiding the NDP for its relationship with organized labour. The move prompted withering contempt from TVO columnist Jon Michael McGrath, who effectively closed the case on Wynne’s legacy as “one of Ontario’s most cynical politicians … just as willing as her predecessors to do anything and say anything to hang on to political power.”

Horwath, in turn, went for the metaphorical jugular on Friday, venturing into the heart of Wynne’s own Don Valley West riding to ask voters to unseat the premier and instead side with the NDP.

“As we get closer and closer to Thursday, it’s becoming very apparent that the new premier is either going to be Mr. Ford or me,” Horwath said.

Those indeed appear to be the stark choices. Ford, with slightly more than a third of the electorate behind him, versus Horwath, with about the same. However it goes, Ontario will at least have the satisfaction of doing away with what was. A fleeting electoral thrill, out with the old, is upon us.

But however it goes, the outcome is every bit as likely to leave nearly two-thirds of Ontarians every bit as angry — perhaps more so — than they are today.

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