Ontario Election 2025 Resources

Premier Doug Ford has called a snap election. Voting day is Thursday, February 27.

The current cost-of-living crisis is an issue for everyone in Ontario. We need to elect Members of Provincial Parliament who will stand up for working people.

Stay tuned for more resources available to share with your community about what's at stake for workers. 

6 Questions to ask your candidate

Download these questions in a pdf

1. Do you support raising the minimum wage to at least $20/hr?

The minimum wage in Ontario would be $20 today if the Ford government had not canceled the wage increase to $15 when they were elected in 2018 and then continued to freeze the minimum wage for two years. Today minimum wage workers make only $17.20/hr. Many of us earn even less, if we are in gig work with little protection, if we are called independent contractors when we are not, or if we have precarious immigration status. Racialized communities, women or workers with disabilities, are over represented in part-time, low waged and unstable employment. 

Even if we all could earn $20/hr, that amount is still not enough to live on. To make life truly affordable, we all need strong rent control; deeply affordable public housing; $10 a day child care; free or low-cost, reliable public transit; and strong social programs like health care, education, and more.

The Justice for Workers movement believes we all deserve at least $20 an hour immediately, and additional increases to bring everyone out of poverty.

2. Will you legislate real rent control and invest in public housing?

For the past 40 years, successive Ontario governments have cut funding to public housing and weakened rent control laws. Most recently, Premier Ford eliminated rent control for any homes built after 2018. As a result, there are not enough affordable homes available for any of us. Let's be clear: there is no housing shortage if you have money.

Corporate landlords and developers profit from skyrocketing rent for tenants and small businesses. Doug Ford's Conservatives want us to believe that handing over public land to for-profit developers, removing safety regulations, and scrapping rent controls will unleash "free enterprise" to solve our housing crisis.

But the fact is, for-profit developers are the problem, not the solution. Michael Brooks, CEO of Real Property Association of Canada (whose members represent 1 trillion Canadian dollars  in real estate), said very clearly: we are not tasked with building deeply affordable or social housing. We can't be there. We're in business. Let's draw a line between these two."

Instead of building affordable housing, the Ford government is continuing to allow their developer friends to make huge profits by building housing only for those who have money. To deflect our anger, they are pointing the finger at immigrants, refugees, and international students and trying to blame them for the housing crisis.

Let's not fall for this divisive strategy. Let's unite to demand high quality, social housing and strong rent control legislation for everyone.

3. Will you immediately double the monthly rates for Ontario Works (OW) and Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP)?

During the COVID pandemic in 2020, Canada's Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) provided income support of $500 per week per person, or about $2,000 per month. Last year, the poverty line for a single person in Ontario was calculated to be $2,302 per month.

Yet in 2025, a single person on OW receives, at most, $733/month and a single person on ODSP receives, at most, $1,308/month. As a result, people on social assistance lack the income security to afford things like smartphones or transit passes to find a decent job, or to afford decent food to stay healthy. Finding decent affordable housing is nearly impossible.

The rates are so low because the Conservative government cut rates by 21% in the mid-1990s and no government since ever restored those cuts. Between 2018 and 2023, under Premier Ford, inflation rose 18%. But ODSP benefits were only increased by 12 % and OW saw no increase! 

Immediately doubling Ontario's OW and ODSP rates will be a huge help to people who are on social assistance. But much higher levels of monthly income support is needed to ensure we all have enough to live in dignity.

4. Will you fix our laws to stop wage theft and misclassification?

Wage theft occurs when bosses do not pay us all we are owed. It happens when we are paid below minimum wage, or when we are denied vacation, public holiday, or overtime pay.

Misclassification happens when bosses purposely treat workers as self-employed to avoid paying their fair share into the Canada Pension Plan (CPP), Employment Insurance (El), and Workers Safety & Insurance Benefits (WSIB). Furthermore, when we are misclassified, we don't get any of the protections under the Employment Standards Act like the minimum wage, rest breaks, and job-protected leaves.

Those of us with precarious immigration status, or who face other forms of discrimination in the workplace, are particularly vulnerable and have fewer resources to challenge these illegal practices. 

The laws we have are only as strong as they are enforced. But under Conservative Premier Doug Ford, proactive workplace inspections have fallen from 2,932 in 2017 to 210 in 2022.

In theory, the government has the power to punish employers who break the law, but Ford has rarely used these powers. In 2022, the government issued only 6 tickets and initiated only 6 prosecutions against employers who committed wage theft. Yet that same year, the Ontario Ministry of Labour assessed over $22.7 million owing to workers.

When employers get away with wage theft or misclassification and face no consequence for breaking the law, employers become very confident in becoming repeat offenders. This has to stop. We should be able to work and get paid what we are owed instead of being pushed into poverty by employers who break the law.  

5. Will you improve funding for public services like health care, education, child care, transit, and other essential services?

Strong social programs make life more affordable for working people. If we had to pay for-profit corporations for our health care, education, roads and sidewalks, or even clean drinking water, we would be far worse off than we already are. That's what taxes are for: to pool our resources to provide essential services that would be too expensive for us to buy on our own.

Corporations greatly benefit from public services and public infrastructure. They benefit from a skilled and healthy workforce educated through our public schools and supported by public healthcare. Every day, corporations depend on well­ maintained roads, highways and public transit systems to transport products, customers, and workers to where they need to be.

But despite benefiting from public services and infrastructure, corporations do not pay their fair share of taxes. Decades of corporate tax cuts have meant corporations only paid $41 billion compared to the $145 billion people paid in 2015. In 2014, the Canada Revenue Agency reported that corporations evaded up to $11 billion in taxes through tax loopholes and offshore tax havens.

When corporations pay less in taxes, it reduces the money available for public services, so even though workers like you and me are paying more, our services are not improving and sometimes get even worse. Today, our healthcare system is strained with overworked and underpaid staff. We squeeze into buses and trains that are often late, and desperately in need of repairs. We have staffing crises in child care and education, because workers can't afford to work for such low wages.

These problems could all be fixed if we reversed decades of corporate tax cuts and clamped down on corporate tax fraud. But they don't want us talking about all the corporate profit that is being made. Instead, we see politicians blaming im/migrants, refugees, international students and anyone who needs income support to survive.

It doesn't have to be this way. Let's unite to demand corporations pay their fair share of tax and use the money to restore funding and infrastructure for our social programs, so we all have better access to the services we need.

6. Will you legislate 10 employer-paid sick days for everyone?

58% of workers in Canada do not have paid sick days. That number rises to a staggering 70% for workers who earn less than $25,000. And because racialized workers, im/migrants and women in precarious jobs are less likely to have paid sick days, this issue is also a matter of racial, gender and equity justice.

No matter who we are, none of us should be forced to decide between going to work sick or paying our bills.

Going to work sick puts us, our coworkers, and the public at risk. We learned this hard lesson during the COVID pandemic when we needed to stay home if we had COVID. Our governments responded to the popular demand for 10 paid sick days, by implementing temporary paid sick days during the pandemic so that we could stay home and not get others sick. Yet in 2025, we still have zero  paid sick days in Ontario. 

We briefly had 2 paid sick days in 2018 after a hard-fought campaign by workers. But when Conservative Premier Doug Ford took office that year, he took those 2 paid sick days away.

As a result, Ontario workers now only have 3 unpaid sick days. So workers have little choice but to go to work sick. Premier Ford had every opportunity to do the right thing but instead, his government voted against paid sick day bills over 25 times since coming to power.

By contrast, the federal government responded to our campaign and, in 2022, made it mandatory for all workers under federal jurisdiction (such as in transportation, banking and telecommunications) to have 10, employer-paid sick days each year. 

Taking paid time off when we are sick is an essential human labour right and we continue to fight for at least 10 paid sick days for everyone.