Exclusive: Inside the campaign that won Doug Ford his third majority

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“We are in a time of war. It may not be a shooting war, but it’s an economic war,” says Kory Teneycke, Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s re-election campaign director. “It’s a trade war, and those are as big a threat to your sovereignty as the other kind.”

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Ford’s dream team, led by Teneycke, brought Ontario PCs safely through a perfect storm. In the midst of a political vacuum in Ottawa and arguably the biggest threat we’ve faced as a nation — Trump tariffs — Ford’s campaign team risked a snap election to score a rare third majority mandate for the Ontario premier. The PCs captured 80 seats, the NDP 27, Liberals 14 and Greens two in the Feb. 27 vote.

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When I catch up with Teneycke, he’s still pulsing with adrenaline and keen to relive the campaign that secured Ford’s role as the “happy warrior” protecting the people of Ontario for four more years. But there’s no time for victory laps.

Already, his team’s epic win has been eclipsed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s imposition of 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian imports and the country has turned its attention to the federal election call, possibly as early as mid-March. Canadian voters have been hurled headfirst and en masse into uncharted territory.

“You’re dealing with an economy that’s going to be ravaged by trade unpredictability. Even if we got an agreement tomorrow with Trump,” says Teneycke, “you’re going to see a chill on investment in Canada for the life of this administration and maybe much longer. Because nobody believes that a deal is worth anything.

“Unless you want to go back to 1812 or something,” Teneycke continues, with a grimace, “we haven’t seen this — the upside-down world where we’re being tariffed at double the rate of communist China, and the United States is talking about lifting sanctions on Russia, and has stopped arms to an ally in a war, at the same time that they’re playing kissy-face with the Russian crowd.”

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The Ford campaign team had been preparing for an early election for a year, Teneycke shares, “with some knowledge that things could be disruptive with Trump, but no one anticipated to what level. He did not campaign on 25 per cent tariffs for allies.”

Calling an early Ontario election on Jan. 24 — with the federal Liberals in disarray and mere days after the inauguration of Trump — looks genius. Teneycke agrees, there was wisdom in trying to get ahead of the Trudeau departure. The exiting prime minister, he observes, was “animating politics in a way that I think is less unique than everything else we’re dealing with right now.” But, he adds, the unpopularity and polarization was “something we haven’t seen probably since the dying days of the Mulroney administration.”

There were plenty of reasons for the campaign manager to want to go to the polls early, but you know, he says with a broad smile, “the campaign manager doesn’t get to make those decisions; it’s the premier.” Teneycke may be spinning me a little but whoever decided to gamble on a preemptive strike, it was a shrewd manoeuvre. The 2025 campaign caught rivals off-guard and leveraged peak tariff anxiety.

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Teneycke is a formidable political strategist, hailing from a grain farm in Saskatchewan; he was former prime minister Stephen Harper’s communications director and he’s since managed Ford’s 2018, 2022 and 2025 election campaigns. Another marquee player on this dream team — helping secure a political hat-trick for Ford — is Windsor, Ont., native Nick Kouvalis. He deploys granular, targeted polling to keep his finger on the public pulse during campaigns. And there’s a bit of intuition thrown into the mix; political insiders refer to Kouvalis as the Ford Whisperer.

Fifty per cent of our ad budget was the Trump ballot question

Kouvalis’s voice sounds weary, on the other end of the telephone. On X platform, he’s told the world he’s hanging up the skates: “This senior role stuff, senior adviser stuff, scrapper, disciplinarian (always having to make those calls) and team leader stuff is just too taxing on me.” In May, Kouvalis tells me, he’s heading to Greece for a few months of sailing to rejuvenate. But in the meantime, there’s this federal election looming on the horizon involving a longtime friend, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.

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“I’ve been working with Pierre and doing all of his local riding stuff for 20 years and I’m working for them now,” Kouvalis shares. “But I’m not going out, running around, and doing a campaign. I might do call centre work for them. I might go put up some signs for the local campaign. Maybe I’ll go in with some coffee. If I see something I think is silly, I’ll fix it. But as far as running a campaign, no, I’m not doing that anywhere.”

We both chuckle; politics can be an addiction and there’s little doubt Kouvalis will be lured into that race. What’s he whispering in the ear of federal campaigners, I ask. “My advice to the federal Conservatives,” says Kouvalis, his voice now animated, “is you have $40 million; spend it before he (the prime minister) calls an election and you are restricted by limits on spending.”

Sage advice. But even with a hefty war chest, campaigns need to craft ballot questions that resonate with voters. In the Ford re-election campaign, the question wasn’t, “Who is best positioned to negotiate with Trump?” (nobody can negotiate with a guy who keeps changing the deal); the question put to Ontario voters was, “Who do you want running the province with the looming tariff threat?”

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There was a second ballot question, laser-focused on affordability. And as Teneycke explains to me, it’s difficult to see where the first question ends and the second begins. “Tariffs in the trade war are an assault on affordability, across the board,” he says, “and the issue is going to get much worse. What salve are you going to put on the wounds that are being created by that?”

Michael Diamond, PC Party of Ontario president since 2022 and a third member of the Ford dream team — he’s also worked on all three of Ford’s election campaigns, this time, touring with the premier — echoes this sentiment. In a telephone call from his Toronto home, where he’s recovering from COVID, Diamond musters the energy to decipher this interplay between affordability and Trump’s tariff threats.

Voters in Ontario care about social programs, health care, infrastructure build, “all of that mattered,” Diamond assures me. “But there was a recognition with voters if we didn’t have that strong economic base, none of that would matter.”

“We could have the best platform on health care possible,” Diamond explains, “but if there wasn’t a tax base to support it, if there weren’t businesses employing people and businesses and workers staying active in a growing economy, none of it matters.” That’s why, Diamond adds, from the beginning of the campaign, “our slogan was ‘Protect Ontario.’”

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“Fifty per cent of our ad budget,” Kouvalis elaborates, “was the Trump ballot question and then 50 per cent of our ad budget, depending on the riding and the area, was either an attack on the Liberals and taxes or on the NDP and some of their crazy woke policies.”

“If our election was today, with Trump bringing in the tariffs,” Kouvalis predicts, “we’d probably win 90 seats. People will be more scared, more worried, and it’s real.”

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