Toronto Businessman Wants To Make Ontario Conservative Again?
An interview with Matthew Spoke, who argues that Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government has lost its principles.
Left: Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Source: LGOntario. CC BY-SA 2.0. Right: Matthew Spoke.
Ontario has a history of conservative governance. Notably, from 1995 to 2002, Progressive Conservative Premier Mike Harris led the “Common Sense Revolution,” a policy agenda rooted in fiscal conservatism that reshaped the province through tax cuts, welfare reform and government downsizing. His government was, in many ways, unapologetically conservative and left a lasting imprint on Ontario politics.
Today, Ontario is again under a Progressive Conservative government, but some on the right say the current Premier, Doug Ford, has drifted from conservatism.
Under Ford, Ontario has run large deficits, accumulated record debt and embraced elements of the green agenda. Critics say his government has allowed DEI and gender ideology to go unchecked in the education system, and in some cases even promoted them. Conservative critics of Ford also point to Ontario’s GDP per capita, which trails every G7 country except Italy, as well as worsening housing affordability and crime as evidence the province is headed in the wrong direction.
Despite those criticisms, Ford has won three consecutive majority governments.
Still, an increasing number of Ontario Conservatives say Ford needs to better reflect conservative principles in government.
Among them is Matthew Spoke, a Toronto-based real estate and tech entrepreneur. He recently launched “Project Ontario,” an effort to push for a more conservative agenda provincially. He is hosting a conference on the initiative on Sept. 30.
I sat down with Spoke to discuss his project and the challenges Ontario is facing.
Elie Cantin-Nantel: What is Project Ontario? Is it a think tank? A grassroots movement? The start of something bigger?
Matthew Spoke: We started off with a very simple idea: to gather a couple of people who shared a frustration that we weren’t seeing a conservative policy agenda getting pushed forward in Ontario. Maybe naively, we hoped it would lead to productive conversations with the government and the PC Party. It really started off as policy recommendations focused on what we consider the dashboard of metrics showing Ontario is not going in the right direction.
These include GDP growth being among the slowest in the country, hospital wait times getting longer, housing prices rising faster than anywhere else, housing starts lagging, and education outcomes not matching parents’ expectations. Crime and public safety are also worsening.
We looked at these issues and asked: What ideas could a Conservative government champion that would address these fundamental problems?
Project Ontario is not a formal organization. It’s not the beginning of a new political party. It’s not a direct challenge to Doug Ford’s leadership. We’re not secretly hiding a leadership hopeful waiting to jump in.
Elie Cantin-Nantel: Why did you personally get involved in this?
Matthew Spoke: I don’t have a background in politics. I’m on the board of directors of a conservative organisation called the Canada Strong and Free Network, but that’s only been the last three years. That’s been more federal and focused. I’ve always been a keen observer of conservative politics, but never a day-to-day participant, activist, or campaign person.
Now I’ve reached a stage in my life where I own a business, I have kids, my wife owns a business. We’re starting to feel the consequences of bad policy. When people think of politics, it often feels theoretical: would I like tax rates lower? Would I like a lower deficit? But when you start to feel it day to day, housing becoming unattainable, your kids entering the public education system and you don’t like what you’re getting, a family member going through healthcare and you don’t like the quality or speed of care, you realize politics is real. It impacts lives.
If political parties and leaders don’t take that responsibility seriously, it requires people to speak up. Why me? No other reason than I was frustrated. I started asking a few others, and they were also frustrated. Out of that came a small group of people who said, ‘We should do something about this.’ That snowballed into what we’re doing now.
Elie Cantin-Nantel: You brought up the economy, healthcare, and education in your previous answers and these are things also discussed on your Project Ontario website. What would you say are the solutions to these issues? What are you proposing in terms of the economy, healthcare, education?
Matthew Spoke: On economic growth and productivity, there’s a fundamental disagreement between how the current government is governing and what a more conservative policy agenda could look like. A think tank in Montreal recently published a report showing Ontario is now the biggest spender on corporate subsidies in the country. A recommendation would be to instead reform the corporate tax environment so Ontario is the most competitive place in Canada and among the most competitive in North America to start and grow a business.
Unemployment is another major problem. This past summer, Ontario saw the highest youth unemployment rate in decades, coinciding with incredibly high numbers of temporary foreign workers taking jobs that historically went to teenagers and young adults. Businesses find it complex and expensive to hire young people, and our labor policies don’t reward them for taking that risk. Reform is needed there.
On housing, where I spend most of my time just because my day job is in housing development in the Greater Toronto Area, Ontario has the slowest rate of housing starts per capita in the country. If Toronto is too expensive, people move to the suburbs. If suburbs are too expensive, they move to other provinces. The province has authority to reform the Development Charges Act, which allows municipalities to levy huge taxes on developers, sometimes up to $200,000 per unit. This government came out in 2018 strongly pro-housing, and then created the Housing Affordability Task Force in 2021, and received 55 recommendations. They’ve yet to implement meaningful ones.
Education is another one. My wife owns an Early Childhood Education Center in Toronto, so I saw the impact of Trudeau’s $10-a-day daycare program. In Ontario, it destroyed the private preschool operator business model. These were small, often woman-owned businesses that have been closing. There are fewer childcare spaces today than three years ago. The province will claim their hands were tied, but Doug Ford embraced a federal policy in an area of provincial jurisdiction because it was electorally popular. We haven’t seen signals they’ll reform these policies now that Trudeau is gone. In K–12, we support more access to school choice. Other provinces, including NDP-governed BC, have more school choice than Ontario. Parents should have the ability to choose where their kids get educated, whether through tax credits or funding.
And then healthcare: while there’s been some movement toward private delivery (diagnostic centers, pharmacists prescribing), the single-payer system still leads to underfunding and inefficiency. We need to introduce the option for people to pay for certain services.
Elie Cantin-Nantel: On your website, you argue that Ontario conservatives have lost their principles. Back in 2018, Doug Ford ran and won as a right-of-centre conservative, pledging to be “for the people,” cut red tape, reform health care, and find four cents of savings on every dollar. He also opposed Kathleen Wynne’s gender ideology curriculum and positioned himself against costly green programs.
Yet today, his government runs large deficits, carries record debt, has embraced elements of the green agenda, and allows DEI and gender-based programming to go largely unchecked, in some cases even promoting it. Why is Doug Ford today not the same leader he was in 2018? Why do you think he changed?
Matthew Spoke: I can only speculate. I think Doug Ford believes he’s a conservative, but if you asked him to define conservatism, I don’t think he could. In his mind, it’s more a style of governing than a set of principles or ideas. He often comes across as conservative rhetorically, but there’s little follow-through. Once policy implementation becomes unpopular, he pulls back. Ultimately, Doug Ford is motivated by popularity, not ideas. Most of the policies I described require risk-taking. They’re new approaches, and people will disagree loudly. That risks popularity, and Ford doesn’t take those risks.
There’s also the issue of lobbyists. Once in office, with access to power and money, principles get deprioritized. Policy decisions seem to be made based on which lobbyist you hire and how connected they are, rather than on conservative ideas. I don’t think anyone could articulate this government’s agenda. They react to issues in the media rather than laying out a clear vision. I don’t think that that’s true of everybody in this government. I just think that once you’re a member of a team and the leader and his inner circle are strict about the discipline, the talking points, and the party line, it forces people to shut their mouths. I think there are a lot of frustrated people, even inside that caucus and cabinet, who just can’t say anything without risking their own jobs.
Elie Cantin-Nantel: Some will say Ontario’s problems are largely due to federal Liberals under Trudeau. How much responsibility does Ford have, and how much is on Trudeau or Carney?
Matthew Spoke: The country is not heading in the right direction. Economic data shows GDP growth is flat or negative per capita. Housing and cost of living are worse. Much of that is on the federal Liberal government.
But during most of that decade, when Ford was Premier, it was easy for him to point the finger, housing, crime, the economy, temporary foreign workers, it was always Ottawa’s fault. Or he blamed the Bank of Canada. There’s some truth to that, but now Trudeau is gone. Trudeau was a very good punching bag. Now, though, people are going to be looking for where to lay that frustration, and I think increasingly it’s going to start showing up provincially. It won’t be good enough for the Premier to say housing starts aren’t happening because interest rates are too high. Ontario is performing worse than the rest of the country, and the rest of the country has the same interest rates. So at some point, you have to look in the mirror and ask: What are we not doing? What have we done wrong?
Elie Cantin-Nantel: Responding to your project, Doug Ford has accused you of being a “right wing radical group that wants to go after me.” Kory Tenycke, one of Ford’s top advisors, told CBC your project is a small thing “far outside the mainstream of the party” and “far outside the mainstream of the conservative voter coalition.” Melanie Paradis, a veteran Conservative campaigner, said you’re chasing “an impossible standard of conservatism that no politician in Canada could meet.” What do you say to these criticisms?
Matthew Spoke: My only response is that we haven’t seen anyone criticize our ideas, only how we’re putting them forward. ‘Why are you not doing this inside the party tent? Why are you sniping at the sitting Premier and creating the perception that there is weakness in the conservative movement, because this is only going to benefit the Ontario Liberals in the next election?’ But we haven’t seen people actually take issue with what we’re talking about. We’re not creating a purity test. Leaders can either follow public opinion or try to change hearts and minds. Pierre Poilievre is an example: he made housing and immigration central issues when no one else was talking about them. Leaders need to take risks to improve things. We were not talking about immigration in this country until Poilievre started raising it. These are political risks, but if you’re not willing to take risks as a leader, I don’t know how we can ever expect to improve things.
If you look individually at the ideas we’ve laid out, I don’t know how you can call any of them radical, especially when we can point to examples in Canada where these ideas are already being tested and implemented. Is it really so radical when it is already happening in British Columbia, Quebec, or Alberta? I don’t buy it.
What we’ve seen, and frankly it is surprising, is that instead of being ignored, we actually got more attention than expected. I thought the most obvious outcome of publishing a bunch of ideas would be that nobody cared. Instead, folks close to the party and the Premier seem offended that we would challenge them in public, or challenge their ideas.
Elie Cantin-Nantel: Doug Ford is often described as the most successful conservative politician in the country. He has won three consecutive majority governments, while the federal Conservatives have lost four consecutive elections. His supporters argue that federal Conservatives should copy his strategy rather than criticize it. What do you say to that?
Matthew Spoke: Doug Ford is a unique generational political talent. I think he is an incredible retail politician. His style is what makes him popular. He speaks plainly, he is jovial, he apologizes frequently, and he likes to make friends before he makes enemies. Those are all good characteristics of a political leader. But if you do not know why you want to govern and what you want to accomplish, then electoral success is irrelevant. We have been asked this question: if we can never win, then we can never implement ideas. My response is that if you do win and never implement those ideas, then what was the point?
What is often missing is that we overemphasize political leaders who can keep getting re-elected, particularly among conservatives in this country. The way I see Canada and Ontario is that, broadly speaking, Liberal policy dominates over the long term, and conservative governments have a responsibility to come in, undo, fix, and course correct as much as possible in the time they have, knowing that the country will probably return to a Liberal agenda at some point. But if a conservative government does not do that, if it fails to roll back damage or misdirection, then we are just moving in the same direction as the Liberals would have taken us, only more slowly.
So I do not think it is good enough for a Conservative government to simply become more and more Liberal at a slower pace. A Conservative government should balance things back and take us closer to a conservative direction. I would much rather see a political leader win one term, go in, make meaningful structural reforms, and then lose the next election than see a leader win five times in a row and accomplish nothing.
More information about Project Ontario and tickets to the conference can be found at projectontario.ca
This conversation was edited for length and clarity.