Ontario is going to the polls next week with a year remaining in the Ford government’s present term; voters don’t generally like premature elections unless there is a good reason for them. Counterintuitively, the country did reelect Justin Trudeau in a premature election in 2021 on the basis of his handling of the Covid pandemic, which was in fact absurdly overreactive, authoritarian, and grossly expensive. He was assisted by the fact that the official opposition’s position was that they would establish a royal commission to evaluate the official reaction to the pandemic instead of coming out slugging and making the government pay at the polls for its poorly thought-out and executed response to the public health crisis. The current Ontario election is later in the mandate than the 2021 federal election was and the reason for the election call is to give Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government a strong mandate to deal with his province’s response to trade and related challenges arising from the United States government’s threat of sharply increased tariffs.