Ontario political parties are going full tilt in Milton, fighting for the soul of the GTA in Thursday's byelection.
Not one for tempering expectations, Premier Doug Ford proclaimed at a press conference this week that he's confident that his candidate, Zee Hamid, will win.
"I am so blessed to have a candidate like Zee in Milton," he said, adding that he's never before been door-knocking with a candidate that everyone recognizes.
"I'm confident that he's going to be successful on Thursday and he'll have a seat down at Queen's Park representing the people."
The PCs have deployed a fleet of Ontario cabinet ministers, MPPs and staffers to knock on doors.
But heavy-hitter Liberals at both the federal and provincial levels have also been pounding the pavement for their candidate, Galen Naidoo Harris. They're getting some help from education union locals that are boasting they have the power to flip the riding from Conservative control.
Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie openly considered running in the riding herself before tapping Galen Naidoo Harris, a federal Liberal staffer and the son of former cabinet minister and Halton MPP Indira Naidoo Harris.
The Progressive Conservatives' Hamid, a former city councillor and mayoral candidate, used to be a Liberal. He sought a federal Liberal nomination in 2015 and donated to Liberals at both the federal and provincial levels — including Indira Naidoo Harris in 2014.
While the riding appears to be a dogfight between those two parties, there is a full slate of candidates. The NDP is running Edie Strachan, a former regional vice president of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, and the Green party has tapped Kyle Hutton, a loyal party activist.
The 413
The issue that most sharply divides the parties is the Ford government's plan to build the 413, also known as the GTA West Highway. It is planned to start at the 401 east of Milton, curve north and east around Brampton and meet the 400 north of Vaughan.
It's a signature Progressive Conservative project in a suite of measures to help drivers, and Ford announced Tuesday that construction will begin next year.
Hamid has made the highway a key feature of his campaign. He wasn't always in favour of the project but came onside before he switched his allegiance to the PCs.
In March of 2021, Hamid voted in favour of a motion by Halton Regional Council to reaffirm its opposition to the highway. Three months later, he voted against a similar motion when it was before the town council, arguing that he expected congestion to pick up again after the pandemic.
"The rumours of the death of vehicular traffic on highways are highly exaggerated," said Hamid at a council meeting that spring.
The former Liberal government cancelled plans for the new highway while in office and Bonnie Crombie's Liberals still oppose it today, warning it will wreak environmental damage through a swath of prime farmland and alleging it's "designed to benefit one group of people: Doug Ford's wealthy insiders, Conservative donors and rich land speculators."
Naidoo Harris has picked up his party's narrative. “The path that they’ve charted for this highway snakes through lands that are owned by developers that are in Doug Ford’s pocket and whose pocket Doug Ford is in," he said at a late-April debate.
Some of those developers donated to Hamid's unsuccessful mayoral campaign in 2022 — something opponents of the highway have noted — but they also donated to Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie that year, and she has said developers' donations have had no impact on her positions.
At the same debate, the NDP's Strachan said she had not formed a position on the highway yet. Her party's position is the government should remove tolls on the 407 for trucks, to shift traffic off the 401.
The Green's Hutton opposes the project.
The quarry
In a statement to The Trillium, Naidoo Harris connected the 413 to another contentious project in the riding: the Campbellville Quarry, noting that the owners of the quarry have donated generously to the Conservatives, as have developers who stand to benefit from the 413.
"Both projects pose a threat to the environment, as Highway 413 would endanger nearby provincially significant wetlands and the Campbellville Quarry has the potential to poison the groundwater upon which 1 in 4 Miltonians rely," he said.
But on the quarry, all of the parties are aligned.
Hamid has promised that the PC government will stop the quarry after its environmental assessment is finished, saying the premier personally told him so.
Ford backed his candidate and said this week he will stop the quarry if the people of Milton don't want it, echoing a promise he first made in 2020. Hamid's opponents from all three major parties are arguing that if Ford intended to stop it, he would have already.
The keffiyeh
While the candidates pounded pavement in Milton, a controversy erupted at Queen's Park over the keffiyeh — the traditional Arab scarf associated with the Palestinian cause. The Speaker of the House — a Conservative MPP, but independent from the government — banned the keffiyeh from the building, deeming that it had become a political symbol in light of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
NDP Leader Marit Stiles asked him to reverse it, and then Ford and Crombie echoed her call to lift the ban.
While that earned Ford praise from Hamid, it triggered a revolt among members of the PC caucus who voted against NDP attempts to overturn the ban.
Naidoo Harris campaigned on the controversy, donning a keffiyeh and pinning the ban on the Ford government rather than the independent speaker and a PC MPP who went rogue, inspiring others to join her.
Naidoo Harris promised to be the voice of the riding's diversity, and its substantial Muslim population, at Queen's Park.
The stakes
A couple of publicly available polls give the Liberals a very slight edge over the Progressive Conservatives in Milton, but with small sample sizes and the uncertainty that comes from traditionally low turnout in byelections, the race is much too close to call.
The race has attracted significant attention as a test case for the 2026 election. The Ontario Liberals elected Crombie, in part, on the belief that she can win GTA ridings like Milton to put her party back into contention for government.
The Liberals picked up two byelection wins last year in Scarborough Guildwood and Kanata—Carleton in hard-fought battles against the PCs.
Milton is up for grabs today because former Ford cabinet minister Parm Gill resigned to run federally for Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives.
But Milton is not the only riding holding a provincial byelection on Thursday. Residents of Lambton-Kent-Middlesex are also going to the polls, but the rural riding in southwest Ontario is far less likely to flip.
It's been blue since former labour minister Monte McNaughton won the riding in a 2011 byelection. He won the riding by wide margins in 2014, 2018 and 2022. In the latter two contests, he got upwards of 55 per cent of the vote. The NDP candidates were runners-up in each of McNaughton's general election victories. The Liberals didn't get more than 10 per cent of the vote in either 2018 or 2022.
The Tories are running Steve Pinsonneault, a longtime councillor in Chatham-Kent.
The Liberal candidate is Lucan-Biddulph Mayor Cathy Burghardt-Jesson, who also served as warden of Middlesex County.
The NDP’s candidate in the riding is Kathryn Shailer, who spent much of her career in academia.
The Green party candidate is Andraena Tilgner, a respiratory therapist who works in London, Ont., which neighbours the riding.
— With files from Aidan Chamandy
