York experts available for Ontario election commentary

Ontarians are heading to the polls today after a quick but heated campaign triggered by Premier Doug Ford’s call for a snap election. With tensions rising over U.S. tariffs, Ford is seeking a strong mandate to take on President Donald Trump. While trade and the economy have been front and center, the newly led NDP and Liberals have been bringing focus back to traditional issues like health care.

York University experts are available to weigh in on the election results and key issues:

Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department of Politics Dennis Pilon is available to comment on election results from the perspective of voters, party strategies, party branding, voter responses, election administration, and electoral strategy. His research has focused on issues of democratization and democratic reform in Western countries. In 2007 he published The Politics of Voting: Reforming Canada’s Electoral System, in 2009 co-edited British Columbia Politics and Government, and in 2013 published Wrestling with Democracy: Voting Systems as Politics in the Twentieth Century West.

Pilon has acted as a consultant on election issues for legal firms, political parties, trade unions, community groups, and the Auditor General of Canada. He is a member of the National Advisory Board of Fair Vote Canada, a citizens’ group focused on gaining more proportional methods of voting for Canadian elections, and sits on the editorial board of Canadian Dimension magazine.

Zachary Spicer, associate Professor at York University’s School of Public Policy and Administration, is available to comment on election results. Spicer serves as head of New College and is a faculty affiliate with the City Institute and the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies. Outside of York, Spicer is a member of the Digital Mobilities Lab, an associate at the University of Toronto’s Innovation Policy Lab, a member of the Laboratory on Local Elections, a member of the study team for the Electronic Elections Project, and an affiliate member of the Laurier Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy at Wilfrid Laurier University. He has served as a consultant or advisor to dozens of governments and professional associations across Canada, including working as a senior policy advisor for the province of Ontario with both the Ministry of Transportation and the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing.

Professor in the School of Administrative Studies Richard Leblanc is available to comment on what the election means for Premier Doug Ford’s mandate, and the certainty of planning by Ontario businesses. He can also comment on Ford’s toolbox of potential targeted reciprocal tariffs against U.S. industries and businesses as well as the possibility of aid packages by the Government of Ontario to businesses and workers, pending U.S. tariffs, and conditions those packages should have. He can also speak to considerations for Ontario-based boards of directors of companies when responding to imposed U.S. tariffs.

An expert in corporate governance and ethics, Leblanc’s commentary is grounded in his extensive research and work with boards of directors and the training and development of leaders and managers.  An award-winning educator, lawyer, consultant and author, he has guided leaders of organizations through his teaching, writing and direct consultation.

Fred Lazar, associate professor of economics, was indirectly involved in the original Canada-U.S. free trade negotiations. He is available to speak on tariffs, the economic impact a trade war could have on Canada’s economy, and the threat of recession. An expert on international trade agreements, Lazar wrote a book on the Tokyo Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the GATT), The New Protectionism: Non-Tariff Barriers and Their Effects on Canada, in the early 1980s. He can provide context for why Canada pursued a free trade deal with the U.S. in the first place, the negotiation strategies involved in brokering it, as well as the U.S. Constitution, which makes domestic legislation supreme to any international agreements where there might be a conflict, as is the case today.

Pat Armstrong, distinguished research professor in Sociology and fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is available to comment on the key issue of health care in the election. Armstrong held a ten-year  Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (CHSRF)/Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) chair in Health Services and Nursing Research and chaired Women and Health Care Reform, a group funded for over a decade by Health Canada. She was principal investigator of a ten-year study “Reimagining Long-term Residential Care: An International Study of Promising Practices.” Focusing on the fields of social policy, of women, work and health and social services, she has published widely, authoring or co-authoring such books as The Labour Force Crisis in Long-Term Care (2024), Care Homes in a Turbulent Era: Do They Have a Future? (2023), Unpaid Care in Nursing Homes: Flexible Boundaries (2023), The Privatization of Care: The Case of Nursing Homes (2020) and many others.

Distinguished Research Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change Roger Keil is a political scientist working on local, urban and regional politics, with a focus on urban geography and urban studies. He is a founding director of York University’s City Institute (CITY), former York research chair in Global Sub/Urban Studies, and presently a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in their program Humanity’s Urban Future.

Keil’s research areas are urban political ecology, cities and infectious disease and global suburbanization. He led the large international project on “Global Suburbanisms: Governance, Land and Infrastructure in the 21st Century.” Recently, he published a comprehensive collection of core texts by key contributors to the field of urban political ecology, Turning Up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency. Keil is available to comment on urban infrastructure, transportation (including the Highway 401 tunnel expressway), the Greenbelt, planning processes, and municipal-provincial relations.