Covering the Ontario election

We spoke to several alumni to hear about their experiences covering the 2022 Ontario election. 

Joanna Frketich graduated from the School of Journalism in 1998 and is a health reporter with The Hamilton Spectator. 

Frketich focused some of her reporting ahead of the election on health issues that have been brought to the surface as a result of the pandemic. These issues included hospital overcrowding, staffing issues and waitlists for long-term care, and mental health and addiction services. Despite the issues, Frketich says she didn’t think they were necessarily top of mind for people for this election.

“In some cases, health care really is a make it or break it,” said Frketich. “Despite the fact that I think Ontarians care very deeply about health care and the healthcare system, in some elections it's a non-issue, so I sort of felt that was the case in this election.” 

Her work also looked at the Progressive Conservative government’s approach to the health care system. 

“Because of the pandemic, there was not very much focus on that. There was basically, in the election, no discussion of this major overhaul the Conservatives were in the midst of doing,” said Frketich. “In a lot of ways, it’s surprising there wasn’t more focus on these massive changes to the healthcare system.”

Frketich believes the lack of focus on health care could be due to exhaustion from the pandemic and other issues like the cost of living taking priority. 

“I just try as much as I can to give voters the information they need so that they can take some time to think about these issues and what they would like to see going forward.”

Allison Jones graduated from the School of Journalism in 2006 and works as a reporter with The Canadian Press. 

Leading to the election, Jones served as a main writer in The Canadian Press head office, taking advantage of her Queen’s Park experience and also liaising with reporters on the ground. 

“We managed to come out with a pretty impressive and large package of content covering the election, despite having fewer people than we had in previous years,” said Jones.  

One of the main differences she noticed between this election and those of previous years was in covering the Progressive Conservative campaign.

“Last time they were the upstart newcomers and they came forward with a platform of all of these new ideas,” said Jones. “This time it was hard to cover their campaign because to be quite honest, they really were not proposing a lot... the budget itself, flipping through it, it really seemed to me like 90 per cent of it was just regurgitating stuff that they had already done.”

“So that kind of made it difficult I think in terms of framing to voters exactly what the Tories were promising.”

As for the low voter turnout, Jones attributes much of it to the pandemic.

“I think a lot of people in the province have a lot more pressing issues in their day-to-day lives coming out of the pandemic than paying very close attention to provincial politics. So as somebody who pays very, very close attention and read all the platforms from front to back, I think there were some really interesting issues there and I tried to get at those issues in my coverage – but I think that the general public can probably be forgiven for not paying as close attention as maybe they have in previous years, when maybe we’re not just coming out of two or two-and-a-half years of almost every aspect of every single person’s life being completely upended by a global pandemic.” 

Emma McIntosh graduated from the School of Journalism in 2018 and currently works as an Ontario reporter for The Narwal. 

McIntosh notes that The Narwal had a different approach to their election coverage, like looking for gaps in coverage or focusing on places where readers could use an explainer. 

“Instead of spending too much time debating how much energy to focus on things like minority or majority and parties winning, we just also tried to hone in on a few things that our readers would care about, so things like will the Greens win a second seat [and] will our environment critics from the opposition parties retain their seats,” said McIntosh. 

She notes that one of the things that stood out about this year’s election was environmental issues.

“I think since the last federal election, the environment has really taken more of a centre stage than in previous years,” said McIntosh. “It kind of seemed like it would be a trend and this provincial election really bucked that trend. It really seemed like the candidates wanted to talk about it as little as possible.”

In terms of the low voter turnout, McIntosh notes that a reason could be due to a failure on the part of the main opposition parties to present people with a compelling alternative vision. 

“Not many people were particularly inspired to vote and simply saying ‘I'm not Doug Ford’ wasn’t good enough and you could really see that in the split on the left between the Liberal and NDP, which was a super predictable outcome.”