The Supreme Court of Canada has struck down a Ford government law that restricted political advertising by third parties, such as unions, in the year ahead of a scheduled election campaign.
The top court ruled in a 5-4 decision Friday that the law allowed for political parties’ ads to “drown out” those of third-party groups, infringing on citizens' right to meaningfully participate in the democratic process guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
“The information available to voters in Ontario in the year before an election must include the interests, voices and views of different citizens and parties,” reads the majority decision written by Justice Andromache Karakatsanis.
Because the law restricted third-party spending ahead of an election much more severely than that of political parties themselves, it created a “disproportionality that is so marked on its face that it allows political parties to drown out the voices of third parties on political issues from reaching citizens during an entire year of legislative activity,” she wrote.
The law in question is part of Ontario’s Election Finances Act that restricts the amount third parties — any people or groups that aren’t political parties, candidates or riding associations — can spend on political advertising in the year before the fixed date of a provincial campaign.
Political advertising is defined broadly as advertising that promotes or opposes a political party or candidate, as well as advertising on issues that political parties or candidates have taken a position on.
In 2025, third parties’ spending on that kind of advertising would have been limited to $30,168 in any one electoral district and $754,200 in total during the 12-month period before a scheduled election campaign was to begin. However, because Premier Doug Ford triggered the election more than a year early, the limits did not apply.
Nor did the less severe restrictions on political parties themselves. By way of comparison, their advertising would only have been capped in the six-month period right before the election period, at $1.2 million.
This was not challenged in court, nor were the limits on political party and third-party spending during the four-week election campaign.
Now, if the Ford government wants to reinstate some kind of restriction on third-party advertising before scheduled election campaigns begin, it will have to rewrite that section of the law and pass it through the legislature.
There are no immediate plans to do so, according to a spokesperson for the premier.
“Having just finished the election, in which the people gave Premier Ford and our government a strong mandate, this decision has no immediate impact,” said Grace Lee. “We’ll review the decision and determine next steps in due course.”
It’s a victory for a group of Ontario’s unions in a battle they have been waging against the province for years.
In past elections, the unions that brought the case — teachers’ unions and the union-funded Working Families Coalition — were top third-party advertising spenders, producing hard-hitting attack ads targeting Progressive Conservative leaders.
The teachers’ unions have long said that the Ford government passed the tough third-party ads law to target them specifically and silence their criticism of Conservatives, and repeated that at a press conference after their court victory on Friday.
They also said that the law — and the early election call — stopped them from more aggressive advertising ahead of and during the recent campaign.
Two of the teachers’ unions — the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario (ETFO) and the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation (OSSTF) — ran negative campaigns against the PCs during the election period, while the third, the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association (OECTA), did not.
“We spent more time in this election trying to figure out what we were legally allowed to do, as opposed to getting out there and telling the story of what's happening,” said Karen Littlewood, president and CEO of the OSSTF.
The law “was intended to chill that dialog. It was intended to impede that process. So it did have an impact on everything we were doing,” said OECTA president René Jansen in de Wal.
Things have changed for the other applicant in the Charter challenge. The Working Families Coalition did not run ads in the last election, and some of the building trades unions that had paid for its attack ads against previous Progressive Conservative leaders endorsed Doug Ford’s PCs this time.
The group’s former spokesperson, Patrick Dillon, said that when the group first challenged the law, the Ford government was moving forward on “draconian” changes in relation to trades training and licensing. But it walked some of that back and began listening, winning over some of the unions. He credited pressure from the Working Families Coalition for moving the PC party on these issues over the last decade or so.
Dillon said he’s pleased by the court’s decision.
“Especially in today's environment of what's going on in North America, this decision will help people in political power to understand that their job is about what they can do for people, not to people,” he said.
In the court system and in the legislature, the Ford government has said that the law was not about muzzling unions but about protecting Ontario politics from the rise of American-style "dark money"-funded political action committees.
The top court did not address this argument, and the unions rejected it outright.
“This has nothing to do with U.S.-style politics and super PACs,” said ETFO president Karen Brown. “This is about suppressing community voices. Your community groups are coming together who are elevating issues on good public services.”
This was the second Charter violation identified by the courts concerning the same part of the election law.
In June 2021, the Ontario Superior Court found it violated the Charter right to free expression. Rather than appealing that decision, the government passed the law a second time with the Charter’s notwithstanding clause to override that right and keep the law in place in the lead-up to the 2022 election.
The Charter does not allow the notwithstanding clause to be used to override a violation of the democratic right at issue in the more recent challenge.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association intervened in the case to advocate for a broad approach to the right to vote and succeeded in that, said Anaïs Bussières McNicoll, a lawyer and director of the group’s fundamental freedoms program.
“Our intervention also highlighted the structural conflict of interest that legislators are in when they adopt election law because there is a clear potential for partisan self-dealing in those circumstances,” said Bussières McNicoll, adding that the court echoed that argument in the majority opinion when it found that government decisions involving democratic rights must be carefully scrutinized by the court.
The case is a “landmark decision” about how democratic rights are protected by the Charter, and the ruling will be important when other courts evaluate cases that touch on those rights, she said.
The decision was split, with two groups of two judges dissenting from the majority for different reasons.
