Ontarians are heading to the polls today after a quick but heated campaign triggered by Premier Doug Ford鈥檚 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.

91亚色 experts are available to weigh in on the election results and key issues:

Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department of Politics 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鈥檚 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鈥� group focused on gaining more proportional methods of voting for Canadian elections, and sits on the editorial board of Canadian Dimension magazine.

, associate Professor at 91亚色鈥檚 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 91亚色, Spicer is a member of the Digital Mobilities Lab, an associate at the University of Toronto鈥檚 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 is available to comment on what the election means for Premier Doug Ford鈥檚 mandate, and the certainty of planning by Ontario businesses. He can also comment on Ford鈥檚 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鈥檚 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.

, 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鈥檚 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.

, 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聽 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 鈥淩eimagining Long-term Residential Care: An International Study of Promising Practices.鈥� 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 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 91亚色鈥檚 City Institute (CITY), former 91亚色 research chair in Global Sub/Urban Studies, and presently a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in their program Humanity鈥檚 Urban Future.

Keil鈥檚 research areas are urban political ecology, cities and infectious disease and global suburbanization. He led the large international project on 鈥淕lobal Suburbanisms: Governance, Land and Infrastructure in the 21st Century.鈥� 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.

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StudentMoveTO, a collaboration between Toronto鈥檚 four universities to address student transportation needs, found that students in the GTA are spending too much time commuting to and from classes each day.

The findings are the result of a joint survey conducted by the four universities. It is the largest survey of its kind in the region, completed by 15,226 students from OCAD University, Ryerson University, 91亚色 and the University of Toronto. The initiative is the first travel survey in the GTA to effectively capture student travel patterns, offering a window into the transportation challenges university students face.

The study found:

• 1 in 3 respondents or 33 per cent of those who filled out the survey spend two hours or more per day traveling to and from campus.
• On average, it takes students 40 minutes one way to get to campus.
• 1 in 4 students live 20 km or more from school.
• Commuting distance can be one of the factors determining how students pick their courses. Students may group classes together, thus avoiding early morning and late night courses but also affecting whether they avoid taking classes on Mondays and Fridays.

鈥淭he StudentMoveTO survey shows that many students are spending a large portion of their day traveling to and from campus,鈥� said U of T鈥檚 associate professor of geography Matti Siemiatycki, one of the lead researchers on the survey. 鈥淭he average one-way trip to campus takes 40 minutes, with many students making much longer trips. One-third of students spend two hours or more commuting to and from campus.鈥�

The survey, launched in September 2015, found that the more time students spend commuting, the less time they have to engage in campus life and academic and extracurricular activities.

鈥淭ransportation is directly impacting the educational experience of students,鈥� Siemiatycki said. 鈥淭wo-thirds of students with longer commutes 鈥� over an hour each way 鈥� are picking courses that are grouped together to minimize the number of times they have to come to campus per week. They are thus potentially missing out on learning opportunities that occur at times that are not convenient for them. By not coming to campus as frequently, they may also be missing out on the extracurricular activities that enhance the university experience.鈥�

The transportation survey came out of an effort by the presidents of the four universities to partner on joint initiatives aimed at improving the state of the city-region, identifying student mobility as a common concern for their student bodies. The survey was developed by a team of researchers including Siemiatycki, Professors Roger Keil at 91亚色, Raktim Mitra at Ryerson and Isabel Meirelles at OCAD U, and doctoral candidate Chris Harding at the University of Toronto.

Students attending the GTA鈥檚 four universities make up over 184,000 commuters who travel daily to get to and from school, to work, to social activities and back home. Their size alone puts a significant impact on a crowded transportation system, especially since all four universities have a high number of students who live off campus and travel daily to school and jobs. The institutions are also stretched across the region, with both downtown and suburban campuses, and contribute significantly to the urban region as cornerstones of the knowledge economy.

"Toronto鈥檚 universities have larger populations than most mid-size towns and have a significant impact on the urban region鈥檚 economy and daily life,鈥� said 91亚色 Environmental Studies professor .

鈥淭his study will provide universities, transportation agencies and others with evidence to make better infrastructure decisions. It shows that all four universities have common transportation interests but also provides details about the differences in their students鈥� commutes. For example, it found that 91亚色 students have among the higher commute times, with 41 per cent spending two hours or more per day traveling to and from campus. And although there is already high transit mode use at 91亚色, 29 per cent of 91亚色 students said an improvement to transit services would motivate them to change their main travel mode to campus.鈥�

The survey results will be made available to university administrators, faculty, students and city officials to better understand the travel patterns of an important constituency that uses the transportation system daily. The data will help city planners better include the needs of students in their transportation plans and services.

The data can be found online at .

For more information:

91亚色 Media Relations
Janice Walls, wallsj@yorku.ca
416.736.2100 ext. 22101

U of T Media Relations
media.relations@utoronto.ca
416.978.0100

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