With just days before Ontario’s provincial election campaign, the New Democratic Party (NDP) has surged from third to first place, raising the serious possibility that Canada’s social democratic party could win control over the country’s largest province.

Though an impressive feat, the social democratic party’s gains are not completely of their own making. Both partisans and election analysts estimated there was a path to NDP victory given voter exhaustion with fifteen years of Liberal rule and a desire to stop Doug Ford’s right-wing Progressive Conservatives (PCs).

While some of the NDP’s support is soft, the NDP has not shied away from promoting a platform that features a major expansion of the public health-care system that will finally offer pharmacare and dental care. The party is also promising to go further than the Liberals recently have on progressive labor law reform and child care. And the NDP is promising to pay for all of its new spending by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations.