Overview
Every four years marks a new provincial election cycle in Ontario. Each cycle, registered political parties are forced to contend with how, and through what mediums, they will drive Ontarians to the polls and communicate their political messaging. These considerations are increasingly important as advertisement media shifts and Ontarians’ central concerns evolve from cycle to cycle.
This is not a concern for registered political parties alone, however. Third parties, who are defined under the Ontario Election Finances Act, RSO 1990, c E.7 (“EFA”) as “a person or entity, other than a registered candidate, registered constituency association or registered party” and by the Supreme Court of Canada (“SCC”) more colloquially in Ontario (Attorney General) v. Working Families Coalition (Canada) Inc., 2025 SCC 5 (“Working Families”) as “citizens and groups who aim to provide information to other citizens and draw attention to issues of importance to them”, are also engaged in political advertising.
In Working Families, the core issue was whether the limit on third parties’ spending on political advertising in the year preceding an election period infringes the right to vote protected by s. 3 of the Charter. The impugned provision of the EFA capped third party spending at $600,000 during the 12 months before a provincial election (the “pre-writ” period). This was in stark contrast with the legislature’s $1,000,000 spending limit on the same political advertisements by registered political parties for the six months before the issue of the election writ. The SCC addressed this contrast in considering the following question: is the EFA’s limitation on third party political advertising an infringement on third parties’ democratic rights under s.3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (“Charter”)? The brief answer is yes. This article sets out the SCC majority’s reasons for holding that the third party spending limit in the EFA infringes s. 3 of the Charter, and is not justified under s. 1 because the law is not minimally impairing.