Pension Plan, higher taxes on high income earners, and increased fees for cigarettes and airplane fuel, among others. The budget was contingent on NDP support, as the PCs had already indicated that they would vote against it. While NDP leader, Andrea Horwath, had, during the last two budget negotiations in 2012 and 2013, spent some time reviewing the budget and talking to her supporters before revealing how her party would vote, this time she almost immediately announced the NDP would not support the budget, thus sending the province into a general election. The day after the budget was read, Wynne went to the lieutenant governor to dissolve the Legislature and trigger an election, rather than wait for her budget to be voted down on the floor of the Legislature. The timing of the election was peculiar, in that past provincial elections in Ontario were called on a Wednesday and then held four weeks later on a Thursday. However, because Horwath announced on a Friday that she would not be supporting Wynne's budget, the writs were officially dropped on the following Wednesday and the election would not be for five weeks because of a Jewish holiday on the fourth Thursday. The election was called for Thursday, June 12, 2014, resulting in a longer campaign than in the past. While pundits had predicted the Ontario election to be a wild card three-way race between the Liberals, PCs and NDP, the first two weeks of the campaign saw the polls stabilize into a narrow two-party race between Wynne's Liberals and Tim Hudak's PCs, with the NDP falling into a distant third. The first public poll of the campaign, conducted by Forum Research, showed the PCs ahead in the popular vote, but the Liberals likely on track to retain a minority government. Wynne ran a fairly controversy-free campaign, although her performance in the televised leaders' debate on June 3 was criticized by pundits as being weak and she was on the defensive for many of the scandals that had plagued her predecessor, Dalton McGuinty. The NDP's slow start and public internal rift over the party's decision to reject Wynne's budget coupled with the unpopularity of Hudak's 100,000 job cut pledge helped Wynne throughout the campaign. She began to eat away at the NDP's traditional left-wing support, especially in and around Toronto, and the controversies over some of Hudak's economic policies hurt him among centrist