Bonnie Crombie Must Resign Now

On The Liberal Campaign That Failed

“When I looked at entering politics in a more serious way, the Liberal Party best combines the values of seriousness, competence, fairness, compassion, honesty and integrity, and those are core values you need to hold on to, the core values you need to build upon.”

It was two years ago tomorrow that I got to speak with Nate Erskine-Smith as he trial ballooned his run for OLP leader. I would say I interviewed him for the site, but it was hardly an interview - I asked three policy questions, ran the transcript as an article, and spent more time talking about baseball and John Prine and the Leafs than any policy questions. I wanted to get a sense of the man who was thinking of running, confident that policy questions were in more than capable hands. But one of the few I did actually ask was about why the Ontario Liberals were his preferred progressive vehicle, and I’ve thought a lot about this portion of Nate’s answer since he told me it.

Bonnie Crombie has failed catastrophically tonight, failing at her first goal of winning the next election and then failing at her second goal of 30 seats, as articulated in that Toronto Star profile in December, and now failing to be official opposition. Bonnie’s entire leadership was premised around the idea that she could win, that she had the right combination of experience, name recognition, and ideological placement to win. She has failed, through a combination of arrogance, petulance, lies, and incompetence. She has hired badly, she believed her own hype, and she has allowed the PCs to advance in their own marginal seats, where she was supposed to be strong.

She was supposed to be a leader who could reconnect with the centre that had been abandoned, but instead the PCs have kept the centre anyways. Crombie didn’t run in the Milton byelection allegedly because being in the Legislature wouldn’t be helpful, but staying outside of it didn’t end with her doing more events or meeting more people. She dashed from policy to policy without concern for coherence, failed to articulate a sense of self that had any continuity in it, ignored and waved away signs that what she was doing wasn’t working, and now we’re here.

Nothing Bonnie Crombie has said in the 453 days of her leadership came close to being a coherent, concise, and honest reflection of who they are and what they’re in politics to achieve as what Nate said to me two years ago. Nothing, I suspect, because she doesn’t know. The Ontario Liberal Party is still on life support right now, and the culprit is the leader, who was promised a bill of goods by her advisers and then sold us all one. And to understand just how much damage Bonnie Crombie has done to the Ontario Liberal Party, we have to go through these last two years, if only so we never let our party be taken advantage of by the vain and selfish again.

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It was exceedingly clear from January of 2023 onwards that the elites of the Ontario Liberals were trying to find a star candidate for leader. The Draft Mike Schreiner letter, which is still one of the most offensive propositions in modern politics, was an effort by the party’s past to influence the party when their influence is responsible for us being in this space. The Ontario Liberal Party’s original sin was not getting rid of Wynne in 2016, when they lost the Scarborough-Rouge River byelection, called two more byelections for the fall, treated a 14% swing against them in Vanier like it was a victory, and then held on against all sense. That moment was failure from the party elites.

Those elites then got their choice in 2020, and then Del Duca failed and only gained one seat and at no point did any of the elites of this party think they might be the problem. So when Schreiner turned them down, they want star hunting some more, offering Bonnie Crombie a deal that was too good to be true. At the time, the rumours were that she was told she would be essentially coronated, which the party was certainly willing to enable on some level. Key decisions - like punting all debates until after the registration deadline, allowing one single polling place per riding and requiring in person voting, and restricting voting to one single day per riding - were all made to protect her. And she nearly lost.

Leadership debates proved difficult for her, as her propensity for notes didn’t play well in the more cut and thrust nature of a debate. She found herself routinely flailing to answer questions she wasn’t prepared for, and she never showed a willingness to engage with her record as Mayor of Mississauga on Housing - a record that was plainly disastrous. Her decision to pivot late to a YIMBY housing position probably won her the race, because it undercut a key attack of Nate Erskine-Smith’s, but her record as Mayor was never dealt with.

Her campaign showed from an early point that it wasn’t running well when she decided to turn an eminently reasonable point of Nate’s - that this rebuild is a two election rebuild and that he is a candidate of generational change - into evidence of his sexism. It was an utterly bad faith attack, and one that showed that Crombie had little capacity to engage in either good faith or in good strategic form to legitimate concerns about her.

Eventually she won, immediately set about a fundraising goal she was able to say she achieved, ripped up the party’s support for a carbon price, and mostly wasted the next six months. The Liberals didn’t air any ads while Crombie was defined as a tax and spend Liberal and a Trudeau supporter despite that big post-leadership victory fundraising haul, they lost the Milton byelection and suffered a swing against them in the seat, and then did nothing. They made a bad bet on beer liberalization by making their opposition to the policy a big talking point despite the fact nobody cared, and then went away for a while.

They tried to relaunch her leadership at Convention but made the story of the weekend an utterly clumsy attempt to get rid of an automatic leadership review if she lost that ended up being walked back. They eventually did relaunch her with a Leader’s Dinner speech that to my knowledge was never released publicly and that I’ve certainly never seen, but botched that by relaunching in December when nobody cared about politics. They released a tax cut at some point that’s fine and a doctors policy that’s pretty good too but it’s all just varying shades of meh.

The platform is whatever, beyond the big announcements. We decided to announce 90 new schools with the platform, instead of as part of a specific announcement. The rest of the education policy, which emphasizes investment into curriculum and policy over personnel and a reprioritization of safe, well resourced classrooms is not something that will be missed by educators, or those in their orbit. In many ways it was, as was the rest of her offer, a reflection of her leadership, and her vision for the party. Unambitious, uninspiring, and demonstrated a clear lack of the necessary self reflection which should have come after her narrow win.

The lack of ambition can be defended as a measure of what she wanted to be - a more moderate, centrist leader - but that is misleading. The reason is, that’s not who Crombie has been. If Crombie had been a clear and consistent advocate for a set of beliefs - whatever those beliefs were - this campaign would have at least told us something about what works and what doesn’t. This leadership has been a disaster in how inconsistent it is, lacking a throughline or any connective tissue between ideas.

The decision to hire Tom Allison was a disaster. The Milton byelection, where the Liberals suffered a swing against in a key marginal seat, should never have happened. Those in the inner circle who were subsequent shuffled down or out should never have been there, but it is a testament to Crombie’s terrible political instincts they were.

Crombie, per sources, once floated the idea of flying the Ontario Liberal Caucus to the Hamptons for her first caucus retreat, an idea so insane it had to be immediately rejected. That she didn’t understand the optics of that was a horrifying sign early in her leadership that she was unserious. Her decision not to run in Milton around the same time was spun as an opportunity to allow her to spend more time around the province, but it was political cowardice out of fear she’d lose. It was also expensive cowardice, from a leader who by virtue of not having a seat and not running and winning Milton, needed to take a considerable party salary at a time when a lot of people had to step up and do the actual hard work for free or for nominal pay.

In December 2023, the Liberals raised $1.2M, a sign that Crombie’s fundraising prowess was a boon to the party. In the next two fiscal quarters, they didn’t break a million either time. At that time the PCs were slaughtering them on the air during the meatiest part of the sports schedule, and the Liberals never hit back. Impressions of Crombie hardened because the Liberals didn’t have the money to attack. For a leader who allegedly raised $1.2M in a month to fail to raise that much in either Q1 or Q2 should have been a disaster. That Q2 number of $954k included the proceeds from a cocktail reception with Mark Carney in Toronto, and yet it was still less than robust. This weakness was a key talking point of Crombie, that she could raise the money to fight. That the party was unable to compete is not an act of God, but a result of her failures.

Her obsession with Ontario Place and the Science Centre was an absurdity that never made any sense. There was never any compelling data that it was an issue that moved votes, and as much as I tried to care about it I couldn’t. It’s even worse given that we didn’t even win Eglinton Lawrence, in addition to the opportunity cost of spending so much time and effort on that instead of broader issues that affect far more Ontarians.

That opportunity cost was born out in the summer of nothingness. There was no ambition, there was no strategy, there was nothing happening for months. Efforts to get the leadership to do events, do a tour, or make announcements were rebuffed. The whole argument that she didn’t run in Milton was shot to bits by the lack of publicity and messaging in the summer months.

If you want to be charitable to the Liberals, the circumstances of the election - a PCPO riding high on the back of Trump’s tariff threats and Ford’s Captain Canada routine - were not good for them. In a sense, it’s true, and I would say that there is a reasonable standard to hold them to below that of Bonnie’s one term win pledge. That said, we knew the Trump tariffs were announced when the bulk of the reporting into the 25 gains stuff was put into the Star profile, so there’s only so much leniency you get.

There’s also the Carney of it all. It is factually accurate to say that Crombie did better tonight in seats and votes than she was polling four weeks ago. That’s true, and a key argument for the idea she deserves another go. The problem is, the Federal Liberals have as well. Is Crombie polling better because of her campaign, which has been marred by fuckup and scandal, or because Justin Trudeau is gone now and the boat anchor around the Liberals is gone?

What those inside the party want us to believe is that it’s because of Crombie’s campaign and their work, because the people who put in long hours and hard work to advance their beliefs want to believe it is worth something. But them wanting it to be the case doesn’t mean it’s true. This is as likely a campaign surge in spite of Crombie as it is one because of her.

The honest truth is that Crombie has flipped less than 10 PC seats red. That is an unacceptably low number given what Crombie said she could do. They were talking about 25 gains, mostly from the PCs, and now that we’re here that number is 6, as of publishing. The only thing that has changed is now Crombie has failed and people are trying to maintain their positions.

If you had told people this result in December, or October, or July, or March, or any point in the 453 days since Crombie took over, nobody would have viewed this result as acceptable. In people’s hearts, they have to know this isn’t acceptable. But now we’re here, and for reasons of personal self-interest, feigned ignorance of that basic truth, or sheer idiocy they’re pretending this is acceptable. It’s not. She couldn’t even win her own fucking seat.

Bonnie campaigned on the idea that the Liberal Party was still the institution that we all want to believe it is, this venerable institution that should be in high office and is merely suffering from an aberration. That was why she said repeatedly we could go third to first. She was offended at Nate saying the truth, that this was a two election proposition, for that reason. Now she’s trying to survive by claiming to have exceeded a bar she strenuously opposed lowering to this point. The problem for Crombie and her defenders is that you can’t claim you’ve done the best you could have with this campaign.

The candidate vetting crises were just unacceptable - former Pierre Poilievre nomination candidates, misogynists, and whatever the fuck the Oshawa candidate was - and served as a distraction for the a crucial week of the campaign. Before the chorus of “we were planning for a spring election” comes, the second Chrystia Freeland resigned, it was obvious this would be when Ford called an election, given his whole reason for going was getting it in before Trudeau was gone. And before you think that’s revisionism, I wrote it at the time.

The debate performance was pretty bad, too - a stilted performance that exemplified all of her troubles in that format in the leadership race. It was fine on some level - she got through the lines well enough - but as a holistic performance it wasn’t inspiring. Against a Premier as all encompassingly terrible as Doug Ford, we needed a stellar performance. And we got a mediocre one, emblematic of the campaign as a whole.

Bonnie’s only case for staying as leader is that she deserves every benefit of the doubt despite loudly proclaiming she would never need it. Her staying would be now asking for the good faith of her opponents when they have the upper hand, despite slandering her opponent in bad faith as a sexist to win the job. She is asking for something she hasn’t earned.

We need a leader who can leverage social media and earned media to create a sense of momentum and forward progress to defeat Doug Ford. We need a candidate who can be spontaneous, eloquent, honest, and reflective to defeat Doug Ford. We need a leader who will admit their flaws and their failures instead of pretending they haven’t held radically different positions. We need a leader who is honest with the party, and with the province. We need better.

I don’t know if we deserve better, because fundamentally this is on a lot of people. This pathetic, horrible result has made it harder for us to dislodge a bad government and to restore Ontario to its best days. I will never accept that this is good enough, because it’s not. Bonnie Crombie cannot be the future, having failed so clearly in the present. Her leadership has been marred not by her successes, but the dogs that never hunted.

We stuck an announcement on building 90 new schools in the platform instead of doing events every day for a week in communities that needed them. Our climate policy is to build some transit, widen some highways in congested areas, and come up with a Made In Ontario policy to replace the Carbon Tax. That’s it. Doug Ford runs Ontario like a Temu Tony Soprano, and the platform is silent on any form of proactive anti-corruption measures.

Christine Elliott is now lobbying for a private health care company after being Deputy Premier and Health Minister, and we didn’t think that banning former elected officials from lobbying for 5 years, up from the current 12 months, would be smart? No value in making some form of standing commission into corruption with a broad remit and powers part of the platform? If you wanted a way to show distance from McGuinty and Wynne that would have helped.

One of Bonnie’s attack lines has been that Doug Ford is spending more than ever and getting less and less for it in terms of services. It’s true! There is lip service given to the idea of looking for efficiencies to pay for services, but no focus on it. Instead of making the progressive case for a tri-partisan Commission Of Audit, they stuck some efficiency reviews in the platform and let the NDP call it DOGE-lite.

This would be unfathomable if it wasn’t so predictable. Bonnie Crombie showed us in 2023 she was the wrong person to lead our party, and somehow underperformed even the lowered bars of expectations tonight. It is a dishonour to all of us that we let her win. The failure that was inevitable the moment she won has happened, and now she must depart. She has done enough damage to this party, and to this province. May it be her epitaph that she enabled whatever horrors come in Ford’s next term.