Bonnie’s Bike Lane Banality

On The OLP's Nothing Leadership

Be real with me: do you know what Bonnie Crombie thinks about Doug Ford’s plan to strip out bike lanes without municipal consent?

I don’t - because it’s exceedingly clear Crombie doesn’t want us to. A simple search for ”Bonnie Crombie Bike Lanes” spits out a CBC article that doesn’t answer the question, a Brian Lilley column that indirectly quotes her as attacking Ford for wanting to be Mayor and not Premier, and a BikeLawyer blog post that I’m not going to read as the top 3 results.

Recent Abacus polling showed that basically this issue is a wash, if you properly interpret a 5 category poll. (For those even aware of the niche internet scandal around the Star’s write up of this polling, I’m quite certain the Star was to blame for the bad write up.) And yet, Crombie and Stiles have tiptoed around the issue, refusing to take a particularly strong stance against Ford. And I think it’s a huge mistake, especially for Crombie. At a time when the attack on Crombie is that she stands for nothing - that every word out of her mouth is a lie you can’t trust - equivocation and non-sequiturs aren’t the answer.

Bonnie Crombie came out with a tax cut last week that I’m sure polled well. It’s not enough. She needs to stand for something. And right now, nobody knows what that is.

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I’m not going to rehash my objections to the tax cut too much - yes, they only help the top 50% of earners, but Tyler Meredith has made the point publicly that the tax code might not be the best place to help low income Ontarians. I take him at face value, and I feel comfortable with the idea more is coming. (I might have announced the tax cut with whatever more is coming but whatever.) But leading with the tax cut is a choice - and not one that’s particularly reassuring to my wing of the party.

Bonnie’s trying - not unreasonably! - to run away from the idea she is a tax and spend Trudeau Liberal. I get her incentives are to run to the middle. I truly do understand it all. But it’s also not clear that she understands that one of the ways to get into 2nd place is to kill the NDP, and Stiles is giving her every opportunity. Bike lanes are a niche issue that do not matter to most people. However, the people they do matter to are literally the subsection of people that ensure that downtown Toronto elects Federal Liberals and provincial New Democrats. And if the Liberals can flip a handful of those seats, closing the gap to the NDP is much easier.

But more than just the specific value in a Spadina or a St. Paul’s, this is an easy way to stand up to Doug Ford. Doug is unpopular, but he soldiers on at the ballot box because the opposition to him is either silent or ineffectual.  Instead of tiptoeing around this, why is Bonnie not making fun of this ludicrous proposition? Why are we scared? Why aren’t we taking advantage of this?

Here's what she can say, if you want. “Doug Ford is constantly telling Ontarians who need help no. Whether it’s teachers teaching in dilapidated classrooms, nurses seeing patients in rooms with leaking ceilings, or doctors with computers running Windows 97, Doug Ford is constantly saying we don’t have the money for better. But, the second he gets a chance to rip up bike lanes that won’t save anyone any time, suddenly money’s no object. Of course we don’t support this insane idea, and if the Premier really thinks they’ve got $48M lying around there are hundreds of better things they could spend money on.” But instead, we get waffle.

I’ve heard from donors to Bonnie’s leadership campaign that this is an issue, and I know others have heard the same. Crombie is all too often seen as standing for nothing. Rachel Notley was routinely attacked as a member of the Trudeau/Singh coalition or as a radical progressive and she just got 44% of the vote in a province where the NDP and Liberals federally are lucky to break 35% combined. Part of why the PCPO’s attacks on Crombie are as effective as they are is that she’s still a blank canvas. One tax cut proposal doesn’t change that.

What Crombie needs to do is tell us who she is and what she believes. The thing about politics is that most people don’t pay super close attention, but they get a broad sense of a leader and fill in the gaps. There’s a reason people sometimes feel betrayed by promises unfulfilled even when the promise was never made. Joe Biden, for all the talk about how he never said he’d be a one term President, was deemed to be one by the public because that is what they understood from the broad talk of a transitional figure. Crombie isn’t giving us anything to fill in the gaps.

Is she going to meaningfully compete with the NDP for left flank votes, give serious assurances on health care and education capacity and promise clear and credibly higher wage offers to nurses and teachers? I don’t know. I know she’ll talk about unions nicer, and I know she has good candidates behind her (support Tyler Watt in Nepean!), but I don’t know what she’ll do. She’s an enigma, and bike lanes would be a nice, low salience way of signaling who she is. Unless, of course, this is a signal, and she is exactly who those of us who supported Nate thought she was.

I don’t know that Crombie is doing anything particularly terrible, but that’s kind of the fucking problem. She’s not doing anything. She’s stuck in the mid 20s and she’s playing it safe. It’s a milk the clock, run heavy offense while down 20 points. It’s just plainly not good enough. The tax cut’s fine, and I’m sure it polls well enough. People like more money. But a Liberal Party needs to offer more than just a decent tax cut that polls well to win. It needs to show itself to be worth keeping around. And there’s no such urgency or sense of purpose from Crombie.