Bonnie’s Disgraceful Selfishness

On Oshawa, Self-Interest, And What Happens Next

Why did it take Bonnie Crombie from Monday to Friday to drop a Liberal candidate who celebrated the killing of a Canadian citizen and called out Justin Trudeau as gay for blaming the Indian government for that killing?

Let’s rephrase that, and add another fact. It took Bonnie Crombie till Day 5 of a controversy and it needed multiple candidates and her former leadership rival turned Federal Housing Minister to publicly call on her before she dropped him. Oh, and Bonnie Crombie is running in a majority non-white seat that has a significant Indian population and is 6:1 Hindu to Sikh.

Now, to be clear, I have no idea whether or not crass Mississauga politics are the reason Crombie delayed so long. I’m quite sure that if I asked anybody in Crombie’s orbit they would strenuously deny it, so let’s pretend I asked and they denied it. I’m not sure it’s a good thing if it sincerely wasn’t about Mississauga, because it would leave a question that’s even harder to answer, but still.

What is fascinating about this Liberal leadership is how much of it is utterly incompetent, and yet we’re expected to believe that the obvious answer isn’t the right one. In this case, the Occam’s razor answer is Bonnie Crombie put winning her seat above her principles or the best interests of the party or province. Maybe that’s not true. But it probably is.

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If Crombie didn’t keep the Oshawa candidate from Monday to Friday because she wanted to signal to her Indian voters in Mississauga East Cooksville that she isn’t as hostile to India and to Modi as the Federal Liberals, why did she then? Is she too dumb to know that the Liberals can’t win Oshawa, and that actually the Liberal vote collapsing in Oshawa would be good for driving down the PC vote total? Does she want to be Opposition at all costs that she wants the NDP to lose seats like Oshawa, where the fight is between the NDP and the PCs?

None of these are good answers for Crombie, but those are the other possibilities from this. Was she just so inexperienced with party politics to know that these sorts of disendorsements after the close of nominations happen all the time - as they did in Burnaby North-Seymour with the CPC in 2019, Victoria with the LPC in 2015, and I’m sure a bunch of other examples I’m forgetting about. It’s a normal bit of the political fermerment, an oddity that makes modelling the next election harder because of the “incorrect” baseline and is the moment most people in our line of work remember it. (Or I’m just really model-pilled.)

But none of those answers are really acceptable if you’re Crombie. You can’t admit that you want Opposition even if it means Ford wins more seats, you definitely can’t admit you’re that inexperienced with this shit that you just dithered for no reason, and if you admit you thought you could actually win Oshawa you look naive - and you’d open yourself up to the idea that you want this guy in Queen’s Park, which you really shouldn’t. None of those are good for the party.

So is it about self interest? Probably, because this is what happens at this stage of a losing campaign. Crombie has been in a shitstorm this weekend about Hazel McCallion, which is the kind of eyerolling nonsense that makes everybody else in this province hate Mississauga, but Crombie had a better rapid response to Hazel’s kid putting out a statement and Patrick Brown ratfucking than they did for their own candidate calling Trudeau gay for standing for citizens of this country. They can do good politics, when they want to - which makes their lack of interest in playing good politics in the Oshawa case even more curious.

The truth is that Bonnie Crombie doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. Her leadership was premised on the idea she could win. She projects for 21 seats right now, and that’s with generous assumptions about her value in the city of Mississauga. (Like, we’re a 3x multiplier on the projected Liberal swing in Mississauga ridings, which is probably excessive and going to overstate the OLP. Under “normal” conditions - if I rewrote those seats to be treated like outposts of the fake city of South Brampton, we’re talking 18 seats for the OLP, not 21.) Her leadership is flailing, and so the attention focuses back to Mississauga.

When she fails to win this election or to force a Hung Parliament, there will be a fairly concentrated effort to force Crombie out. The kinds of results we’re talking about - low 20s/high teens of seats - is not enough to justify her staying in the job. If she gets my projected result - 21 seats, ~30% of the vote, clearly Opposition - and she wins her seat, she’ll try and keep her job. Which is why it’s so important to win her seat.

If this reads as overly cynical, Bonnie Crombie just took 100 hours to get rid of a candidate who thinks murdering Canadian citizens is hunky dory as long as those citizens have airquotes “bad” opinions and thinks calling Justin Trudeau gay is a sick burn. She’s either recklessly incompetent, significantly illiberal, or extremely cynical herself. The argument for Crombie is that she’s a leader worthy of this province. She couldn’t get rid of this asshole until Day 5. That’s either evidence she literally can’t run this province, or she could have and chose not to for reasons, proof that she shouldn’t.

Years ago, I remember reading a review of some book - I want to say of a controversial Lennon biography? - where the reviewer was talking about judging the veracity of some of the big claims in the book, and they wrote something to the effect of “if I can’t trust the little stuff is right, why would I trust the big claims?” (It was a Lennon biography, because the small thing the reviewer was harping on was multiple spellings of Holden Caulfield’s name in a span of paragraphs. In other news it took me 15 minutes to find my wallet last night) In a lot of ways, that’s Crombie’s current dilemma. She doesn’t have the goodwill with either the province or the party to be this sloppy or this cynical.

When Crombie announced her list of Mississauga endorsements, she didn’t include the Liberal name or branding, which is odd if you’re trying to promote the party. Presumably the endorsements are endorsements of the whole Liberal slate, not that anybody would know that of course. It would be nice if the party was pushing the endorsements of popular electeds everywhere, instead of just when it helps Bonnie. But we don’t care about everybody else, after all.

I was coy earlier, when I used the passive voice to say there will be an effort to get Crombie out if the results are bad. That charge will be led in the pages of this site if she doesn’t win 30 seats. I’m not letting her stick around with a bad result because this campaign has been a moral disgrace and a political failure. There’s been no offer to the working class, lies about Crombie’s record, and a trail of unfulfilled promises from 2023. It’s not good enough. That it took 100 hours to dump a homophobic bigot who believes murdering certain Canadians is good and that the likeliest reason why is Bonnie’s self interest is pathetic, and emblematic of her leadership‘s catastrophic, and frankly disgraceful, failures. It’s almost bad enough to stop me voting for her. Almost.