Crombie, Ford, And Why We Need The New Leaf Liberals

On The Need For Change

There isn’t, by basically any metric, a way Doug Ford’s Ontario is going well right now.

Housing starts, despite 225 basis points in Interest Rate cuts from the Bank of Canada, went down 20.2% this year in Q1 compared to the same period last year. We’ve got the third highest unemployment rate in the country, a whopping 7.9% unemployment that’s worse if you’re young and trying to get a foothold anywhere. We’ve spent all of this extra money - $72B in additional debt not even counting 2020 - to make outcomes worse. A government that claimed to care about ending hallway medicine has made the idea of hallway medicine sound downright peachy compared to the Ford-era realities of closed ERs and increasing for-profit, private care.

At a time when the Federal government’s renewed role in the housing market is increasing building everywhere else, things are getting worse here. At a time when we need to be working with Indigenous partners to speed up crucial project, we have a government that is ensuring everything we try and accomplish will spend half a decade in front of the courts. At a time when we need serious people to do a serious job well, we have a Premier and a government that is more focused on being seen to be fighting for Ontarians than he is on actually helping solve any problems.

My deep concern with the election result in February was then, and still is today, motivated solely by the complete and utter hatred I have in my heart for Doug Ford. There is no problem in this province to which four more years of Doug Ford, or whatever lackey eventually replaces him, is the solution. We must do everything to make sure he loses. We must make the Ontario Liberals a party capable of forming government and of doing the serious work we need done to fix the problems of what will be a decade of Ford rule.

Right now, the party is not that. February’s election result was a night of high highs, yes - getting Tyler Watt elected in Nepean was a huge source of happiness, getting to cast a ballot for Karen McCrimmon‘s successful re-election bid made me proud, and returning to party status means we can do more of the work the rejuvenated caucus did against Bill 5. But it was much more a night of bitter disappointments.

The fact that so many good candidates could have won hurts. The fact that we couldn’t get over the line in so many seats hurts. The fact that our leader is still outside the Legislature, and therefore unable to use our great House as a way to build our party, hurts. And that hurt hasn’t diminished in the nearly 4 months since the election.

To accept that 14 seats and the Leader outside the Legislature as acceptable, you have to be willing to accept the unacceptable. We are forced so often by Doug to lower our standards, whether by accepting blatant corruption and nefarious practices for friends and donors, by so rarely meeting the House (which is now gone until mid-October for summer), and by lowering the quality of public services to the point where class size and health care wait lists that would have been scandals 5 years ago are seen as par for the course. We don’t need to accept less from Crombie too.

It’s why I am so proud to call myself a supporter of the New Leaf Liberals, a group of party members who want to bring our party back to where it belongs - at the forefront of this province’s politics. We need a Liberal Party that is fit for purpose, that is able to protect our values and project the kind of strength that politics demands. We need to expect more of our leaders, not less - and we cannot let Bonnie Crombie and her allies make us believe what happened in February was good enough. Because it wasn’t.

When Crombie ran for leader, she promised she’d win the next election. That promise suddenly went away after we went backwards in the 2024 Milton byelection, an inauspicious performance in a seat we only lost by 4% in 2022 that signalled weakness in key suburban areas. Then that became a goal to gain 25 seats at the end of the year - after Donald Trump had won the election - as laid out in the Toronto Star. Yes, the same Star piece where she admits she “thought it would be easier. It’s been tough.”

Crombie ran as the leader who would ensure we had the money to be competitive with the PCs. The PCs blitzed the airwaves with ads for all of spring 2024, defining Crombie before she could define herself, in large part because we couldn’t answer because we didn’t have the money. That weakness led to a position where Doug Ford was openly musing about a snap election as early as September 2024.

I understand the argument that Trump gave Ford a new lease on life, I do - but one of the ways we could have stopped an early election was by being closer to the PCs before the Trump-created rally the flag moment of earlier this year. We weren’t. Had we hit the ground running it’s entirely possible Ford wouldn’t have been comfortable calling that election, and therefore given us the extra year to message against his failing, decrepit government.

If we accept that 14 seats and the leader is outside the House, then we are letting Bonnie do to our party what Doug is doing to our province. We need to be raising the bar and doing everything in our power to make sure we give Ontarians the Ontario Liberal Party that they deserve and need, not one that consoles its failures with platitudes about vote share in a seats system.

We need to hold the Liberal Party to a standard. We nearly failed to do that with the Federal Party, and with the benefit of hindsight I think it’s impossible to argue that we would have been better off deferring to whatever alleged wisdom of the leadership. We must be ruthless in fighting for Ontarians, executing a strategy and presenting a vision that can end bad conservative rule as quickly as possible. Bonnie Crombie had her chance to lay out that vision and execute her strategy, and she failed to meet any goal she set for herself, or even win her own seat. Her leadership has failed.

Tolerating her continued leadership on some vague notion that Doug won’t be as popular next time - not for nothing the same strategy that Liberals are currently mocking Pierre Poilievre for, even though Poilievre gained more in raw seats, vote share, and seat share than Crombie did - cannot be acceptable. We cannot lower the bar to the point where we are pretending that this is good enough. It’s plainly not, and none of us would have even contemplated saying it was.

If at the beginning of the campaign, we were told the actual results were locked in, none of us would have accepted them as good enough. When Liberals were briefing in the Star 25 gains, none of us would have accepted 5 gains as good enough. When we were electing her on the idea that two terms weren’t needed to take the party back to the governing benches, 14 seats was never going to be good enough. And I must say, we would have been right then, and we’re right to demand more now.

This is a government rotten to the core, and we cannot let anything get in the way of beating it. That's why I spent 2024 in these pages making constructive suggestions around how to flip the script on fiscal discipline and tough on crime, how to take advantage of Ford’s corruption with a standing inquiry into corruption so that we’re not waiting for RCMP investigations that may never end, an exciting Message Of The Week proposal that would have seen us relentlessly messaging our policies and keeping Ford’s failures at the forefront, as opposed to allowing Ford to skate on clear failures in his jurisdiction. Whatever the end result of this process, I will continue to fight for this party to be the best version of itself, because it has to be.

Doug Ford is too much of a danger to this province and the very ideals we hold near and dear to be complacent. There is no question to which Doug Ford is the right answer, except maybe who is the biggest barrier to returning Ontario to its status as this confederation’s crown jewel. This fight is too important to take it on faith that next time will be better. This province is too important. The people, the communities, up and down this province are too important.

We need a Liberal Party that is fit for purpose to stop a dangerous, damaging, and in many ways deathly incompetent government. It is on us Liberals to save this province, and we need to be at our best. Bonnie Crombie’s Liberal Party is not good enough, and we have a choice - lower our standards, or tell our leader what we want Ontarians to tell Doug Ford at the next election. It is time to say that we are not going to accept less than we deserve. It is time to demand more of our party, and our leader, so we can stop Doug Ford. It’s time to demand more than endlessly lowered standards and being told to accept the plainly unacceptable. It’s time to demand more than Bonnie Crombie’s excuses for failure.

It’s time for a new leader of the Ontario Liberal Party.