Crombie’s Catastrophic Campaign

On The Endlessly Infuriating OLP Campaign

“I follow to the edge of the Earth/And fall off”

Bonnie Crombie was asked yesterday what she would do in a minority Parliament scenario, and she decided to say that she would look to work with the NDP on a vote by vote basis to topple Doug Ford at the earliest opportunity. This, in response to a hypothetical question that has zero statistical backing for, has led to Crombie confirming the idea that she would look for NDP votes to topple Doug Ford. Crombie bit on a hypothetical question she didn’t need to answer and gave the PCs all the ammo they need for the final week.

Crombie has been attacked all campaign, fuck it, since she became Liberal leader, as a tax and spend Trudeau-supporting Liberal in millions of dollars worth of PC ads. Her campaign strategy, as implicitly said publicly and certainly explained explicitly in private after the Leader’s Dinner was to triangulate off the NDP and put Crombie firmly in the political centre to win back PC votes. That’s why we led with a middle class tax cut. That’s why the Leader’s Dinner speech railed against encampments. That’s why the OLP voted to close a majority of safe injection sites. It’s why Crombie is being the leader she has been.

And now, with one answer, she has given the PCs all the ammo they need to bombard key marginal suburbs, like Nepean, Mississauga, Niagara, and the new city of Toronto, with the idea that a vote for Bonnie Crombie is a vote for the NDP - and they will have every right to do so, given what Crombie said. It’s not really true, but it’s not false, because Bonnie fucked up yet again, and we are suffering the consequences.

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“I won’t engage in hypotheticals and I am doing everything I can to form a Liberal majority government to enact Liberal policies like getting everybody a family doctor, cutting taxes, and building more homes by slashing exorbitant taxes.”

That was the answer that Crombie should have given, by the way. That’s the answer you give, because it allows you to stay on message, fight for your ideas, and stop you from being tarred with the NDP’s brush. The NDP aren’t super popular in a lot of your key marginals - they’re not gonna get 10% in most Mississauga seats, and what squeezable voters in key marginals there were to get you already got. Doug Ford is in the mid 40s, and you have to go get his votes.

Tuesday’s post debate pivot was pathetic enough, mostly because the way to do that would have been to completely ignore the NDP. The actual way to treat the NDP as an irrelevance is not to loudly proclaim their irrelevance all the time, but to treat them with blatant disrespect. But of course nobody in the OLP could have known that would make more sense … except, wait, I wrote that three weeks ago in a column, glad nobody’s listening though. They’re doing such a crack job at running this campaign, after all. But today was worse.

I feel horrible for Liberals in key seats, some of whom I consider friends - they got absolutely fucked by their leader today. Bonnie allowed the PCs to paint good, reasonable people as out of touch ideologues all because she wasn’t prepared for a hypothetical.

This campaign then released a platform today that has $36B in uncosted, new spending over 4 years after claiming that the platform would be costed. The campaign is trying to make this seem less bad by claiming that it’s $9B/year instead of the $36B number over the four year plan, and by including a bunch of “savings” that a Grade 11 Accounting student at my alma mater would laugh at. The rest of the platform being nebulously paid for by unnamed efficiencies is fine, but a very dumb way of doing a popular thing. (Again, I will shill for fiscal discipline coming in the form of a high profile tripartisan Commission Of Audit instead of just sneaking in efficiencies.)

The Liberals are going to build 90 new schools, apparently. That’s a great announcement! We saved it for when there are five full campaigning days left in the writ period to announce it. We slipped it into a costed platform launch instead of announcing it solo and doing a tour of communities where class sizes were off the charts and/or every school is 80 years old. I pitched Education Week - daily events focused on school repairs, wage increases/respecting teachers, new school construction, and the creation of an education advisory committee that would show our commitment to bettering educational standards - in July. We never got it, now we’re burying great announcements the morning after McDavid’s golden goal.

If I seem extremely pissed off, it’s because I am. It’s because this is fucking pathetic to the point where I’m only half-jokingly wondering about sabotage. There is so much good in this Liberal platform - more and more reliable transit, better health outcomes, new schools, a hugely inspiring Housing plan, and ending the legislated poverty of ODSP. It’s worth voting for. It’s worth getting excited about. It’s worthy of winning. And we’re running an all time bad campaign.

We are on day 5 at least of Oshawagate, where a candidate who is destined for third place, who cheered India killing a Canadian citizen, who called Justin Trudeau gay at the same time, and whose disavowing could help save an NDP seat, is still the party’s official nominee. There have now been two Liberal candidates who felt the need to call on Crombie to disavow this candidate, which means there are more days worth of stories about that instead of stories about what the Liberals want to do. This campaign is a fucking disaster.

Whether anybody in Crombie’s orbit will admit it or not this campaign has been a fucking catastrophe. It’s so frustrating because Crombie has been better than many of us thought she would be on policy, and yet so much worse than we could have imagined as the leader. It’s just not good enough.

It is unacceptable that a team of campaign professionals have run a campaign so bad. It’s unacceptable that the leader who claimed her electability as her raison d’être is now in this spot. It’s just fucking unacceptable, and she is going to make all of us follow her off the edge of the Earth because of her failures, her flaws, and her inability to be what she promised to be.