Crombie’s Green Failure

On The Deal That Wasn’t

Just fucking try.

Today’s bombshell report that Bonnie Crombie was offered a deal by the Green Party of Ontario - stand aside for the Greens in Parry Sound-Muskoka, and the Greens would stand aside in Crombie’s riding and 4 other targets - and flatly rejected it is depressing. It’s depressing that PCPO candidates were elected when they potentially didn’t have to be - the Green vote was greater than the PC margin in all 5 seats, as was the Liberal vote in Muskoka - but it’s more so depressing that Crombie couldn’t see such a deal as a gamble worth taking.

Would every person who voted Green have voted Liberal had there been a deal in those 5 seats? Who knows. Would the outcomes of a Doug Ford government be different if he had 74 seats and not 80? No, probably not. Do I have faith Bonnie Crombie would be successful enough in the House that the party would be measurably better off? Not really, though not having to pay her salary out of party funds would be nice. But I also understand that these are all debatable points, and that winning seats is good and losing them is bad, and if we had incumbents in (up to) 5 more seats those would be five seats we could prioritize moving resources out of to other targets that now we can’t. And we can’t because the leader said no.

The true calamity of this decision is that it’s safe and boring at a time when we need bold and innovative. We were losing, and everybody knew it. That election was so boring in large part because everybody knew it. The Captain Canada messaging from Ford and the hat and all the rest of it ended up with a political calculus that made it hard for us, and that is the excuse that Crombie et al trot out to justify her staying as leader. Fine - if you genuinely believe that you’re a huge underdog because of factors outside of your control, you have to throw expected value out the window and get bold.

We ran a boring, stale, and safe campaign, and the lack of deal epitomized it. When I called for a more active strategy a year ago in the pages of this site, the party’s reaction was crickets. There have been ideas posited here and many other places that were ignored, and the thing about running a traditional, boring, safe campaign is in trying not to fuck up you rarely get rewarded. Justin Trudeau took two huge risks in 2015 to win that election - voting with the Conservatives on anti-terror law and alienating the left, and vocally making the case for controlled deficit spending while everyone else argued for budget balance. Crombie didn’t take risks, and didn’t get the reward from it.

It’s overly simplistic to say that this deal cost the combined left 6 seats, but that’s why I want to be very clear: this decision was bad even if it didn’t cost them a seat. When you are losing - at an election, in sports, in life - you have to try and change things. Variance goes from something you’re scared of to something you embrace, because there’s nothing to lose from aggression if you’re going to lose anyways. Crombie couldn’t have known they’d lose the five seats, and she couldn’t have known the Green vote would exceed the margin of defeat. But the fact is, a deal was offered to us on a plate that had a chance of helping and we didn’t.

Whatever brand damage she thought such a deal would do by not running everywhere is nothing - nobody knows nor cares, and the idea that the Liberals would take brand damage from only running in 123 seats is ludicrous. Sorry, 122 - we already didn’t run in Windsor. And if Ford wanted to make the campaign about some tiny deal instead of saying “Elect Conservatives to stand up for Ontario”, that would be a good day for us. But the leadership’s timidity and rigidness cost us, and now that same leadership is claiming they’ll be nimble and openminded. To say I have my doubts would be an understatement.

Crombie’s problem in this leadership race isn’t just that 14 seats and losing her own seat isn’t good enough in a vacuum, or that it’s wildly inconsistent with her own promises beforehand. It’s actually not. A different leader could have survived those two problems given the Captain Canada thing Doug Ford had going for him when he called it. The problem is Liberals across this province have not been given a reason to trust that next time will be better. If Crombie gave us a reason to think 2029 (if Ford doesn’t go early again) will be better, I doubt the level of formal opposition would be here. But there’s nothing that gives me hope she’s learned, and rejecting this deal suggests the rot is incredibly deep.

Ontario Liberals deserve a leader who will try. They deserve a leader who will bust their ass for every vote, scrap and claw for every seat, and who will try every trick in the book to advance the ball even a fucking inch. We don’t have that right now. We have a leader who refuses to take a chance. We have a leader who refuses to even contemplate the possibility that we are losing in a fair fight and that our best shot - hell, our only shot - was to take a risk and see if that scrambled the board enough to elect a few more Liberals. I don’t know if it’s arrogance or callous indifference that led Crombie and co. to decide we’re above help, but we’re not. We’re in third, and we could fit the entire caucus into 2 fucking Suburbans with room to spare.

You take the fucking chance. The answer is obviously to take the chance, because you need to be willing to do anything and everything to defeat Doug Ford. If the deal ends up not producing, the correct response, the only response is to say that it was a chance worth taking. You’ve got to try.

And if you’re not prepared to? Just give up entirely.