Crombie’s Soulless OLP

On Her Path Forward

How many things about Bonnie Crombie do you actually know? Not about her leadership - though there’s plenty of gaps that are slowly being filled in, for sure - but about her?

Doug Ford, love or loathe him, makes sense. He’s a brash, tell it like it is, plain speaking conservative. He’s George Bush without the Texas drawl, which works as an analogy on two levels because neither the Fords nor the Bushes were actually plain folks. The problem is, that has a constituency, a constituency that likes the idea that they know the man in the office. Trudeau’s personality helped him win too, a sense that despite the last name he possessed a certain understandable energy. Trudeau might not have been seen as an intellectual heavyweight, but he was likeable. He was a Gen X nerd, someone who cared about normal things and probably could do 30 minutes on what was lost by the ‘94 baseball strike.

Stephen Harper’s eminent Dadishness was his charm, a command of the Beatles discography and a passion for the origins of hockey. It seemed sincere, but it also really helped disarm his critics that he was some fascist psychopath when he would sit in the shitty stands at the local rinks. There’s nothing saying that the voters should care about this, and yet, for some reason we let it.

Crombie’s leadership of the OLP has been unsteady, both from a results standpoint and from a personal one. She has been better than I expected and not as good as I would wish an OLP leader would be - after all, I voted for the other guy. Put aside my thoughts, she’s at 25% in Abacus and lost the Milton byelection with a swing against. If the election were tomorrow, the OLP would be second in votes and third in seats, again. It’s all a bit nothing. There’s the occasional great announcement - the housing stuff of the early spring, namely - but there’s a lot of announcements about future announcements. The commissions are good, but they hardly get the pulse rising. It’s all … fine, in that “7th album from a band that hasn’t been truly great since their 3rd” way. (Have I spent the last two hours listening to Rush Of Blood To The Head and X&Y? No comment.)

What Crombie’s leadership needs is not more vaguely incoherent decisions without a through line, like her showing up to support the world’s dumbest strike action. What it needs is to tap into the leader - not her record in Mississauga, not another announcement, but her backstory. If she’s going to stand at a picket line, tell us why. Tell us what music gets you out the door in the morning, tell us what moment inspired you to seek public office, tell us it all. Ontarians want to dislike Doug Ford, and we want to vote against him. Right now, the opposition is split between two leaders who are not giving Ontarians a reason to believe. Let us.

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There’s few things more satisfying than finding out what someone’s favourite movie is or the song they play when they need to shut out the world, because it’s not just a trivia factoid. It’s a window to the soul. There’s few things better than seeing the influences, working backwards from that fact and seeing how obvious it is. It’s the same with memories, understanding something or someone more because it finally clicks. It’s humanizing, but it’s also illuminating. And for a politician, this kind of thing can matter.

It can be narrative nonsense when politicians use pop culture or sports to seem hip and cool, but done properly opening up can change the way the public sees you. But let’s be blunt, the Crombie leadership could be on borrowed time sooner than we think. I talked about this on today’s Scrimshaw Show with Nathaniel Arfin, but if I were Doug Ford I’d call a general election for October 17th or 24th and leave the OLP and ONDP fucked. An early election is a certainty, and the only question is whether he goes in October or June 2025, in my (informed) opinion. What happens to the leader who pledged they could win in 2026 if it’s 25% of the vote, 16 seats, and third place again? Hell, 16 might be generous, given Fournier has them projecting for 12 right now.

I can sit here and give a laundry list of policy ideas and strategic buzzwords I think would get that 25 to a 28, but at the end of the day the problem isn’t a lack of ideas. It’s a lack of narrative. What is Crombie’s purpose, what does she want from government, what animates her purpose? The one time she has shown that dynamism was a year ago, when she accused Nate of sexism. I thought then and think now the accusation was crap, but she at least was showing a capacity to bring her upbringing and her history and tell a cogent story about how she has seen older women discarded and disrespected for their age. I understood why she was outraged, even if I didn’t think his quote merited it. And I haven’t felt that same visceral understanding since.

Why is Bonnie on a picket line? Is it just because she opposed White Claws at Circle K, or does she have some broader connection to organized labour? Her leadership platform has plenty of bon mots, but I have no idea why she is animated by the causes that she is. She’s a mostly black box at a time when she’s running against the candidate that subtext left for dead. In trying to be good for all timezones, she’s sanded down what personality and dynamism she has. I don’t have the foggiest what that is, because I don’t know her. But there has to be more there.

I want the Liberals to give Ford their best shot. Right now that requires a pretty clear reset of the leader. Not on policy, but in terms of her relationship to the electorate. She’s been defined by Doug Ford as a tax and spend Mayor who is friendly with Trudeau and she has had to spend time fighting against that to the detriment of the public’s understanding who she is. Give us something, anything, to understand who Crombie is and what makes her tick.

If we want to beat Doug Ford it won’t be technocratic niceties. It’ll be Bonnie Crombie selling herself as a leader and as a Premier. She needs to show us who she is at a more fundamental level. Otherwise, her leadership will remain as soulless as ever.