In Defence Of Standards

2016, 2025, And OLP’s Original Sin

One of this site’s longest running punching bags has been Jagmeet Singh, but in many ways the actual punching bag has been the NDP and its membership. I’ve been loudly rude about them for keeping Singh in a job he is very bad at and has lead to two straight performances less than what they fired Tom Mulcair for in 2016. Singh’s defenders point out that 2019 and 2021 were minority Parliaments, as if they get the credit for the Conservatives and the Bloc winning Liberal seats. It’s nonsense, and every time I write about this Liberals understand it’s nonsense.

The other punching bag in recent months has been Justin Trudeau, who I’ve laid off of since he resigned as Liberal Leader but whose arrogance and vanity nearly killed the Liberal Party. And before you say I’m wrong about that, every single time another pollster shows a swing left, I’m more and more right to have called for JT to resign.

In both cases, I correctly - because yes, it is worth pointing out that I have been vindicated by events in both cases - understood the situation progressives were in, and wanted their leadership to be held to a standard. The refusal to do so is going to kill the NDP, and it nearly killed the Liberals. In America, thank fucking God the Democrats decided to enforce a standard on Biden, if only after a debate performance that would have put New York in play. In all three cases, those that decided to accept good enough for whatever reasons - personal loyalty, vague concepts that the leader has earned the right to make their own decision, cowardice, or whatever else - and they either would have been disasters or are about to be one.

The provincial Liberals face a similar dilemma now, and while I laid out the case for Bonnie resigning last night, I want to make one more point - part of why we are here in the first place is the refusal to hold leaders we like to a standard. Bonnie Crombie will make her decision or we’ll force her out, and frankly at this point I don’t give a shit - she will not fight the next election, and she’ll either understand that herself or be knifed. But it’s worth understanding how we got here in the first place, and how a fateful August night in 2016 is the OLP’s Original Sin.

The night in question, the Liberals lost the Scarborough Rouge River byelection. Desperate to get away from the consequences of my parents’ divorce, I decided to go down to Toronto for a week to stay with a university friend and knock some doors. It was a professional campaign that, on Monday morning, told us they had 17000 “A” commitments to vote Liberal. And then on the night, we lost by 10% and suffered a nearly 21% swing against us. We didn’t even get 7300 raw votes. The mood at the what was supposed to be a victory party was foul, with conversations about coups and future leaders and Yasir Naqvi and more. The consensus that night - from fairly senior staffers - was that there was this was a crisis and there was no way Wynne could be allowed to just muddle on.

Then, for reasons passing understanding, Wynne was allowed to make the November Ottawa Vanier byelection be make or break - if she won it, she’d stay, if she lost it, she’d go. They scheduled Vanier for the day before the AGM that year in Ottawa, had all of the party’s staff up in Ottawa pulling vote, and then acted like the result - a 14% swing against the government - was a good result. They completely ignored the fact that in Tim Hudak’s old seat of Niagara West, they suffered a 25% swing and went from a competitive-ish second (once you account for Hudak’s personal vote) to a distant third. And they spent the Vanier victory party celebrating like they won another majority. That whole AGM weekend was a farce, a show of strength at a time when the party was heading for disaster.

That few months cost the party everything, because a new leader would have had a chance to capitalize on everything that happened with Patrick Brown in 2018, and would have at least managed official party status. If the Liberals would have had official party status this whole time, it’s likely we’d be in a better place - neither Del Duca nor Crombie had the resources to build out in the way they would have if not for that original sin.

The sin was not holding Wynne’s leadership to a standard, treating byelection swings that averaged 20 points against us, and letting her run in the next election due to some superficial “win” against a standard that was utterly too low. Huh, who on earth does this sound like? Is there any lesson we can learn from letting a leader who failed at the actual objectives redefine their benchmark of success to then justify staying on?

I’m laying it on thick here for a reason - as I wrote last night, if you had asked anybody currently defending Crombie that they’d find 14 seats and her own seat lost whether that would count as acceptable in December of 2023 or any point before last night, they’d have laughed at you. It wouldn’t have even been considered. Now, expectations have been lowered so much that it’s allegedly acceptable.

The degradation of standards in progressive places is one of the most concerning things we’re seeing. We must not tolerate the same mistakes we did in 2016. We must not allow ourselves to stick with a leader who failed the targets they set themselves. We can never surrender to the soft bigotry of low expectations. We must not allow ourselves to repeat our failures, and we must look to our past to inform our present. We must enforce standards to save our party and allow us to be an election winning force in 2029 or earlier.