Memo To Bonnie Crombie: Liberalism Isn't Optional

On A Disastrous Mayor

Two things happened this morning that at first blush seem unrelated, but they’re not. The first is that Brad Treliving overpaid for yet another depth player because he doesn’t trust himself to go out and find the next David Kampf instead of just overpaying the current one, and the second is that May housing stats are out and only two (2) new housing projects started. If they’re going to hit the ten year target, they need 1000 starts/month. Once again, they had 2 in May.

If you’re asking what a bad GM and a bad Mayor have in common, it’s not just that they’re bad, but they’re bad in predictable ways. Brad Treliving has been a mediocre and overly timid GM until the moment he was faced with the prospect of losing two stars in one summer, and he is bringing his lack of ingenuity to the Leafs, and Bonnie Crombie is an anti-housing NIMBY who cares more about protecting her and her generation’s property values instead of making life easier for everyone.

Or, put another way, they are who we thought they were, and we have to stop pretending them doing exactly what you’d expect is a shock.

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Now, obviously, the two (2) housing starts in May is a shock because of the scale, but zoom out (as Mike Moffatt has done), and they’ve been a disastrous laggard for a while. Through 17 months of this ten year target, Mississauga has started 4655 housing projects. Their target in those 17 months? 17000, meaning they’ve done 27% of what they need to. This is not solely a Mississauga problem – Brampton’s only done 23% of their targeted starts, but the difference is Patrick Brown isn’t actively seeking a promotion (at least currently), and more importantly he isn’t trying to pretend he’s a Liberal when he’s not.

Bonnie Crombie opposes dense housing near transit, she said the Liberal Party needs to govern from the right of centre, and refused to rule out the same sort of Greenbelt land swaps that Doug Ford is using to make his developer buddies rich. Her male political inspirations were Winston Churchill and Sex Pest John Tory, who had to resign in disgrace for fucking a subordinate he had firing and promotions power over, and she said the Liberal Party needed to more resemble the party it was under Bob Nixon when they were more of a rural party. Of course, Bob Nixon’s strategy was so successful he was Premier for … *checks notes* … 0 days.

Crombie’s a conservative, whatever her allegiance to the big-L Liberal Party is. She is not a liberal in any way, and what she wants is to take the Liberal Party and make it into the party that she wants it to be. It’s a transparent move that shows she isn’t interested in the party for what it stands for, but merely as an empty vessel for what she wants, which is a glory run to more power.

We know she wants more – given her dogged pursuit of unwinding the Peel region despite never articulating what she wants to do with those powers that the existence of that org structure was blocking – and that’s her right, at the end of the day. Politicians thinking them being in charge would make things better is neither a new phenomenon nor an inherently bad one – all of the best politicians in the history of this country and every other one were driven by an innate sense that they were needed to do the job.

The problem is, I’d be fine with a politician attempting a glory run to higher office by transparently turning an existing party into their own image if there wasn’t a much better politician and a much better vision on offer, in this case Nate. And let’s be clear, even though I’m supporting Nate (sign up to vote for him, why don’t you?), an OLP led by Ted Hsu or Yasir Naqvi would be parties I’d have no problem supporting. If Crombie’s leader of the Liberals, I’m voting NDP, and so is everyone else under the age of 40.

What we have in Ontario is a clear anti-Tory majority that is willing to vote for the party that gives them the best chance of winning, but that principle will not apply to a Liberal Party that runs as a right of centre party. If the Liberals abandon their voters on housing, on health, on prescriptions coverage, then they will be abandoned in turn. Bonnie Crombie might identify as a Liberal, but at some point revealed preference matters more than stated preference. She’s a conservative, and as Nate said, we don’t need another right of centre political party – we already have one.

The reason I am dedicating a significant portion of whatever influence I have on this leadership race and specifically trying to destroy the idea of Crombie as the next leader of the OLP is because she is genuinely the worst thing this party could do at this point. The Ontario NDP are deeply unserious, choosing to anoint their chosen successor in a closed door process and depriving the party and the province to get to know their new leader, and their only substantial policy is a ban on protests around venues where drag shows might occur, a policy disaster on its merits and a focus on an issue where the vast majority of people do not give a single fuck.

This government is beatable, and they were beatable in 2022 but the two opposition parties were about as useful as a condom on a strap on, so we are where we are. Bonnie Crombie will re-elect a Ford government by leaving the Liberals a joke and an irrelevance and leaving the task of winning PC seats to a party fundamentally unsuited to the job. Crombie is a conservative, a terrible Mayor, and a disgrace to the entire idea of a Liberal Party, and those two housing starts in May prove everything she touches turns to shit.

Don’t let her kill the Ontario Liberal Party, because she is who we think she is, and we can’t let her off the hook.