Memo To The OLP: Don't Assume Tomorrow's Guaranteed

On The Battle For The OLP

It’s a tricky thing, having a good memory – it’s both a great skill and a complete pain in the ass. Small failures or lines that could or should have been better articulated stay with me because of it, but it also serves useful purposes, such as the moment I was canvassing in the 2017 (Federal) Vanier Byelection and was paired with someone I knew. It was my second year, and someone I had known through the campus Young Liberals had graduated and taken a position in the Premier’s Office, but he was back in Ottawa to help out so I asked about the weekend’s Forum poll, which had the Liberals in 3^rd on 19%.

His answer was that nobody was worried, but specifically claimed that the polls in the months before 2015 had the NDP and Conservatives at 40% and the Liberals at 15%. The claim was crap – the lowest any one poll had the Liberals in 2015 was 23% (twice, from Angus Reid) and they never fell below 25% on average. But in the retelling, the Ontario Liberals – or, at least this one fairly well connected one – was telling a story to make reality less terrifying.

It reeked of a very specific arrogance that oftentimes grips Liberal parties in the Toronto to Quebec City corridor, which is that their survival is inevitable, and not just that but somehow assured. It’s a law of nature to these people that the Liberal Party will survive, because to contemplate otherwise would fundamentally break the average Liberal staffer or member or aide. But, it’s worth thinking about in the context of what’s to come – there’s nothing structural or intrinsic that means the Ontario Liberal Party has to exist in a decade. And a lot of people who want to lead this party seem to think its survival is guaranteed when it’s not.

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This is not about Bonnie Crombie in specific – I’ve made my views on this fundamentally unserious person known for now, and while I’m sure I’ll repeat it again as necessary, I’m not in the mood. But it is about this idea circulating that a nasty, divisive leadership race is bad, and that therefore the candidate going negative (also known as accurately quoting Bonnie Crombie, but I digress) is hurting the party. The truth? That this is an existential moment for the OLP and if they make the wrong choice the party’s probably dead.

The weird insistence of some to view this leadership through a Hillary/Bernie dynamic is endlessly maddening, because despite the fiction that the diehards invoke, the Democratic Primary that year was a lovefest compared to what nominated Trump. But what’s more maddening is the idea that the Ontario Liberal Party’s aversion to internal democracy and to arguing about its future is somehow divorced from all the losing they’ve done in the last 8 years.

This isn’t just about Crombie, but all of the candidates in this field have a lot of questions to answer – Crombie for being too right wing, Yasir Naqvi for being yet another Wynne Cabinet Minister who will have all of that shit hung around his neck like they did with Del Duca, Nate for being too left wing, and Ted Hsu and Adil Shamji have to prove that anybody knows who the fuck they are. (In fairness, Nate might have some of that issue with the population, but he’s getting press like he’s a leading candidate and the other two aren’t, so I think that’s less an issue for Nate.)

The actual truth that the party has to recognize is that they’re not entitled to the votes of people who dislike Doug Ford, and they cannot assume that they will get votes from even people who voted for them in 2022 as a matter of course. The quietly said and repeated truth is that a Crombie leadership will see an exodus of young, left wing voters who vote for Trudeau’s Federal Liberals to the Ontario NDP because there’s no way in hell they’re voting for a NIMBY. But point out that Crombie’s said nothing of substance and that she’s nowhere yet on policy and you get blocked on Twitter by a leading surrogate for her. (In fairness, I was trying to bait it, but still.)

This weird idea that the party must be united is bullshit peddled by the same people who have driven the car into the ditch, but no, the wisdom these fuckers have must be important. In 2016 when Kathleen Wynne came to Ottawa for the yearly AGM, she decided not to allow the membership to vote on her Leadership, cancelling a Review because she knew if the Liberals lost the Vanier byelection the Thursday of AGM weekend, they would lose the vote, and even if they won, it’d embarrass the lead. Guess what – going down to 7 seats embarrassed us more. How’d that masterclass in unity work?

I was at the victory party in Vanier that night, and I felt like I was on drugs, the amount of mass delusion I was experiencing around me. They celebrated holding on to fucking Vanier – 6 weeks, if memory serves, after losing Scarborough – like they had won another term of majority government. Vanier. The days of a party where nobody dare criticize anyone else are responsible for the near death experience it’s currently under. And now, people are arguing to continue this fake bullshit? Not a fucking chance.

The OLP doesn’t have the luxury of another 6 cracks at this. Another bad election and whoever leads the party after that becomes an irrelevance, a huckster trying desperately for their pithy quote about the evils of the government of the day to make into news stories but being relegated to the side. The thing about First Past The Post is it crushes smaller parties both directly and indirectly, by giving bigger parties cudgels with which to attack. Liberals know it well – they won government in 2014 with it. If the party makes the wrong choice, that same cudgel could soon kill the party.

The OLP is guaranteed nothing moving forward, and its recent history of suppressing internal dissent and pretending everything’s fine has led us to the brink of death. Anybody who opposes a robust debate will hasten the party’s death.