OLP: Good And Bad Of Bonnie’s (Not A) Relaunch Week

On Inconsistency And Illogic

Since I wrote the vast majority of my Bonnie Crombie piece on Sunday, Bonnie Crombie has actually been quite busy, launching a $3B initiative to get every Ontarian a family doctor by the end of the decade, headlining a leader’s dinner in Toronto that Liberals both privately and publicly are claiming raised over a million (much-needed) dollars, and giving a speech at that dinner that called out Trudeau as “wrong” on the carbon tax and said that identity politics in Ontario are dead.

Now, Crombie of course spent a good portion of her leadership race playing identity politics, accusing Nate Erskine-Smith of being a sexist for having the temerity to make the case for real generational change, so her conversion to the side of the anti woke is about as sincere as me pretending to care about Wicked, but she’s decided it’s one of her talking points. She (according to reports - I haven’t seen video of this speech or a transcript, annoyingly) also came out swinging on the increase of homeless encampments in our cities as evidence of Ford’s focus on helping his donors and not solving concrete problems.

As a rhetorical point, it’s not a *bad* gambit - framing the NDP as radical ideologues who care more about being pure and better than everybody else instead of being focused on achieving anything for anybody and Ford as so focused on rich friends that he ignores the everyman. It’s not a bad place for the party to be in, adopting the mantle of centrism against these two bad options. I’m gonna be clear - even if Nate was leader I’d be telling him to use the PCPO’s corruption and the ONDP’s utter uselessness and obsession with fringe nonsense against them. So I like the rhetorical positioning.

I also like the healthcare announcement! It’s a good policy on merits - more family doctors means less pressure on emergency rooms and more handling of routine and preventative medicine that will reduce costs in the long run and make it easier to be seen for broken limbs and dislocated joints in less than the 10 hours from admission to the first time I saw a doctor I suffered in 2021 for my dislocated shoulder. More family doctors is a good thing! It’s also an easy thing to repeat a lot, it looks good in a 5 point plan, it’s sellable, seemingly achievable (I am not an expert in the feasibility of doctor recruitment and retention but I haven’t seen anyone attack it as infeasible), and generally good.

I will even defend the decision to more vocally chuck Trudeau under an 18 wheeler on carbon pricing. Honestly, my only issue with her is that she took her opportunity to do it in a speech that isn’t, as far as I’m aware, on camera so we can’t use the clip. I have said in these pages time and again that reasonable people can like and dislike policies, but pretending you have the public onside when you don’t is a recipe for failure. I stand by it. We lost the war on carbon pricing. The public does not and will not view a carbon tax as a price worth paying to reduce emissions. Knowing that, chuck JT under the bus, loudly and repeatedly.

The party can even do a good job at basic media and story management. That Jane Philpott, who spoke at the OLP AGM and was widely expected by outsiders to be a future star candidate, taking a gig for Doug Ford wasn’t viewed as a big failure for Crombie and didn’t spiral into a big crisis was genuinely good work by the party. But the problem is, the party can be good - even sometimes very good - in a game of tactics. Certainly, from the perspective of doing what you set out to do, Crombie has had a very good week. She’s owned the media, she’s gotten her core messages out, she’s doing what she wanted to do. Whether you like her pivot or not, she has mostly gotten what she wanted out of this week (I suspect the quotes in the Star aren’t beloved but other than that …).

But I don’t think Crombie has a holistic vision of Ontario that makes much sense even on her stated ambitions. If she wants to focus on Getting Things Done and ignoring culture war fights, that’s great. That’s a non-ideological stance that can appeal to everybody. Love it. But dig into it for even two seconds and it completely falls apart.

In her speech on Tuesday Bonnie raised the issue of homeless encampments and attacked Ford for being more focused on booze in corner stores, bike lanes, and a mega spa at Ontario Place than fixing gridlock and solving our homelessness crisis. These encampments are evidence of a crisis, they are a deep affront both to people’s humanity that we have allowed people to reach and an impediment to people’s willingness to go downtown and patronize businesses near these areas and take their kids to parks and do a number of things.

To be very clear, they need to be done away with in a way that respects the humanity of those forced into this circumstance and that allows residents and visitors to enjoy their public space again. And every time the NDP or the left open their mouths on these issues they sound like lunatics. There’s a reason that progressive Mayors and DAs in cities across America are getting voted out and recalled. I get why this is a winning issue for us if done well. The problem is, Crombie already screwed up.

Earlier that day, the Ontario legislature voted to close a majority of Ontario’s safe injection sites, and the four Liberal MPPs present in the House for the vote voted with the government. Now, to the extent that we have a crisis of homelessness and encampments, it is a lot a crisis of addiction and poverty, and how those two things interact. Not every person at a homeless encampment is an addict and not every person who is addicted is homeless, but to deny that some of the same people Crombie has declared it her mission to clear from encampments are the very same people who just lost a safe place to use the drugs they are addicted to. It shouldn’t take a genius to guess where they’re going to start using those drugs - in public parks, at their encampments, and in ways that make it harder to help them and more likely they are going to create the sorts of problems and anti-social behaviour that you are seeking to solve.

To say these two policies are in contradiction would be the understatement of the year - they’re almost specifically chosen to work against each other. And yet, that’s the state of the OLP right now. Plainly, the vote that Ontario Liberal MPPs took this week makes it more likely, not less, that an 8 year old kid walking a version of the 600 metre walk I did every day from school to home or a mother and a small child walking back from a small family run ice cream shop is going to see someone smoking crack or shooting heroin or just reacting to the consequences of any number of drugs. If we need to clear encampments to lower the number of those interactions, why in the name of fuck are we supporting making those interactions more numerous?

It’s because there’s little holistic thinking happening right now from people the leadership is listening to. Bonnie’s first big announcement was a tax cut, which makes sense as a way of addressing concerns she’s Queen of the Carbon Tax and a Tax And Spend Liberal like the PC ads say, but that mostly came and went without any real push from earned media. Her health care announcement was great, but will she be blitzing the province next week, doing events, going to the ridings with the fewest doctors and the biggest needs? They keep saying in the House they know how many people per seat need family doctors, why aren’t they doing a tour of the worst offenders?

The party wasted a year - the polls are as bad now as they were before she beat Nate - and that’s a year they can’t get back. The fact that we’re staring down the barrel of an early election is on Crombie, because if Nick Kouvalis was seeing a 4% PC lead and the Liberals at 35% he’d be telling Doug to not even consider an early election. That the PCs are sold on the idea is a sign of her failure, no matter how many times we will be told it was an act of God that we had to deal with.

Take this leadership’s approach to party unity, right? A Nate supporter was given the Climate critic position and made the head of the party’s working group/commission into finding a new, better, non-carbon tax way to meet our environmental goals. Plenty of Nate’s people are in party positions. There haven’t been any bitter dividing lines in the party’s nominations between Nate-ites and Bonnie-ites, there’s no real factionalism. From a party management standpoint - and in this case I do mean literally managing the party as an institution with jobs and staffers and apparatuses, it’s very united. But the party in the province? They’re extremely disunited.

There has been little policy outreach to the progressive wing so far, there has been little effort to put Bonnie and Nate in joint events, there’s been no joint announcements, no (even entirely fictitious) Senior Advisor or Director or Counselor title given to Nate, nothing to make progressives believe you’re serious when we’re told we’re valued members of the coalition. If Marit Stiles didn’t fucking suck, didn’t flirt with letting back in a rape denialist and make one of her first policies announcements some nonsense about safety zones around drag clubs, and didn’t have a housing policy as unserious as she does, then the Liberals would be completely fucked. As it is, the party is getting their asses saved by Stiles’ incompetence and they’re still nowhere.

What Crombie is banking on is that the left of the party will plug their nose, swallow their objections, and deal with the consequences of having to choose between an insufficiently progressive Bonnie and Satan Incarnate, also known as Doug Ford. The problems with this are numerous - namely that people just won’t bother voting, like they didn’t in 2022 - but it also relies on the goodwill of the party’s left. Well, if you shit on the carbon tax, you vote against safe injection, you start with a tax cut that the bottom 50% of Ontarians won’t benefit a single penny from, you condemn identity politics, and you do so all in the form of a career politician that has served for nearly two decades and yet has no discernible values, why is the left going to do their bit of this dance?

The PC Press Office has found a Crombie quote that reads “Canada needs to act now and … place a price on carbon” from her 2008 campaign to be a Liberal MP under Stephane “Green Shift” Dion. She’s now claiming she’s never supported a consumer carbon tax, which seems hard to reconcile with the idea she ran and won her federal term under Dion and is impossible to reconcile with that quote (though I can’t independently verify it and the PCs don’t give a source on their graphic). She was a NIMBY Mayor now advocating an aggressively YIMBY platform. She said she wants to govern “right of centre”, then said she was a pragmatic progressive, and is now in the centre. She was pro-identity politics when it was being used to make her leader and is now against them. When people have no idea what you stand for, it’s nearly impossible to ask for the good will and faith that coalitional politics demand.

What we need from Crombie is some fucking sense of her values. Those values do not need to be particularly progressive, but we need to get a sense of the guardrails here. We need to know that just because we have to swallow a difference in tactic, something like the difference between a carbon price and a US-style consumer and business subsidy regime, to achieve net-zero, that doesn’t mean you aren’t still deeply committed to net-zero. We need to know that the death of identity politics doesn’t mean we’ll tolerate potential attempts to legislate significant erosion of trans rights. We need to know that at the end of the day, even if we don’t agree with all of it, that there’s a moral and ideological compass that won’t let you get too far away. I wrote it Monday but I don’t know if her leadership is honouring or betraying her values, because I don’t fucking know what her values are beyond platitudes about “being for you.”

If Crombie is going to commit to this pivot to the centre, then she is going to need a lot of progressives to act as guarantors for her. The fact she won’t go on Nate’s podcast is a layup that I know he’d say yes to, and either she said no when it was pitched to her or nobody has thought it would be a good idea. Neither inspires any confidence because none of this inspires any confidence. I’m not saying I should have been offered an hour with Crombie on the record, but I am saying that there are a lot of ways to get people with (some amount of) pull amongst the Ontario left more on board. But again, nobody can think more than one step ahead, so the lack of anybody acting as a progressive guarantor for Bonnie, nobody out here consistently and cheerfully making the case for Bonnie to the left, hasn’t been solved. And yes, we do need a positive, active case for her, because 2022 showed us that Ford Bad doesn’t work.

I have been lightly chastised for calling this week a relaunch of Crombie, but I honestly think if it’s not one we’re completely fucked. The idea that things have gone well the last year is abhorrent, because if losing a byelection in a seat you lost by 4% with a swing to the government, polling stagnation since you took over, and being potentially only weeks away from an early election call your polling weakness brought on is a successful year I’d hate to see an unsuccessful one.

I actually do genuinely want to be wrong about Crombie. I want her to be a success, I want the party to be in a good position, and I want to be proud when I vote Liberal next year. I just know that won’t happen, and I won’t be. Bonnie’s people think this week has been a success for them and it’s easy to see why. But I don’t. I just … Nate would have had plenty of problems if he won the leadership, and it would have been a hell of a battle to manage the need for him to keep his principles and meet the electorate where they are. It would have been long and oftentimes frustrating, and the idealized fantasy that we were 900 votes or whatever in that leadership race from being in an election winning spot right now is understandable, but not true. But I know fighting with him and his people about the future of the party wouldn’t feel this way. It wouldn’t feel this empty, it wouldn’t feel this helpless, and it wouldn’t feel as depressing. We chose the electability candidate and we’re still 15 points down.

I despair.