OLP Leadership: Bad Faith Feast

On This Week's Drama

Was it ageist or sexist when Justin Trudeau said that the “era of hyphenated Liberals ends right here, right now, tonight” when he won the leadership of the Federal Liberals in 2015 and promptly neutered the internal power of everyone who had been players inside the party before his time? No, of course not, even Trudeau was running as the explicit candidate of generational renewal in that leadership race for a party that needed it.

Fast forward, and we have had the almightiest of bad faith shit fights over a reporter’s characterization of a Nate quote, because apparently generational change is unacceptable in Ontario despite saving us Federally. The worst part of the fight is everyone’s acting in bad faith, and everyone feigning outrage is missing the point – the old fucking over the young is accepted practice, but the young fighting back isn’t.

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Bonnie Crombie’s been the Mayor of Mississauga who has built almost no new housing. That’s not hyperbole – since the introduction of the 10 year target, her city’s only started 27% of the starts needed to hit the target, including a May 2023 number of two (2) starts. Reminder, the target’s 1000/month.

Crombie’s housing policy is, explicitly, generational warfare. She is fucking over the young in the name of existent homeowners and their property values, which ends with mass inequality of opportunity when the Boomers homeowners either retire or die, and the property values get passed on. She is perpetuating a system where whether your parents bought or rented will decide future generations’ economic class, because she wants to protect the status quo at the expense of the young.

But of course, that doesn’t piss off the chattering classes, no, the idea that Nate said that a candidate running in this race needs to be prepared for the long term and not just trying to cut corners for a quick 3^rd to 1^st – a clear shot at Steven Del Duca and his advisors. It’s a way of reminding everyone that he is the generational change he’s pitching himself as. Was it the most artfully said quote I’ve ever read? No, but I don’t want it to be. Nate’s whole thing is that he talks like a normal fucking person, and as I’m always liable to remind people who oppose the level of profanity in my writing, there’s a tradeoff between polish and authenticity, and if we want more authenticity, we need to give more space for inartful phrasing. (If you like politicians who don’t talk like robots, sign up to support Nate.)

What’s been wild to watch in all of this, as someone who has been on a modified (or more accurately, inverted) sleep schedule the last week because of Wimbledon and the Scottish Open and therefore been seeing these things after the fact is how blatant the bad faith is. Criticisms levied against Nate included a lack of willingness to support the party through hard times, which have not been made against Bonnie Crombie nor Yasir Naqvi, who aren’t MPPs and in Yasir’s case literally chose not to run against provincially so he could run federally. (A choice, to be clear, I would also have made, obviously.)

The criticism that the comments against Crombie represented an attack on her gender were also nonsensical bad faith – the idea that any woman is beyond reproach for basic political campaigning because of her gender is as insidious as overtly sexist attacks. Don’t forget, Pete Buttigieg did a much more overt version of Nate’s quote to Joe Biden in the 2020 primary and there was a period of time when it looked like it might work (or, at least, got him a de facto tie in Iowa and an extremely good second place in New Hampshire). The idea that no man would be attacked for his age, and invoking the treatment of Lisa Laflamme as a comparable, is as risible as it is offensive to victims of actual ageism and sexism.

At the end of the day, the question before the Liberal membership when they vote is whether they want to elect a candidate who has said it’s up to the Federal Government, not the province, to do more on key issues of health care and child care, who wants to govern from the centre-right, who idolizes a sex pest, and who opposed high density buildings near transit lines, or an actual fucking liberal. It’s seen as gauche in some circles to point this out, but Bonnie Crombie is not a centre-left politician by any means and she’s trying to lead a centre-left party. It’s not rude to point this out, it’s not rude to draw a contrast, and it’s not rude to campaign to win.

What should draw outrage is that there’s a candidate for the leadership of this once great party who seems to be opposed to the good things it did. Crombie doesn’t want an activist provincial government, because she doesn’t seem to be in politics to do anything. A politician doesn’t usually want to delegate responsibilities, they want to horde it, and Crombie’s wholesale rejection of the fundamental basis of provincial action as a means to make lives better should fucking terrify all of us.

For those included to be mad at those who point out the fact that Crombie has no identifiable purpose for running, no policy agenda she wants to see through, and no vision for the solving of the greatest crisis this country faces (housing), be more mad about the fact that she fucking sucks than the fact that people are pointing this out. To paraphrase the West Wing, so long as Bonnie Crombie stays intolerant of the young and those looking for housing that don’t have the bank of Mom and Dad to help, I (and a generation or two of voters come 2026) will stay intolerant towards her.

The Ontario NDP coronated their next leader and have nothing to show for it, a party with no cuthrough publicly despite the ability to command their position as the Official Opposition and their party status to push Ford. There seem to be some in the Ontario Liberal Party that pine for the idea that we do a modified version of this and spend this leadership race being polite but fundamentally not figuring out what party we should be. We can’t let bad faith fuckery stop us from having the fight we should but didn’t have in 2020.

Getting more outraged by a fundamentally benign quote than the fact that a possible leader of the OLP wants to do nothing except ask the Feds to do her job for her is either dumbassery or bad faith, and saying this aloud is necessary.

Bonnie Crombie’s centre-right, laissez-faire, status quo politics is unacceptable. If she is given the keys to this party it will not live to survive the trainwreck that she will induce. And it’s high time we stop dancing around this basic truth.