OLP Letter: Old Guards' Last Stand

The End Of Influence

So, apparently the elites of the Ontario Liberal Party just hate their party, right?

What the signatures of the Draft Mike Schreiner effort have said, in the not-insubstantial (and, in my view, let’s be honest, majority) case he doesn’t become Ontario Liberal leader, is give both the NDP and the PCs a knock out punch of an argument. If, as I expect, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith wins the leadership, he will go into an election debate where Doug Ford or Marit Stiles will be able to say “why should anyone vote for you, your own former Deputy Premier prefers the other guy!”

The worst part? They’ll be right.

Let’s dispense of the politics of the leadership race, if Schreiner says yes and enters the race. He likely won’t win, for the simple reason he’s not a fucking Liberal. Liberals will want to vote for an actual Liberal, and therefore the not-Liberal who has spent the better part of a decade shittalking the former Liberal government starts any leadership race as a massive underdog, especially against Erskine-Smith, who has built a brand as the Federal Liberals’ conscience on the backbenches and as someone committed to principles above all else.

Schreiner was clearly involved at some level with this action – I would be highly, highly surprised if the letter wasn’t run by him first and he told them if they put it out he wouldn’t slap the idea down. None of this happened in a vacuum is my guess, and this is an elaborate way of pitchrolling this so that Schreiner doesn’t find himself without the Green leadership if there’s no appetite amongst the Liberal grassroots.

But frankly, right now we’re in the phony war of this campaign – Schreiner is making moves but behind the scenes, the other candidates are doing the same, and we’re waiting to see if there’s any appetite for this. I think I know the answer to that, but no point being repetitive about it.

What is interesting is why the people who stuck the OLP in this spot think they should be able to continue to exert influence on an institution they’ve destroyed.

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Why does Deb Matthews, the former Deputy Premier of Ontario who served as Deputy under Kathleen Wynne and helped get her the spectacular 7 seats and sub 20% of the vote that she managed in 2018, think she can orchestrate the future of the Ontario Liberal Party? She was Deputy to the Premier whose staff literally made up fake stats about how far back Trudeau was in 2015 to justify the idea that despite polling in third place, they’d bounce back and win.

I’m genuinely asking here, because what the signatories of the letter are saying is that this is the answer, that they have figured out what is necessary. And I’m curious why they think they are entitled to keep driving the car, when the Ontario Liberal Establishment has been wrong at every moment so far. They were wrong to keep Wynne in 16/17, they were wrong to pick Del Duca, and they clearly botched the strategy for the 2022 campaign.

Now, given that I liked the 2022 campaign strategy, I don’t really have much of a leg to stand on here, but here’s the crucial difference – I’m not trying another shortcut to maintain power inside the party. I am not advocating for a specific plan – either around personalities or leader – because I am trying to engage in a little thing called self-reflection, otherwise known as not acting like a genius on a topic I just got very wrong.

The problem is, these people cannot and will not ever admit they got anything wrong, so they cannot acknowledge that what they’re doing is essentially definition of insanity stuff. These elites of the party are unwilling to actually look at why the Liberals lost, so they think they can just get an easy answer. Del Duca was the answer to the question of who they could run that could be “Wynne 2014-ism, without the sexism or too much baggage”, and now they think the problem is an uncharismatic leader, so they went to the guy everyone thought had a good debate.

It's cheap, lazy partybuilding, premised too much on the idea that Justin Trudeau won solely because his name was Trudeau and not because he had actually done the work of partybuilding in those years. Remember when he created all those commissions and panels of experts? Freeland on financial issues, Andrew Leslie on defence, shit like that? He got smart people in a room and asked them to give the party some intellectual heft, which ended up being why he won that election.

The Liberals are trying to do a Trudeau-esque third to first, and the chances Doug Ford will have some vote share to bleed after 8 years in office are certainly better than not, but the idea that they will just all gravitate to the Liberals essentially by default was the big mistake I made in 2022. Schreiner isn’t some generational political talent, and the thing about the letter writers is they’re essentially praying he is, because this is an attempt not to build the party, but to short circuit that.

What’s the Simpsons line, again? “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”, right? That’s the OLP elites if they actually think they can’t build back the party with an actual fucking Liberal. Del Duca was nominally something, but he was in effect nothing, because he was an attempt to change nothing except the leader. Now, they’re all out of ideas on how an actual Liberal could ever succeed.

It’s offensive to see people so tragically out of touch with the fact that they are in part responsible for the disaster they have left their party in now saying there are no Liberals who should lead the Liberal Party. Pretending that there is some easy way to get around an existential crisis with one solution is not a credible idea, and it’s especially not when your definition is just stealing a different party’s leader.

The signatories of this letter have decided no actual Liberals should lead the Ontario Liberal Party. As such, they should have nothing to do with the future of Ontario Liberalism. You don’t get to drive the party off a cliff and then demand to be able to drive yourself to the hospital and do your own surgery. At some point, the architects of failure need to move on, and stop trying to control what they are clearly incapable of doing well. Given that, get out of the fucking way and let actual Liberals try and take a swing at fixing the wreckage.