One Year Of Crombie: We're All Completely Fucked

On Anniversaries And Abject Failures

So, Bonnie Crombie sat down with the Star for a One Year Since Winning feature yesterday, the kind of article designed to remind people you exist. Assignment editors tend to like hooks for things, and so you have your Crombie feature drop in the Sunday Star the day before the anniversary of the leadership announcement. That Crombie agreed to do this, or hopefully reached out to do this, is great, and the kind of thinking I’ve been wanting from the leader’s office. What she said in it, however? Fucking yikes. Here are four quotes from the piece, all from Crombie:

• “When I got here, I thought ‘I’m experienced, I’m a polished leader, you know? Seventy-eight per cent of Mississauga voted for me.”

• “I thought it would be easier. It’s been tough.”

• “I was really comfortable right at the beginning. I had a lot of confidence. And then I realized, ‘maybe I don’t know what I don’t know,”

• “This is a much different ballpark ... there’s a lot to learn”

How on earth are you admitting any of that in public? How in the name of fuck do you allow the headline of your big year in review to be that you were sold a bill of goods? More interestingly, why are you admitting that you could get conned by a group of out of touch party grandees who were last relevant in the mid 2000s? This idea that Bonnie was told it’d be easier than it’d be is something we’ve all known ever since the leadership, when she wasn’t at all expecting Nate and Yasir to be serious forces. I heard at the time she was told she’d win on the first ballot; she won on the third and final one with 53.4% of the points and 52.35% of the votes.

I have tried to be fair about Bonnie’s leadership in these pages since she won - I have defended the decision to ditch consumer-facing carbon pricing, I have praised her genuinely great shift in policy and moreso tone on housing from her Mayoral days to now, and I have tried to be constructive. I’ve spent many a column inch trying to make the case for ideas that would work for a Bonnie-led party because at the end of the day she is the available non-Ford vehicle with any chance of doing anything. Marit Stiles and the NDP had a golden opportunity to take advantage of left Liberal discontent in the leadership result and she has spectacularly failed to do anything. So it’s Bonnie or bust. And honestly I’m going to lose my mind.

Per the latest public polling, including today’s Mainstreet - a distinction I am making for a reason and will elaborate on shortly - the Liberals would gain 4 seats since the last election, stay in third place, and the PCs would stay essentially where they were, between their 2018 and 2022 seat totals. The PCs would trade losses to the Liberals with gains from the NDP, as working class NDP seats in southwest and northern Ontario go blue. Now, there’s a series of further NDP seats that don’t go on this projection that could - and, plainly, that I think will - go blue at the next election, like Windsor West, another Hamilton, Timiskamang, and possibly even a London seat or two. But the fundamental truth that the public polling shows the Liberals gaining at most 10 seats remains.

Now, the Liberals would push back strenuously against this characterization. I know, because they do so to me privately every time I’m critical of the party’s chances. Their argument is that their internal polling shows a tighter - though not truly competitive for government - position and a clear advantage in the race for opposition. If that internal polling was replicated at the election, I would agree that something like 25-30 seats would be likely, and becoming the official opposition would be almost certain. But there is a clear disconnect between what the party is seeing internally and what is seen externally.

Abacus has the Liberals on 23%, down 4% from Bonnie’s first poll as leader and stagnant since the November 2023 pre-Crombie poll. If I were to be an asshole, I’d point out that that November 2023 Abacus poll had the Liberal vote share under a hypothetical Crombie leadership in the low 30s, and that that’s an 8% decline, but I’m not an asshole. I’d also point out that since their final pre-Crombie polls Angus Reid and Pallas have both seen their most recent vote shares within 1% of the OLP shares before she arrived. For all the talk of Bonnie’s “X Factor” in that Star piece, the public evidence doesn’t show it.

Now, maybe the internal polling is correct and Bonnie’s going to outperform public expectations, but the case against believing this is robust. If Nick Kouvalis was seeing the same numbers as the Liberals, it is unlikely Ford would be this certain about going to an election early. If there was a latent pro-Bonnie sentiment that wasn’t being picked up in the public polls, we’d probably see it in a less confident and gung-ho Government. It’s also the case that the non-polling dynamics show Crombie as a less successful leader than many had pointed to.

The party has yet to air a significant ad blitz on TV, which is not great for a leader who was elected in part because of her ability to raise money. Hopefully this week’s Leader’s Dinner raises a significant amount, enough to let the party start to air ads, but so far we’ve yet to see the benefits of the fundraising prowess. Crombie’s efforts at earned media have been lacking, focusing on high leverage speeches and moments and not focusing on a bread and butter Message Of The Week strategy that could start to dictate terms and focus the energy on Doug’s actual failures as opposed to whatever stunt or nonsense he wants us talking about.

Crombie has failed to dictate the agenda, but she also failed to take a chance to run in Milton and win a seat to the Legislature. I remember part of the rationale from those who supported her decision being that she could use her time more effectively outside of the Legislature, touring the province, meeting Ontarians, and driving the agenda. She has failed to do so, partially because our policy agenda is scattershot. Good policies, like our support for four units as of right, get pitched and then forgotten, as opposed to being relentlessly messaged. Failures of the Ford government are touched on and then ignored, as opposed to the relentless pressure and focus that Pierre Poilievre has shown works. Why Crombie isn’t doing a tour of hospitals that don’t have the money to keep ERs open 24/7 or of schools that have had roofs cave in or other structural problems and showing, day by day, event by event, community after community, the cost of Conservative inaction is insane to me.

Why Crombie isn’t putting big ideas in the window while attacking Ford is also beyond me. I pitched a Commission of Audit earlier this year, a bold strategy to win over both fiscal conservatives in the suburbs who think the government taxes too much and wastes the money and progressives who want more money for services. It’s a way to sell a singular message to two groups - Doug Ford is spending more and more for less and less actual results. Finding savings is a skeleton key for finding the money to fix our schools and hospitals and hire more nurses and teachers and cops and pay them good wages but for some reason there’s no concrete offer or agenda.

We rail against the Ford Government’s corruption all the time, but other than tweeting that we heart the RCMP, what’s the anti-corruption agenda? Where’s the lengthening of the time before ex-MPPs can become lobbyists? Where’s the standing inquiry into all anti-corruption cases so that the OPP don’t have to hand off investigations for a conflict of interest? Where’s the dedicated media focus on how you’ll make sure that the next run of ex-Ford ministers can’t become lobbyists a year after leaving that portfolio, like ex-Deputy Premier Christine Elliott shilling for a private health care provider a year after stopping being Health Minister?

More than all of these points in specific, why the fuck am I one of the leading sources of progressive ideas in Ontario and not the literal fucking Liberal Party? Let’s say for the sake of it that all my ideas suck - where are the Liberal Party’s? I’ve been messing with an idea on Development Charges in various columns and podcasts - some sort of a Housing Accelerator Fund-esque mechanism to replace the revenues that DCs raise - for weeks if not months now. It’s pretty clear from Crombie’s (in my view, reasonable) response on bike lanes - essentially telling Doug to stop being Mayor and do your job as Premier - that she would take the idea of just unilaterally slashing DCs for the municipalities badly, so fine, use provincial dollars to incentivize cuts. Or, I don’t know, fucking something.

Even when she is announcing things, Crombie’s not capitalizing on it. She announced support for two-way, all day GO train service to Niagara the Thursday after the US election in a video on social media. This is a good policy, I support it, I am happy to be in a party that cares about transit. But that’s it. That’s all there is. One announcement about one city put out on socials. Why was that not announced at a press conference alongside other transit announcements as part of a bigger, wider province wide plan, with multiple videos like the one she did in St. Catharines for each local project. Why didn’t she save that announcement until there was a bigger, wider plan of announcements, and then do events in all the places to build momentum for the newer, better, more interconnected Ontario?

I don’t need Bonnie Crombie to lead the Evan Scrimshaw Party, nor do I want her to take all of my policy positions on board. I understand that I am in a big tent and that the purpose of the tent is to win. I will tolerate many, many, many half loafs to get a government I don’t utterly despise. But it’s just not acceptable. Last night I was talking to a friend and I said something about it only being worth it to run away from our principles to win if we win in the end. The problem, as I said to him then, I don’t actually know if she’s actually running away from her principles because I don’t know what her principles are.

She’s been leader for a year. Crombie didn’t know what she was getting into, she’s not prepared for the job she took on, and she’s leading our party into the abyss. It’s not good enough.