Ontario: Bay Of Quinte And OLP Convention

On Big Swings And Constitutional Amendments

This is two half columns bound together by the thematic unity of “Ontario”, which is to say if I didn’t have the OLP Constitutional stuff to write about at the end of this I’d probably not have written about Bay of Quinte.

That said, given that I have promised not to keep bleating on about the Federal leadership until there’s actual news there, I’ll have some more Ontario content here next week, plus NB and BC hopefully. Onto Bay Of Quinte!

Bay Of Quinte

This is an unabashedly good result for the OLP and Bonnie Crombie. A 25% swing to the Liberals in a seat with some suburban characteristics should be heartening to the party, and this is the second good byelection in the Crombie era. (We will ignore Milton, out of kindness.) It’s also notable that this is the second byelection of this Legislature east of … let’s say Ajax, and it’s the second one with a substantially bigger swing the province wide polling suggested. As in Kanata-Carleton, the result makes no sense if you just used province wide polling and riding partisanship, even with healthy incumbency boosts notionally removed.

It’s the kind of result that should mean something, especially in a seat where the NDP vote also went up. This wasn’t a case of left consolidation (and I will get back to this later), but a big decline in the PCPO vote. Given I have spent the days since Monday criticizing Federal NDPers who refuse to acknowledge swing, I have to be fair here. This is a genuinely great result.

It’s also a result that is already infuriating progressives, and correctly so. When I shit on the idea of coordination between the Liberals and the NDP this is the kind of result that sticks in my brain. If there was some form of deal, this seat would have fallen. Then again, the Liberals came third in this seat in 2022, so it’s hard to make the case that without the benefit of hindsight this kind of vote split was possible.

What the NDP have to take away from tonight is that they are still nowhere. This is a seat where they could have been competitive and all they did is eat some Green vote from a paper candidate. The Liberals are the party that, to the extent anyone in Ontario is gaining any traction outside of Ford, is doing so. And they’re pissing away their spot as official opposition. I won’t do the “the NDP are two parties stuck together” rant again but they are and they do need to make a decision or they’ll continue to fall to third.

Lastly, this isn’t an overly auspicious result for a man who is blatantly considering a late November election. If I’m Ford I’d still go for an election this year, especially given the Federal NDP could maybe find a backbone in early 2025, but this isn’t a good result for them. If they had lost Milton I’d be more willing to say the polls might be overshooting them compared to the actual results, but it’s pretty clear Ford’s support might be a mile wide right now, but given his personal unpopularity and this result, it might only be an inch deep.

Constitutional Changes

As much as I wish I could be at convention this weekend, I can’t, but I do want to weigh in on the proposed changes to the party constitution that would, in effect, make it harder for the OLP membership to bring about a leadership review and easier for a leader to cling on in the aftermath of an election.

It is undeniable that this push is coming as the OLP’s polling does not auger confidence that Bonnie Crombie is going to do what she said she could in 2023 and go third to government. It is also the case that I bitterly opposed Bonnie Crombie’s leadership of the OLP at the time. It is useless to deny that history as I comment on a rule change that would make it harder for Bonnie to be removed as leader if the next election doesn’t go well for us.

That said, I do have some sympathy for the intention of the amendment. The threat of a review could make the life of a leader who had a successful campaign but failed to win harder than they deserve. However, as a matter of practical reality I find it hard to imagine that if Crombie won 30-35 seats, but the NDP collapsed such that Doug Ford still held a comfortable majority government, that Bonnie would be at any risk.

Lowering the threshold for when an automatic review happens limits the members rights to judge an election result a success or a failure on its own merits. It is for the members to decide whether their leadership has earned another opportunity, not on the leadership to tell the members what they have to accept.

It is also the case that a lack of internal democracy helped cause the party’s precarious decline. Had the Liberal membership been allowed to vote at the 2016 AGM in Ottawa, and had there been a process in the lead up to that AGM in the aftermath of losing the Scarborough Rouge River byelection, it is entirely possible that the last 18 months of our government would have gone differently. Put more bluntly, Kathleen Wynne’s refusal to put a leadership review on the agenda that weekend put the leadership’s desires above the members’, to disastrous effect. We cannot make that mistake again.

The risk of superfluous leadership reviews even after “successful losses” is real, but marginal. It might inconvenience a leader every once in a while, but that doesn’t justify a wholesale reduction in the membership’s rights. It especially doesn’t justify it at a time when the last leadership race was marred by complaints about the lack of accessibility for members.

If I were at the AGM I’d be first at the mic to say no. Given I can’t be, do me proud.