The OLP Needs To Start Acting With Intention

On The Leadership Race That Needs To Start

Somehow.

Astute readers of this site will remember the last time I led a column with that word, a riff on David Eby’s absolute luck as the BC Cons blew up and Emily Lowan was elected Greens leader out there, but it’s still an obsession. Neil Young’s Motion Pictures (For Carrie) is arguably his greatest song, but its greatest legacy is the way it has indelibly clarified something for me.

One of my problems with much of the modern progressive movement, whether in the Canadian Liberals or the NDP, and this is often true of many foreign contexts too, is a blithe dismissal of details as important. It’s not always enough to be right if you’re not seen to be right. It’s not enough to simply be correct if you have no way of executing a strategy.

Progressives and Liberals often move with ambition but not much intentionality. There’s a gap, between the strength of feeling and the clarity of the plan underpinning it. When Naheed Nenshi declared that he wouldn’t let Danielle Smith win on heinous anti-trans law because it was “un-Albertan”, he was morally correct, obviously. But there was never any actual plan to stop her, which is why the Not-a-Plan has summarily failed.

It’s also why every attempt to stop Doug Ford has failed. It’s why Kathryn McGarry’s comments to the Star this weekend are so offensive - voters won’t just magically be sick of Ford’s shit, they’re going to need to be convinced both that his failures are the cause of their discontent, and that we have a solution to that discontent. There’s no effort being made to do that right now because we don’t have a fucking leader, or a pathway to getting one. The problem with that is the looseness that this approach to politics creates, and the holes you then have to plug all because the small details weren’t sweated enough.

Carney’s a great example of this, though by no means the greatest one. The NDP are mildly resurgent in recent weeks, partially because of the pipeline MOU and partially because they got rid of Jagmeet Singh, but they’re notably showing signs of life in Quebec. How much of that is the Guilbeault press tour attacking Carney over the MOU and how much is headlines putting “Liberal” and “corruption” together is impossible to know, but it’s a worry. And yet it feels like there’s been no overture to the Quebec left, or hell, even just to the Star.

Carney is of a very important Liberal tradition - he is a Globe Liberal, not a Star Liberal, with all the biases and implications therein - but he sometimes forgets that those are two very different traditions under one very big tent. There’s no cohesive intent in Carney’s media strategy, at least not yet, and that’s a mistake for the government. There are a lot of incremental gains to be made simply by not fucking up the details.

If I were to be able to get one message to every Liberal and progressive in Canada for 2026, it would be to move with intention. Make every statement, every quote, every action intentional, and designed towards gaining ground in the battles of ideas. Poilievre didn’t flip the country on carbon pricing in the matter of days, but by constantly being smart about where he went and the visuals that would be coming out of his events. We need the OLP to take a similarly systematic approach to politics.

I know that OLP cannot be rigid in terms of what we do - events, dear boy, events - but there needs to be a clearer strategy of the announcements that aren’t forced by events. The hodgepodge of announcements that bounce around topics - often good announcements - hasn’t broken through, and won’t. Whether this is a fair criticism is impossible to say, but also irrelevant - the voters care about what it looks like, and as much as we’d like to say they should care about what is and not what it looks like, they don’t.

But this isn’t just about the OLP. This is about all of us, about how we think and how we act and how we interact with politics. We like to conflate doing something with doing something meaningful, a judgement of activity masquerading as a measure of utility. Do Something has become a bit of a mantra, whereby the question of “what should we do?” gets demoted from essential question to peaky detail. Doing something feels satisfying, it feels useful, it makes you think you’re doing this for the Right Reasons, if I can steal the Bachelor’s trademark.

The New Leaf Liberals were one of the most important stories of 2025 because they cared quite a lot about the answer to the question of what they should do. Their moves were smart, considered, tactically adept, and precise. Put another way, they were intentional with their decisions, and they got rid of a leader many thought would stay on. They are a model to emulate, because they very intentionally didn’t simply adopt the Do Something mantra and then let the details be a pesky distraction from peacocking about all the Something they were doing, which is how much modern activism comes off.

Being intentional with your decision making doesn’t mean being right all the time, or getting a result immediately, but it means at least thinking through the consequences. Not every column I’ve written meets this test - some of the more gratuitous Trudeau bashing of the post-Freeland resignation period was petty and vindictive, angry about the things PMO staffers were saying about me and glad to be proven correct. But at the end of the day, this site is a pretty good testament to getting what I wanted to achieve done, which is to create a place for progressive and liberal thinking to prosper and occasionally be read by important people. I don’t think anybody could claim the OLP’s been successful at anything the last decade.

The OLP’s crisis is that they think they’ll be saved by circumstance, by happenstance, by events beyond their control, because that’s what happens to Liberals in Canada. But it’s not. The OLP’s plan back to government seems to be waiting until they get in by default. You might even say they’re deep inside themselves, but they’ll get out somehow.

Somehow’s not good enough. Somehow won’t stop Ford’s managed decline. Somehow won’t raise wages or lower prices or hire more doctors, nurses, and teachers, or make blatantly corrupt rules tighter, or do anything that will help the people of Ontario. And if the party won’t get off its ass, pick a leader by the end of June, and get on with the job of saving this province, we’ll have to do it for them.

Somehow.