The Ontario Liberals Need A New Leader Now

Why We Cannot Wait Any Longer

One of the arguments that proponents of Bonnie Crombie’s continued leadership of the OLP made in the run up to the party’s AGM in September was that the work of party renewal went beyond the Leader. That’s an argument I and many others who opposed her agree with, and believe that far from just being a Bonnie problem, the whole machine of the OLP needs to be ripped apart and rebuilt. Years of apathy and neglect of riding associations and a decade of ineffectually micro-targeting key ridings has left the party nowhere in large swathes of the province. The campaign, while electing 5 talented new Liberal MPPs, was rudderless and lacked a coherent message about Doug Ford’s Ontario that encapsulated all aspects of his reign, from economics and health care to education and corruption. There is so much to be done.

And now, Crombie’s the impediment to reform. Her continued leadership of the party - or more accurately her leadership in absentia, since she’s not doing any events or leading by any reasonable definition of the word - is now at a point where the party is suffering. We need a leader who can get some media attention and make decisions, a leader who can guide the party through a leadership race and not be a continued symbol of the party’s past. And honestly, we need a leader who is in the House and therefore isn’t drawing a 5 figure salary every month at a time when the party claimed they didn’t have the money to run ads before the writ. It’s time for Bonnie Crombie to resign as leader and allow an interim leader to take the OLP forward.

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There’s a lot the next leader of the Ontario Liberal Party can and should be doing. There should be a coordinated effort to not merely call out David Piccini’s Skills Development Fund abuses, but also to articulate how the Liberals would stop the abuse if and when they form government. There’s been a bit of effort to expose the fact that Ford is spending $10M on a feasibility study for the 401 tunnel, but little connectivity to the fact that Ford’s obsession with projects that will never go anywhere is taking away from getting genuine Indigenous buy-in to projects in the North, which actually could be hugely important to the province and country.

There’s no concerted effort to talk about the way school boards are being systemically underfunded or the fact that schools all across Ontario are making small children learn in portables because their schools are either overcrowded or falling apart. There’s no overarching message, no cohesion, and not even any attempt to use the things that were in the platform to advance a Liberal agenda. As much as I complained that they dropped the platform 6 days before the election (Editor’s note: genuinely how the actual fuck did we fuck that up so badly?), it was a pretty good platform! But without a leader we have nothing.

The Liberal Party needs to stand for more than just opposing Doug Ford, but the presence of a leader who has no authority and is more interested in running for Mayor than leading the province is not going to stake out positions. We need a leadership that can make the case not just that Doug Ford is bad - though given the Abacus polling, that would be a fucking start - but also the case that things can be better. We need a leader who will be listened to, and not one who will fail to communicate.

Crombie’s great failure was a refusal to break away from the Liberal machine. Her defenders often threw the machine under the bus, as if she was somehow both reliant on it and yet above its mistakes, but that was her undoing. Her willingness to work with people who cannot operate in modern politics with success was the undoing of both the party and eventually her leadership. Tom Allison was said to be out of the inner circle more times than Steve Simmons has made shit up about a Toronto athlete out of desperation for relevance, and yet he was still there to the bitter end, managing the pro-Crombie side at the AGM.

If Bonnie wants to believe that the machine simply would not communicate the strain she was under, to paraphrase England’s greatest band, then she is free to. But right now her continued leadership is the impediment to achieving the things she claims to believe in. Bonnie has always said that she is about the party and the province above all, and while I am intensely cynical about her she doesn’t actually deserve to be disbelieved about that. But every day she stays on while not doing anything to help defeat Doug Ford is a day where it’s harder and harder to believe her in good faith.

At the end of the day, the Liberal Party has to be more than about any one individual. Everybody knows I voted for NES in 2023 and was a Crombie skeptic during that race. But in the cool light of day after that race, I came to truly believe that the Liberal Party - even under what I considered to be suboptimal leadership - was the right choice for the province. When I cast my vote for Karen McCrimmon in February, I did it with pride, knowing I was voting for a party that would do a damn better job governing Ontario than the chucklefucks doing so right now. I put the good of the province above my personal grievances, as did thousands of Liberals who poured their hearts into Nate’s last campaign. We deserve a party that puts the province first too.

The Ontario Liberal Party has a long walk in front of it, from the political wilderness hopefully to the government benches. We need to start that walk now, not in 3 or 6 months when the party finally gets off their asses and decides to let the party move forward. We need to do this now, or it will slip away from us and into the same long grass of “we’ll get to it” that every well intentioned scheme from Wynne’s time to now has been met with. We know the issues. We know how to fix them. We just have to do it. It’s time for Crombie to take her exit, and go live whatever next act she wants. The Liberal Party cannot be hostage to her indifference.

Bonnie Crombie must go now.