To say Bonnie Crombie
left the Liberal Party of Ontario better off
than she found them is definitely faint praise, considering she found the party as a minivan’s worth of seven MPPs crashed into a ditch with the air bags deployed and steam pouring out of the engine. But still: In February’s election she brought home five more seats than her woeful predecessor Steven Del Duca managed — enough to regain the party official status in the legislature — and 381,000 more votes across the province. Fundraising efforts rebounded impressively:
The party claimed $2.9 million in contributions in 2024
, Crombie’s first year on the job, up roughly 40 per cent from the year before and more than double what Del Duca managed, even adjusted for inflation, at the party’s nadir in 2019.
But she didn’t win, and even worse for her chances of staying on, she lost her riding in Mississauga, where she was formerly mayor and precisely the sort of 905/suburban riding in which she was supposed to impress. Only 57 per cent of members
voted against holding a leadership review at the party’s weekend convention
and, rightly or wrongly, that’s just not the sort of result Canadian party leaders survive. After bizarrely vowing at first to remain leader, minutes later she announced she would resign upon the election of a predecessor.
The “one-and-done” model of modern Canadian political leadership — i.e., you win your first election or you’re out — often makes little sense. It’s both a cause and a symptom of one of the great partisan malaises: The idea that The Other Guys are such obvious kitten-eating reptiles that if you can’t beat them on your first try (even if they just took power two or three or four years previous) then you’re not even worth talking to. But 57 per cent is 57 per cent.
And yet it’s still easy to imagine Crombie might well have become premier someday, and that’s all most partisans really want from their party: To be in power. At some point Ontarians will weary of the Doug Ford Show, just as they tired of the Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne shows before. (Ford
recently emptied a bottle of Crown Royal onto the street
in protest over Diageo closing a bottling plant in Ontario. It was
very
on-brand, but after all these years in power, it also looked a bit like jumping the shark.)
You read a lot about how popular Ford is. It confuses people. A recent Toronto Star column
“why … Ford’s popularity persists despite failures, boondoggles and imbroglios.” Other headlines:
“What explains Premier Ford’s enduring popularity?”
“How has he managed to stay popular while creating and overseeing so many problems?”
The confusion is understandable. A certain chunk of the population thinks and will always think that Ford is the antichrist, while many conservatives — including many fans of federal leader Pierre Poilievre — have had more than enough of Ford’s distinctly unconservative behaviour on spending and corporate welfare, as well as his general refusal to engage with culture-war issues.
But the thing is, Ford isn’t especially popular at all. Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew enjoys 61 per cent approval,
according to the Angus Reid Institute’s latest poll
. Ford is way down at 41 per cent — up three points from the previous poll — ahead of only Quebec’s woebegone François Legault at 22 per cent.
Ford didn’t become Premier of Ontario because he was ever hugely popular. He became premier because he
just barely
managed to beat Christine Elliott in the 2018 leadership race; and the Liberals were done like dinner; and the Ontario New Democrats are useless.
Had a few points gone the other way, Elliott — widely perceived at the time as much more centrist than Ford, though it’s difficult to see much difference between them nowadays — would have become premier. And when people got sick of her and her government, whoever had managed win the Liberal leadership would become premier more or less by default.
At the end of the day, in their heart of hearts, all that most Liberals care about is winning. And they just fired someone who had a pretty good chance of pulling that off, in favour of … someone else. Ford can only be smiling.
National Post
