Ontario Liberals could be forgiven for feeling their oats a little in recent times.
They have consistently polled ahead of the Official Opposition NDP in province-wide surveys, and in some cases nudged ahead of the governing Progressive Conservatives, despite not having a permanent leader at the head of the party since Bonnie Crombie resigned in January.
The race to select that leader is in full swing, which tends to energize a party as the candidates sign up new members and paint visions of a province once again governed by the red inevitable machine.
But all of that was replaced by a cold bucket of water to the face on Thursday night, when the Liberals failed to win any of three provincial byelections, all in the greater Toronto area. Doug Ford’s Tories held on to Hamilton East-Stoney Creek and York-Simcoe, while the NDP maintained their seat in Scarborough Southwest.
As is always the case with byelections, there are caveats: Voter turnout was low, as were the stakes, with the Progressive Conservatives holding a comfortable majority at Queen’s Park. The winning PC candidates were local councillors who had built-in name recognition. Active provincial Liberals have also been busy with leadership campaigns, drawing time and resources away from those ridings that were up for grabs.
But it is also true that, had the Liberals managed a couple of wins on Thursday night, we would be awash in media coverage about their surge in fortunes, despite those same caveats about turnout and stakes. There would be stories about Ford’s ominous setback and the NDP’s forever struggles in the province.
That the Liberals didn’t win anything, and didn’t come particularly close to doing so, is instead evidence that whoever wins a leadership race that will not end until Nov. 21 will have a lot of work to do in improving the party’s electoral prospects. Any hope that the next leader will take over a government-in-waiting was quite undone by the evidence of this week.
Consider that all three by-elections took place in parts of the province where the Liberals will have to be competitive in the next election if they hope to form government, given their long-standing problems in rural Ontario. York-Simcoe, though a Tory stronghold under former cabinet minister Caroline Mulroney, is in an area north of Toronto that can swing to the Liberals federally or provincially depending on the prevailing mood.
Hamilton East-Stoney Creek, meanwhile, was held federally by the Liberals for a decade before the Conservatives took it by a narrow margin last year, and in Thursday’s byelection the Liberals fell from second to third compared with the 2025 general election. It is not what you would call positive momentum.
“Is it the results we wanted? No,” said John Fraser, interim leader of the Liberals, who then said the party had been able to build some support, by narrowing the margin of defeat to the Conservatives in York-Simcoe, for example. “The whole process of what we did, even though we didn’t get the result, is momentum.”
Pressed on how zero wins show momentum, Fraser said the Liberals had “nothing to lose.” They didn’t hold any of the ridings, and they still don’t. That is definitely one way to spin it.
Fraser was speaking to reporters on Thursday night in Scarborough Southwest, which of the three ridings was the biggest disappointment for his party.
Former MP Nate Erskine-Smith resigned his seat in Parliament for neighbouring Beaches-East York in order to pursue the Liberal nomination in Scarborough, but lost a close race to Ahsanul Hafiz, who owns more than two dozen Domino’s franchises. Erskine-Smith had said the byelection would be the first step toward his campaign for the provincial Liberal leadership, which drew criticism that he was “using” Scarborough for his own political purposes.
He said provincial party employees had worked against his nomination and he ultimately challenged Hafiz’s narrow win, citing voting irregularities, but a panel dismissed Erskine-Smith’s appeal.
Asked about that messy process on Thursday night, Fraser said he was fine with the way it played out and confident that the nomination was fair. Hafiz said he was disappointed with the result but would not speculate on whether it might have gone differently absent the Erskine-Smith controversy.
Fatima Shabad, who won for the NDP in Scarborough with 40 per cent of the vote, 10 points ahead of Hafiz, received just five per cent of the vote in a federal byelection in the same riding in April. Doly Begum, the former NDP MPP who defected from the party in 2026 to run for the Mark Carney Liberals, won easily with 69.6 per cent support federally. It was Begun’s departure that opened up the Scarborough seat in Thursday’s provincial vote. (She did not campaign on Hafiz’s behalf.)
Once this week’s winners are sworn into the legislature, Ford’s PCs will have 79 seats and Marit Stiles and the NDP will hold 27.
The Liberals will remain at 14.
