Beaches—East York MP Nate Erskine-Smith is a polarizing personality in Liberal politics. He’s got an army of primarily younger, progressive supporters but he also rubs a lot of people the wrong way. What sometimes gets lost in that common description is that he has, inarguably, been a loyal Liberal foot soldier for more than a decade in Ottawa, including coming to then-PM Justin Trudeau’s vocal defense during the SNC-Lavalin scandal. So when prominent Liberals tell members of the press that they worked in the Scarborough Southwest nomination race to defeat Erskine-Smith and “save the party,” as Tom Allison reportedly did recently, that says a lot more about them than it does about Erskine-Smith.
Allison, if you’re not up to date on your Liberal factions, was campaign co-chair of Bonnie Crombie’s leadership bid and was a close advisor to her up until the day Liberal members handed her a political (albeit not mathematical) defeat in the leadership review vote last autumn. I can’t tell you for certain why he and others consolidated around the campaign of Ahsanul Hafiz, but I can tell you what it seems like: they disliked Erskine-Smith and wanted to see him lose.
And, for now, they’ve gotten their wish. Erskine-Smith doesn’t seem to have any real path forward in Scarborough Southwest and he might even be finished in provincial politics before the Liberal leadership race really gets going. So, congratulations, anti-Nate Liberals, you win. All it’s cost you is the credibility of the party and any appearance that it’s ready to win an election.
To be clear, I’m not holding Ontario’s Liberals to any standards other than the ones they themselves demanded. One of the last points of consensus about Crombie’s failed 2025 election campaign, before she was shown the door, was that the party had waited too long to hold nomination races and didn’t give candidates enough time to get to know their ridings. Crombie herself conceded the point and had promised to start nominations early, if members let her stay. They opted not to keep her around, but the party didn’t abandon the idea that it needed to do more and better work preparing to run competitive riding nominations.
The results in Scarborough Southwest are, in that context, an unmitigated disaster. Erskine-Smith has made substantial allegations, not just of the kind of run-of-the-mill shenanigans we’ve seen in previous nomination races (we’ve all long since become inured to the phenomenon of “instant memberships” in races like this), but of a more comprehensive collapse in the basic administration of a free and fair election. His allegations are genuinely troubling. Among other things, his campaign alleges that Hafiz voters were, in plain view of party volunteers, taking photos and videos of their filled ballots — something that’s illegal in provincial and federal elections because it can be an indicator of vote-buying.
The usual journalistic boilerplate here is to say “these allegations haven’t been proven in court,” and they haven’t been, and might never be: Erskine-Smith’s only clear avenue of appeal is to the Ontario Liberal party itself, the same one he alleges has badly failed at its own internal administration and one whose powerbrokers have publicly boasted about their mission to keep him out of it.
All of this is bad, even if we assume it didn’t actually change the outcome in Scarborough Southwest. Not because Erskine-Smith is owed a Liberal nomination, but because if his campaign is right, then the party didn’t manage to conduct an election with even the barest of standards. Even ignoring Erskine-Smith’s allegations, the stuff reporters saw in the open last Saturday — things documented by my colleague Steve Paikin — scream “amateur hour” from a party that’s nominally trying to sell itself to voters as an alternative to the current government.
Hafiz will either win the coming byelection in Scarborough Southwest or — if Liberals are truly cursed — he’ll lose it, and the world will keep on spinning one way or another. But Scarborough Southwest is just the start. Having dragged their feet in even calling the leadership race, the party won’t have a new leader in place until November, and assuming that leader even has a seat in the legislature, it will be well into 2027 before they have their staff hired and find their footing. The new leader will then have to turn their mind towards nominations in the rest of Ontario.
Assuming the Ford government doesn’t revise the province’s electoral boundaries, there will be 124 seats to contest in the next election. The Liberals, as the smallest recognized party in the legislature, have only 12 incumbents. The party’s constitution limits the ability of the leader to simply appoint candidates, so it’s fair to say the Liberals will need to hold something like 100 nomination races between November and the next election, and that timeline is compressed if Liberals want their candidates to have several months (or even a year) before a likely election in 2029.
That was always going to be logistically difficult for what is still the legislature’s third party, but it was the party’s own stated priority. Scarborough Southwest is the first byelection since the 2025 election, so it was absolutely vital that — totally ignoring the Erskine-Smith drama for a moment — the nomination race be executed cleanly and competently, or at least well enough that the party could credibly claim it was prepared to do the work ahead of it. Instead, the party appears to have administered the contest with all the order and dignity of a kindergarten field trip to a candy factory.
You don’t have to like Erskine-Smith, or even be cheering for the Liberal party itself, to see this as a disaster the party needs to take seriously. Healthy democracies have strong, competitive political parties. The Liberals identified a clear, practical priority for the party to rebuild its support around Ontario. And last weekend they failed in their first real test.