While MPPs are expected to return to Queen’s Park in October, one Ontario politician without a seat in the legislature will have a shorter summer break. Bonnie Crombie, leader of the Ontario Liberals, will face a leadership review when the party convenes for its annual meeting in mid-September. The party’s constitution requires that delegates either affirm their support for Crombie or not, and there has been grumbling from many Liberals since the disappointing results of the spring election. To recap: Crombie didn’t win her own seat, early heady projections of displacing the NDP as the official opposition evaporated, and many of the new candidates who did win their seats were previously recruited by Crombie’s predecessor Steven Del Duca — that is, it wasn’t Crombie’s coattails that won them their seats.
If Crombie fails to get the support of a majority of voting Liberals, she will have been effectively fired by party membership — and it will launch a new leadership contest for the third party in the legislature.
Still, grumbling is just grumbling in politics until people get organized. So it’s bad news for Crombie that an effort to challenge her leadership is getting organized, with a band of party members calling themselves the New Leaf Liberals making demands in recent days: first, that Crombie resign unless two-thirds of delegates vote to support her leadership (the party only formally requires fifty per cent plus one, though leaders usually want a stronger mandate than that). And second, that the party not stack the coming delegations in Crombie’s favour. (In addition to some other party reform measures.)
Queen’s Park nerds might be wondering: but I thought the Liberals had ditched delegated meetings? True. But not entirely. While the party adopted a weighted one-member, one-vote system in the last leadership convention (making them the last of the major Canadian political parties to do so) the annual meetings still rely on a delegated system for voting. Each Ontario riding is allotted 15 voting delegate slots, but it’s rare for local party members to fill every slot in every riding. So, it’s been common practice (endorsed by the party) for Liberals who actually reside in Toronto, Ottawa, and other Liberal-rich cities to register for delegate slots that would otherwise go vacant in places like the north or southwest.
The New Leaf Liberals are worried Crombie supporters will drown out any critical voices at the annual meeting. “Our nominations were poorly run where they happened at all, they took too long to happen. The party needs to grow, it needs to improve, it needs to be strong or we’re never going to beat Doug Ford,” says Nathaniel Arfin, one of the group’s founding members. “We need to galvanize this party, we need to lead with a focus and seriousness we haven’t seen from this party in a very long time. Or it’s not going to matter.”
The New Leaf Liberals are, for now, focused on process and aren’t backing a particular Crombie opponent. But while 145 people have signed New Leaf Liberals’ petition, many of them either anonymously or only partially identified, the signatories who have used their full names include several prominent supporters of Nate Erskine-Smith, the federal Liberal MP who nearly beat Crombie for the leadership of the provincial party in 2023. Arfin says the New Leaf Liberals are in no way affiliated with Erskine-Smith, and the Beaches-East York MP isn’t involved.
The party itself is not wading into the internal disagreements among members; president Kathryn McGarry called the recent election results “a foundation to build on together” in an emailed statement.
“And there is more work to be done, as we continue to work with all of our members across the province, building our party towards the next election,” McGarry added.
Even some Crombie-skeptical Liberals are concerned about the cost and length of a new leadership contest relatively soon after the last one ended. Arfin, for his part, points to the lightning contest just held by the federal Liberals that ended 62 days after Justin Trudeau announced his resignation.
(The current premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, won his party’s leadership after a 44-day leadership contest and has won three successive majorities, so it’s hardly obvious that fast leadership contests are bad for parties.)
Both Crombie and her intraparty critics have most of the summer to organize in advance of the leadership review vote in September. But events still have a way of surprising us: Dalton McGuinty faced a leadership review in 2012 and won it handily — only to announce his shock resignation weeks later, proroguing the legislature and beginning the contest that would lead to Kathleen Wynne becoming premier.
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