Action, meet reaction: faced with an increasingly organized and open challenge to her continuing leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party, Bonnie Crombie has started something of a counter-offensive. Members of the Liberal caucus at Queen’s Park have reiterated their support for Crombie this week on social media, having already endorsed her earlier this year.
The context here is a Substack post by Nate Erskine-Smith, the federal Liberal MP and one-time Crombie challenger. “We need change in our provincial politics,” he wrote, and he didn’t just mean defeating Premier Doug Ford. “I’ll be a little more blunt here than I have been to date: that renewal starts at the top.” Erskine-Smith then urged his supporters, who have been among the Liberals most actively seeking to dethrone Crombie, to register for the party’s annual general meeting in the fall.
Perhaps the sharpest retort among Liberal MPPs came from Stephen Blais, who said on X “leadership isn’t a backup plan or a safety net.” (Erskine-Smith, who came second to Crombie in the 2023 leadership race, was demoted from federal cabinet earlier this year.)
The Ontario Liberal Party’s constitution requires that Crombie face a review of her leadership in a vote by delegates. Formally, she only needs to secure the support of 50 per cent plus one; the New Leaf Liberals (the first group to openly organize against Crombie) have demanded she resign if she secures less than two-thirds of delegate support.
Both Erskine-Smith and Crombie have reactivated parts of their leadership campaigns from 2023, with emails flowing out to supporters, urging them to register for delegate positions. Under the party’s rules, if there aren’t sufficient members to fill out the number of delegate positions in a riding, people from outside the riding can be appointed to fill those spaces. That means there’s plenty of room for both pro- and anti-Crombie forces to send substantial contingents to the September AGM.
Crombie isn’t simply rallying the troops to her side — the Liberal leader has conceded some substantial points to her critics, not least that the party was unprepared for the early election call this winter, despite months of clear-ish signals that it was coming. In a video posted to X last week, Crombie acknowledged one of the most specific criticisms of her leadership: that nominations for party candidates were poorly organized and in many cases held late in the writ period, which didn’t allow a lot of time for prospective MPPs to fundraise and do community outreach. Crombie says that nominations for the next election will begin opening in January 2026.
Whether Crombie’s concessions will mollify dissidents within her party is unclear, but she’s not alone in having critics. The Toronto Star reported earlier this week that some provincial Liberals have back-channeled their complaints about Erskine-Smith’s conduct to Prime Minister Mark Carney, but since Carney removed Erskine-Smith from cabinet there’s a limited amount of leverage he can exercise against an MP who’s made being a maverick part of his personal brand. Erskine-Smith was the lone Liberal to vote “nay” on the Building Canada Act, Carney’s law to streamline major infrastructure projects.
If Liberal members see the September vote as a proxy battle between Crombie and Erskine-Smith, even many of Crombie’s critics may prefer to stick with the leader they have — particularly if she can demonstrate that she’s been chastened by the results earlier this year and is both listening to substantial criticism and acting on it. So it’s noteworthy that at least some Liberals, according to Queen’s Park Observer, are exploring whether a different candidate might be interested in the leadership: Jeff Lehman, former mayor of Barrie and current chair of the District Municipality of Muskoka.
His time as mayor of Barrie saw him engage on both transit and housing policy in new ways for the city north of the GTA, and in his last election in 2018 he won 91 per cent of the vote. He turned that profile into a solid run in the 2022 provincial election, where he lost to Attorney General Doug Downey by the slimmest of margins. He endorsed Crombie in the 2023 leadership race after considering a bid himself.
In the somewhat perverse calculus of politics, even as Lehman disavows any ambition to dethrone Crombie, his (still hypothetical) candidacy could make her hold on the party more tenuous by reframing the question. Liberals might not have the stomach for a rematch between Crombie and Erskine-Smith, but Lehman is a relatively fresh face for the party with a substantial political record in his own right — and one who can’t be accused of trying to settle a score with the incumbent.
The Liberal annual general meeting is scheduled for September 12-14, in Toronto.
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