Mark Carney unveiled his new cabinet this week, and time will tell whether the various ministers will matter more to the prime minister than the decades-long trend of centralized power inside the Prime Minister’s Office. But politics is about people, and any cabinet shuffle necessarily moves some people who were inside the circles of power to the outside. So it was with Nate Erskine-Smith, MP for Beaches—East York and now-former housing minister — and onetime contender for the Ontario Liberal leadership post occupied by Bonnie Crombie.
Erskine-Smith was understandably disappointed by the new PM’s decision, though he was a little more public about his upset than his counterparts usually are. Writing on his newsletter, Erskine-Smith said that he reversed his previous decision to leave federal politics precisely because he was offered the opportunity to tackle the nation’s housing crisis, and now that the role has been handed to former Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson: “[the] way it played out doesn’t sit right and it’s impossible not to feel disrespected.”
The Kremlinology of federal politics is not normally a topic we’d spend a lot of time on here at TVO Today, since we primarily focus on provincial matters. But in this case the fact that Erskine-Smith suddenly and unhappily finds himself a backbencher once more in the federal Liberal caucus leads to some interesting questions about what his future might be at Queen’s Park.
To recap for those who missed events in 2023: in the aftermath of the second straight election devastation in which the Liberals failed to gain recognized party status or a seat for their leader, the party held a leadership contest in which Bonnie Crombie prevailed over Erskine-Smith, former Ontario attorney general Yasir Naqvi, and Kingston MPP Ted Hsu. (Don Valley East MPP Adil Shamji entered the race but dropped out and endorsed Crombie.)
Crombie led on every single ballot in the leadership vote and, in turn, led the party to… a third straight defeat earlier this year, coming once again in third place and not winning her own seat. The party, at least, formally exists once more at the legislature and therefore receives some funding for staff and research and no longer has to share a rotating question period slot with the Green MPPs and other independents.
It’s not all bad news for the Liberals or Crombie. The party grew its share of the popular vote from shy of 20 per cent in 2022 to just shy of 30 in 2025, and they did elect a handful of a new MPPs. If Crombie had managed to win her seat, or if the Liberals had managed to supplant the NDP as the official opposition, it’s possible nobody would be raising questions about her leadership going forward.
But the questions about whether she’d be allowed to stay on to lead the party through the next campaign started late on election night and have continued, more quietly, ever since. Shortly after the disappointing results rolled in, both the Liberal party’s executive council and the Liberal caucus in the legislature expressed their confidence in Crombie. It hasn’t silenced the murmurs of discontent. The party constitution requires that a leadership review be called no later than two years after a provincial general election, and Crombie has committed to hold that vote at the party’s annual general meeting later this year. Before then, Crombie will be given ample opportunity to sound out Liberal members and donors over the summer break about whether she’s got the support she needs to stay on as leader.
It's far from clear that, if that vote were held today, Crombie would win by the kinds of large margins that leaders have traditionally preferred to justify staying on. Fifty per cent plus one doesn’t cut it in these things — and in 2023 Crombie only prevailed over Erskine-Smith in the final ballot by a margin of 53 to 46 per cent.
Which brings us to earlier this week, when Erskine-Smith did an interview with the CBC. In it he tamped down on accusations that he was whining about sour grapes for being booted from cabinet, and in that context he said most of the right things. He also made it clear that if he’s not already eyeing a provincial career, he doesn’t mind if other people start imagining one for him.
Asked directly by CBC’s David Cochrane whether he was considering his future in provincial politics (a question in which any answer other than an unequivocal “no” is a “yes”), Erskine-Smith responded with a rhetorical question.
“[At] the end of the day, who joins politics for any other reason than to make the biggest difference they can?” he asked, before adding: “And there’s a huge opportunity to make a difference at the provincial level.”
Erskine-Smith’s sudden free agency would be the kind of thing that could cause Crombie-skeptical Liberals to crystallize and successfully demand a new leadership contest. But he has his own detractors in the Ontario Liberal Party as well (obviously, or he would have won the 2023 leadership race.) It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that there are three broad camps in the Ontario Liberal party right now: people who want Crombie to stay, people who want Crombie to go — and people who want Crombie to go but equally don’t want to see Erskine-Smith win the next leadership race. Which side of the question that third camp eventually aligns with may determine Crombie’s fate.