Back in December, Quebec Liberal leader Pablo Rodriguez announced he’d be stepping down. Rodriguez, who faces allegations that members of his party were financially induced to support his leadership bid, resigned just about six months after winning the post. The party, facing an election this October, has already announced that a formal campaign will begin next week and that the new leader will be announced on March 14, 2026 — so, we’re talking a grand total of 88 days between Rodriguez’s resignation and the anointing of a new leader.
Here in Ontario, Bonnie Crombie announced her resignation on September 14 after an underwhelming endorsement from the Ontario Liberal Party membership. Well more than 88 days have since passed, and the party’s internal leadership still hasn’t even clearly signalled when the race will formally begin.
To state the obvious: The two parties are not in the same position. The Quebec election later this year is a certainty, while Ontario’s next election day is a mystery (RIP, fixed-term-election law), although it’s unlikely to be in the next year or two. Obviously, such timing differences will be reflected in different levels of urgency. But Ontario’s Liberals need to carefully consider the kind of stories they’re telling themselves about the party’s recent political struggles — and how those stories could affect the party’s future.
The argument for a more leisurely approach can be summed up in a succinct question: What’s the hurry? As colleague Steve Paikin wrote last year, some Liberals are urging the party to let the current caucus run things in their Queen’s Park benches for now. The experience of watching Crombie face a torrent of early negative advertising from the PCs seems to have led some Liberals to conclude that the closer to the next election a new leader is chosen, the better.
I’m skeptical, to put it politely. To put it less politely: that all sounds nuts to me. The PCs will almost certainly have a larger war chest than the Liberals regardless of when the next election is called or when the next leader is chosen. They’ll certainly have all the advantages of incumbency, including the ability to choose when elections, budgets, and prorogations happen. The Liberals can’t wish any of that away with clever timing; the point is to pick a leader who can adapt to those conditions and give the party a fighting chance of winning on that terrain despite the disadvantages of being in opposition. Adaptation, in turn, takes time — a leader has to learn lessons from successes and failures, and they can only do that if there’s enough time to rack up a record of both.
To put it bluntly: Crombie faltered in last year’s election after having been in her office a bit more than a year. The idea that successful leaders need less time between party selection and general election seems like exactly the wrong lesson to learn. It’s worth stressing here that Dalton McGuinty was given the time to fail, learn, and adapt despite losing the 1999 election, and he went on to become arguably the most successful Liberal leader since Oliver Mowat.
Waiting also comes with costs. The legislature will be in recess until March; if the Liberals had moved to start the race directly after Crombie’s announcement, they could easily have held a substantial contest and still had a new leader picked before MPPs returned to Queen’s Park. That new leader would then have had some time to get their bearings before the summer fundraising season began and before the municipal elections later this fall. The Ford government’s loosey-goosey attitude toward the legislative calendar may not allow for firm predictions about timing, but that’s the point: imagining there’s going to be some perfect moment to hold the leadership race means missing opportunities that could have been exploited if the party had instead shown some initiative. Thanks to the Liberals’ foot-dragging, the earliest a vote could now be held would be late May, even if the contest formally started today.
Finally, there’s the more fundamental point that, if the Liberals want to defeat the PCs in the next election, they need to communicate to voters that it actually matters who’s in charge at Queen’s Park. Leaving their party headless for months, potentially for even more than a year, suggests the opposite: that nothing could happen between now and then that would matter so much that the party might want to propose a clear alternative vision — something that can be done only with a permanent leader in place. If that’s the message the Liberals’ want to send to the Ontario electorate, then they should absolutely stay the course they’ve been on since September. But if that goes badly for them, they can’t say they weren’t warned.
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