Days before she faces the judgement of her party, Bonnie Crombie and the leadership of the Ontario Liberals have released a postmortem report on what went wrong in the 2025 election. To briefly recap, Crombie was defeated in her own chosen riding; the party was once again relegated to third party in the legislature; and the party failed even to win the hoped-for 20 seats, coming up short with a post-election caucus of just 14 — narrowly clearing the threshold for recognized party status.
Much of what’s in the after-action report (formally, “campaign debrief”) is unsurprising, and familiar to any losing campaign. Local riding officials complain that the central party leadership wasn’t always accessible or communicating clearly with people on the ground. In at least some cases, Crombie’s campaign bus rolled into local ridings on short notice, giving candidates little time to mobilize volunteers; in others, local candidates (particularly in the province’s southwest) learned after the fact that “the Leader had passed through their riding without stopping.”
Both the postmortem and Crombie herself have reiterated the challenges posed by Doug Ford’s early election decision, calling it a “snap” election. That’s at least debatable: every competent Ontario political observer was predicting the election call well before it happened. Here at TVO, Steve Paikin first suggested one was possible in April 2024; I followed in May. But the party’s lack of preparedness had real effects: one of the most consequential failures detailed in this week’s report was the failure to hold nominations in a timely manner.
This will all be debated among Liberals in the days before they gather in downtown Toronto to vote on whether Crombie should keep her job — or whether the party should hold a new leadership contest, with all the messiness that implies.
One sentence in the report, however, tripped me up when I read it because of how it seemingly misreads not the mechanics of a political campaign but the nature of the Liberal party itself.
“We need to build a powerful grassroots movement across Ontario before the next election,” the report argues, and not just be a party led from the top. The choice of the word “movement” in this sentence is either confusing or just wrong. There are political parties in Canada that come out of broader political movements: the New Democrats historically came out of a synthesis of labour and prairie populism, while the conservative movement backs the party of the same name. These aren’t just historical relationships; at both the provincial and federal level these movements provide something of the ideological core of the party. Even when the parties deviate from their own orthodoxy (the most common conservative complaint about Ford is that he’s become a Liberal in all but name), the allegation carries weight precisely because of the role the movements have in their respective parties.
For the Liberal party, however, the idea of a movement makes little sense. You’d be hard-pressed to name a coherent ideological core for either the Ontario or national Liberal parties, as evidenced by how both have ping-ponged from progressive leaders (Kathleen Wynne and Justin Trudeau) to more conservative ones, quite explicitly rejecting the views of their predecessors (Crombie and Mark Carney). Insofar as there was any continuity in governing through the McGuinty and Wynne years, it amounted to “keep the teachers unions and Bay Street happy at the same time, if at all possible.”
And that’s not nothing — it worked for more than a decade! But it’s not the stuff of a movement.
Perhaps Liberals would like that to change. It’s not impossible to imagine a more movement-driven party, one that might arguably be more competitive in the 21st century, where politics no longer privileges the big-tent, brokerage parties of the 20th century. But this begs the question: if the party wants to embrace (or be embraced by) a movement, is Bonnie Crombie the person to lead that change? If not her, who?
This week’s postmortem notes that voters “did not know much about [Crombie’s] values” in the last campaign. That’s not promising ground for movement-building. Maybe Crombie can change that. She’s talked frequently about how her life experience has shaped her choices — her childhood, her time as mayor of Mississauga. But more than two years since launching her bid to win the Liberal leadership, she has clearly struggled to communicate how biography becomes philosophy.
Liberals might decide that Crombie’s time has passed for more concrete reasons, not least the more practical campaign failures earlier this year. If they do, however, her successor will face some of the same questions she faces this week. Crombie or no, if Liberals want their party to have the solid foundation of a movement, words alone won’t be enough. To have something to stand on, voters will want to know what you stand for.
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