What a strange time to be a Liberal supporter in Ontario.
At the national level four months ago, the party was left for dead, so damaged was it after nearly a decade of Justin Trudeau’s reign.
But Mark Carney won the federal party’s leadership, got a big assist from Donald Trump’s annexationist bloviating, and managed to come within a few of seats of a majority government. There’s some disappointment at coming up just short, but the turnaround was impressive.
The provincial party entered February’s election having suffered through its two worst elections ever in 2018 and 2022, failing to achieve official party status.
A post-mortem of the 2025 campaign will show mixed results.
The good news is they’re back to being an officially constituted party at Queen’s Park. They’re in the regular rotation at question period, have more money for resources and staff, and have earned a seat on legislative committees that scrutinize bills. The party got nearly 30 per cent of the total vote on election night, well ahead of the NDP’s 18.6 per cent — which could indicate that, if people are looking for an alternative to the Tories, it’s the red team that’s within striking distance.
However, Liberals are still astonished at the inefficiency of their vote. How, they wonder, did Liberals get 600,000 more votes than the NDP, but wind up with roughly half of their seat count?
How did the leader, Bonnie Crombie, the former mayor of Mississauga, fail to win a seat in that city? And what do they now do about getting their leader into the house?
The federal Conservatives, faced with the same problem, are taking a common approach. With more than 140 MPs, and plenty of safe Conservative seats, leader Pierre Poilievre convinced a backbencher from Battle River-Crowfoot in Alberta to step down. This will force a byelection, which Poilievre will contest and surely win (the Conservatives won 82 per cent of the vote in that riding).
In a minority Parliament, the importance of having the Conservative leader in the house is self-evident.
The third-place Liberals face a different calculation at Queen’s Park. They have only 14 seats, just two more than the minimum for party status. Any byelection will carry higher stakes.
Not only that, Premier Doug Ford has a majority government, meaning the next election is likely still nearly four years away. It’s just not as urgent to get Crombie in the house.
During the campaign, Ford’s team brilliantly defined the ballot issue: only he could protect Ontario from Trump’s madness. As a result, the polls barely moved at all during the writ period and Ford cruised to a threepeat victory.
But could the Liberals have done better? Yes. They made strategic mistakes, starting with their leader.
As we saw in two elections this year, Mississauga seems to vote in waves. All six provincial seats went Tory; all six federal seats went Liberal. The provincial brain trust apparently overestimated Crombie’s ability to buck the trend.
The party waited until the last minute to decide which riding the leader would contest, ceding valuable door-knocking time to Progressive Conservative opponents.
There’s also some anecdotal evidence that Mississaugans don’t love their politicians bugging out early for (presumably) greener pastures. Crombie’s departure prompted a mayoral byelection, and another city council byelection when councillor Carolyn Parrish successfully contested the mayor’s chair.
(Mississauga city councillor Sue McFadden faced the same unhappy murmurings when she decided to contest a seat in the federal election. She lost.)
But back to Crombie. What if she had decided not to run in Mississauga, but rather in a seat with better prospects? For example, Toronto—St. Paul’s, which the Liberals captured by 4,000 votes? Crombie surely would have won the seat as easily as Stephanie Smyth did, and today we wouldn’t still be talking about the problem of a leader without a seat.
Not only that: I’ve heard that as many as three would-be Liberal candidates, in three potentially winnable seats, opted to drop out of those contests because party HQ took too long to greenlight their candidacies.
Had the Liberals not made these mistakes, would the outcome of the election have been different? No. Ford still wins. But the news for the Grits on election night and beyond could have been much more buoyant and unambiguous.
Crombie now faces a leadership review per the party’s constitution. It could happen this September. But as she told me last week, “I’m determined to stay on and finish the job I started.” Given her business background before she got into politics, that means “rebranding the Liberals as an activist centrist party,” she says.
It's worth noting that our system tends to make winners look more impressive and losers more unfortunate. For example, the Tories won five seats by a combined 489 votes. The NDP won two ridings by a combined 202 votes. Had those votes gone another way, we could be talking about a Liberal party with perhaps 20 seats.
But the party is where it is, and it has some more figuring out to do before its next grand consultation with the people.