Lee Fairclough didn’t have an easy path to her seat in the legislature. The Etobicoke—Lakeshore MPP first ran as a Liberal candidate in 2022 and lost by just 842 votes. She was hardly alone in that election: the 2022 race saw Liberals all over the province fall short. The party was returned to the legislature with just eight seats, once again relegated to the status of an unrecognized party. When Premier Doug Ford called the early 2025 election, Fairclough braced herself for a rematch with Progressive Conservative Christine Hogarth — and this time, she won by more than 4,000 votes.
“We rebuilt the PLA (provincial Liberal association), we were out in the community, we were fundraising, we were out knocking on doors,” Fairclough told TVO Today Friday morning. “Ford came along 18 months early in the middle of winter, and we were ready with hundreds of volunteers ready to go.”
And now, the one-time rugby player and competitive swimmer is ready for another challenge: she’s formally registered in the race to be the next leader of the Liberal party, the first sitting MPP to do so. (Dylan Marando, who registered earlier this month, does not currently have a seat in the legislature.)
Fairclough is launching her campaign with promises to address hospital wait times and so-called “hallway health care,” reverse recent changes to OSAP that have reduced grants and increased loans, as well as reversing the Ford government’s narrowing of provincial freedom of information rules.
“What's been incredible to me is the number of people I have heard from as an MPP on this issue,” Fairclough says. “It matters to them, too. It's like it was just the last straw.”
The numbers back Fairclough up on this to some extent: multiple public polls in recent weeks have shown that both the recent scandal about Ford’s attempt to purchase a private jet for his cabinet’s use, as well as the changes to FOI rules, have hurt the Progressive Conservatives politically. But she says there’s more to her campaign pledge than just the immediate political point.
“I just feel strongly that if we want good public policy, we should be able to be transparent about how we came to those decisions. We should be able to report on the outcomes that we are getting from the investments that we make with public money. And we do not see that from this government.”
Fairclough’s campaign launch also includes a promise to prohibit online gambling advertisements, something that overlaps both with her inclinations as an athlete and her professional life before politics in the health-care sector. (Fairclough was a radiation therapist and later president of St. Mary’s General Hospital in Kitchener.)
“There’s an element of this that’s just so corrosive to sport,” she says, relaying her recent experience watching a Raptors game. “It really reminds me of what we learned about tobacco and needing to ban advertising for that. When we legalized cannabis, we didn't allow for advertising that, and now it's time to follow suit.”
The fact that online gambling has disproportionately harmed young men in particular is not lost on the mother of two teenage boys. She, along with three other Liberal MPPs, introduced a bill in the legislature to ban online gambling ads.
“The young men are the first to sign that petition when I'm in a room. But it's also the parents and the grandparents because everybody knows somebody that has been very seriously affected by problem gambling now,” she says.
The Ontario Liberals are in something of an ambiguous place right now. Those polls that show the PC government in more political danger than they’ve faced since their 2018 election also show the Liberals making their strongest showing in the polls since a brief moment during the COVID years. At the same time, the party’s relatively strong showing in the popular vote last year didn’t translate into many seats, they’re still the third party in the legislature, and there’s no guarantees that their current strong polling will last.
Fairclough, reflecting on how the party has struggled since 2018, says the current leadership race is a moment for the party to “roll our sleeves up” and do the hard riding-level work of building a party that’s more competitive outside of the GTA. Fairclough currently occupies the Liberal party’s west-most seat in the legislature, and along with Stephanie Smyth holds the only seats west of Toronto’s Yonge Street — a far cry from a party that won majorities in 2003 and 2007 in large part to commanding performances across both urban and rural southwestern Ontario.
“I grew up in a small town in Southampton, Ontario, and I think all the time in the legislature about, you know, how a given law in front of us would impact my constituency in the Lakeshore,” Fairclough says. “But then I think about the people in the small town I grew up in in rural Ontario. And I look across the aisle and I think, it could be so much better than this.”
The Ontario Liberal Party will choose a leader in November.