We can stipulate that in politics, as in much of life, winning is better than losing. So on that note, congratulations to the Progressive Conservatives and to Tyler Allsopp for winning Thursday’s byelection in the riding of Bay of Quinte. The byelection was called after the sudden resignation of Todd Smith, the PC member who’d held the riding and its predecessor since 2011. So, no change in party representation at the legislature, where the PC majority is large enough that there was no real prospect of dramatic political shifts.
Byelections don’t matter until they do. And, in the most basic accounting, this one didn’t.
But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to say about it. There’s no way to spin a PC win as a loss, but beneath the surface, the returns from last night suggest that the Liberals are back in contention in a way they haven’t been since at least 2014, if not 2011.
Smith dominated the Bay of Quinte for the two general elections the riding existed: in 2018 and 2022, he carried it with commanding double-digit margins. The predecessor riding, Prince Edward–Hastings, he carried more narrowly at a time when the Liberal party was stronger. In 2011, he first won with seven points more than Liberal (and then-education minister) Leona Dombrowsky. In 2014 — a bleak year for the Tories, with Kathleen Wynne leading the Liberals back to a majority — he increased his margin to nine points.
There’s no substitute for good candidates (ask the North Carolina Republican Party about that this week), and Smith was a genial, popular Tory in a part of the province where the Liberals struggled from 2011 onwards. By the 2018 and 2022 elections, the Liberals had fallen so far that the NDP was actually the second-place party in the riding: in both those cycles, Smith had more than 30 points on the third-place Liberal.
Last night, Liberal Sean Kelly kept the PC lead to just about five points or about 2,000 votes, by far the best showing the Liberals have had in more than a decade. The scale of Kelly’s second-place finish is less interesting than the location: if the Liberal brand is ever going to recover in Ontario — something that is still honestly an open question — that’s not going to happen solely by running up the score in the GTA and Ottawa; the party is going to need to be competitive in places that Dalton McGuinty won in 2003 and 2007 and then lost in 2011, in large part due to the vehement reaction against wind power in rural Ontario. In short, Bonnie Crombie might become premier without winning in a place like Bay of Quinte — Wynne did — but it would be a whole lot easier if the Liberals were competitive there. And last night, they were.
To be very clear, it’s still a loss, and these results repeated 123 more times in a general election would still leave the Liberal party bereft. A win would have been better. But Liberals are taking last night’s result with a decent serving of cheer, and it’s no mystery why.
“Tonight’s results in Bay of Quinte once again send the strong message that Bonnie Crombie and Ontario’s Liberals are the only alternative to Doug Ford in the upcoming election,” the Liberals said in a release shortly after the results were clear. “With a strong second-place finish in a traditionally Conservative riding, Bonnie Crombie’s Ontario Liberals have become firmly established as the only opposition able to take on Doug Ford.”
That would be the spin of any second-place party in the context of Ontario’s current politics: the Progressive Conservatives have the support of roughly 40 per cent of voters, give or take, and the Liberals and the NDP are jockeying for who can consolidate the support of the rest. If the story of the 2018 election was the NDP profiting from comprehensive Liberal collapse, the 2022 election was different: the Liberals actually got very slightly more votes provincewide overall, and, combined, the NDP and Liberals received more votes than the Tories, but the split among opposition votes led the Tories to a commanding majority in the legislature. The Liberals were rewarded with precisely nothing for receiving more votes than the NDP, winning back only the vacant seat of Don Valley East.
It’s early yet, but there are some signs that things could be turning around for the Liberals: in the year since Crombie was elected leader, the party has been consistently in second place, ahead of the NDP provincially. And even in defeat, the party can find some silver linings in results from byelections like Bay of Quinte.
The Liberals will be heading to their annual general meeting this weekend in London, where they’ll debate some substantial amendments to their party constitution and Crombie will give a morale-boosting pre-campaign speech to the party faithful. But amid the triumphalism, Crombie will also need to warn her supporters: they’re not there yet — if an election were held today, Ford would almost certainly be returned with another majority — and for the Liberal party there’s plenty of work left to do.
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