Bonnie Crombie is the new Liberal leader. For her victory, she gets to lead a caucus of nine MPPs — not including herself, since she isn’t one yet. The goal she’s explicitly set herself is bringing the Liberals back to power in the next election, meaning she’ll need to septuple the current count of MPPs wearing red jerseys in the legislature. The party faces a more daunting challenge than that faced by Justin Trudeau in 2015, the one example Liberals can point to of someone leading a party from third place to first.
A few years from now, Crombie and everyone around her might look foolish for trying — Steven Del Duca had the exact same ambitions and failed. My colleague Matt Gurney has already enumerated some of the structural headwinds the Liberal brand is facing not just in Ontario, but country-wide. The more existential question for the Liberals is whether, in the polarized political environment of the 2020s, there’s any niche in the electoral market for an avowedly centrist, big-tent party — or whether they’ll be eaten alive by more ideologically coherent voices on the right and left.
That’s some of the bad news, but after the past few years, “bad news for the Liberals” is almost boring for Ontario political observers. It’s like remarking on snow in February, and for the Liberals, the answer is much the same: grab a shovel, and get to work. So if we were trying to build a case for why the Liberals should actually be optimistic about the years to come, what would that look like?
Let’s start with the fact that, of the premiers who have contested elections in my lifetime, almost all of them got two mandates from the voters — Bob Rae’s NDP being the lone example of a party serving a single mandate. Winning a majority in the legislature three times in a row, however, is trickier: David Peterson won a minority, a majority, then defeat by Rae’s NDP. Mike Harris and Ernie Eves collectively led two majorities. Dalton McGuinty won two majorities before, in 2011, being reduced to a narrow minority — one that allowed the opposition parties to eviscerate the Liberals in legislative committees. Kathleen Wynne inherited McGuinty’s minority and turned it into a majority, before leading her party to the apocalyptic 2018 results. In short: getting two mandates is a banal level of political success in Ontario; getting three is actually very difficult.
That alone is bad news for Doug Ford: voters get weary of governments after long enough, and at around the eight-year mark, they usually start considering their options. Already, one pollster has suggested that a Crombie-led Liberal party could reduce Ford’s conservatives to a minority in the legislature. That alone would be a nightmare for the Tories, as the opposition parties would then be able to repeat for the Ford government what the Tories and NDP did to McGuinty in 2012: use committees to forensically investigate every current and past scandal facing the government. And that’s assuming the Tories somehow manage to keep the opposition divided enough that they don’t simply form government themselves.
Things get more interesting when we consider the state of federal politics. Under the current relevant federal and provincial laws, there must be a national general election in 2025, about eight months before the provincial one. If the current opinion polling holds, Trudeau will no longer be prime minister after that election and the federal Liberals will be considering what to do next. But this could be a blessing for their Ontario cousins: Trudeau would be out of the headlines, and more than a few Liberals in this province would quietly be grateful to put some distance between him and the party’s brand.
This isn’t entirely theoretical: when I asked Liberal Kelly Steiss why she seemed to be struggling in the Kitchener Centre byelection (a week before voting day), she specifically cited the toxicity of the federal Liberal brand.
A victory by the federal Conservatives would have one other, more subtle, effect on provincial politics: it would pull an enormous amount of political talent away from Queen’s Park and toward Parliament Hill, in Ottawa. We saw exactly this dynamic in 2015, when Trudeau’s victory started a caravan of Liberal staffers leaving Wynne’s government to work in Ottawa. The effect of this is difficult to predict, but it’s unlikely to be trivial.
None of these factors are things that the Ontario Liberal Party has the capacity to alter: we’re simply talking about the natural effects of two governments — Ford’s and Trudeau’s — that have been in power long enough that voters may be or already are tiring of them. Governments, the cliché goes, defeat themselves. The job for the Liberals over the next few years is to be there when and if things fall apart and to present themselves as the best option for voters to put the pieces back together again. They might fail, or the NDP might simply do a better job. Or Ford might in fact defy the historical precedents and still win a third majority.
But even with the facts we have at hand today, it seems unwise to think that the 2026 election will be a repeat of 2022’s.
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