Scott Stinson: I watched Ontario Liberals go from eternal to endangered

I'm still not really sure what happened, but John Tory and Tim Hudak are probably pretty upset about it.

Doug Ford, premier of Ontario. Photo from Ford’s X account.

By: Scott Stinson

Several months ago I was working on a column about the struggles of the Ontario Liberal leader to get much traction with voters.

A friend came into the room, as happens sometimes when you work from home, and offhandedly asked what I was writing about. I said it was a column about Bonnie Crombie.

There was a beat. “Who’s Bonnie Crumble?,” she said.

I was pretty sure right then that the Ontario Liberals were going to be in big trouble in an expected provincial election.

And, they were. Premier Doug Ford, who had been itching to call an early vote for months, determined as he was to get out ahead of a federal election that was expected this fall, went ahead and pulled the trigger. Much else happened, of course: Justin Trudeau fell on his sword, Mark Carney replaced him as prime minister, Donald Trump went on an unprovoked crusade against U.S. allies that allowed Ford to style himself Captain Canada, and in the end Ford won an easy victory.

Crombie’s Liberals increased their seat count from nine to 14 — bit of a dead-cat bounce there, if we’re honest — to regain official party status, but she also led them from third place all the way to … third place. And, whoops, failed to win herself a seat in Mississauga, despite having been a three-term mayor there.

Ontario Liberals delivered their verdict at their recent party gathering, giving her a tepid 57 per cent support in a leadership review. In my day we called that a D+. Crombie said she would resign as leader once the party held a campaign to elect a replacement.

And so, the former Liberal MP will leave provincial politics having never been an MPP, despite leading the party for the better part of two years. Bonnie Crumble, indeed.

Doug Ford must find this hilarious. Some recent Ontario PC leaders, John Tory and Tim Hudak among them, must find it baffling. And a little sad.

The Ontario Liberals, not that long ago, felt inevitable. This was not, to be clear, because they were great at governing the province, but because they were great at winning elections. I covered Queen’s Park for a time at the end of Dalton McGuinty’s decade-long run as premier, and it seemed then as though his party would soon be shown the boot. There had been scandals big and small, and, crucially, the Liberals had alienated a chunk of their base by embarking on an austerity push that put them at war with public-sector unions.

And damned if they still didn’t win again. Kathleen Wynne won a leadership contest, immediately went about mending fences with the unions, and eventually ran a campaign that warned voters that Hudak and the PCs would leave the province a smouldering ruin of job losses, spending cuts, and zombies. (I might be misremembering the last part.) Not long after Wynne won the Liberals’ fourth straight election — with a majority! — I left Queen’s Park to become a sports columnist. Were the two things directly related? Not exactly, but it did feel as though there was not much point in trying to hold a government to account when Ontario’s voters did not seem at all interested in what was behind Door B or Door C.

That was a decade ago. And the Ontario Liberals didn’t just eventually lose (in 2018), but they have somehow managed to swap places with the provincial PCs as the party that cannot seem to get out of its own way. They replaced Wynne with Steven Del Duca, a McGuinty-era former MPP, in the apparent belief that the best way to defeat Ford, an oldish white guy from the Toronto suburbs, was with an oldish white guy from the Toronto suburbs. It didn’t take.

After a long wait to select a replacement, the party went with Crombie, who seemed to approach the job as though she had all the time in the world to get things sorted for an anticipated 2026 election in which she would sweep to victory. She became leader in late 2023, let three provincial by-elections come and go without trying to get a seat in the legislature, and by the end of 2024 was still polling in the mid-teens, miles behind Ford’s PCs. She also seemed to be the last person to realize that Ford would call an election early this year, and the Liberals, to use a wonky political term, did not have their shit together when the winter campaign was launched. Ford cruised to another win, and Crombie was still on the outs, without a seat at Queen’s Park and with no way to easily introduce herself to Ontario voters.

Now, it seems possible, perhaps even likely, that the OLP will tread water for another 18 months as another leadership contest is organized and conducted, at which point another rookie leader will come in and try to do what Del Duca and Crombie could not: defeat Doug Ford.

Here’s the thing about that: He’s not even that popular, routinely getting approval ratings that are the lowest of any premier. He’s not particularly conservative, especially in the fiscal sense, and his signature move is to backtrack in the face of public opposition. I don’t think it’s being unfair to say that, if Ontario were Alberta, Ford would have been tossed out on his ear by his own party several times by now.

But, Ontario is its own thing, and Ford, who got into politics by riding shotgun for his brother, the guy who was so infamous as Toronto mayor that he became the subject of a Netflix documentary, has instead been running the province since 2018 — with another long runway ahead of him in which the Liberals will be a non-factor.

If you had asked me in 2015 if the Ontario Liberals would end up in the wilderness for seven years and counting, I would have bet my house against it.

And I would be looking for a rental, right about now.

Scott Stinson writes from suburban Toronto, and is a white guy, but is younger than Ford and Del Duca. We think. So totally different.

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