The Ontario Liberals Have No Idea What They’re Doing, Do They?

Last Updated on: 15th September 2025, 01:07 pm

I don’t have strong feelings one way or another about Bonnie Crombie, which I suppose may be part of the problem here. But the news that she’s resigning has me surprised and disappointed, because it really doesn’t feel like she was given a fair shot.

She hadn’t even been on the job for a full two years, and the one election campaign she did get to run was one called years earlier than it should have been. that was done, in part, to throw her off balance before she had a chance to get her feet under her. It was also one that, if we’re being honest with ourselves, she had zero chance of winning, because nobody had a reasonable prospect of beating Doug Ford. That the Liberals managed to gain seats was itself a pretty big accomplishment, even if none of those seats went to her. There was at least some upward momentum, which is the best you can hope for when you’re the third party in a majority house.

So with that in mind, I have no idea what the Liberals are hoping to achieve by nudging her toward the exit. They appear to be spinning it as a much needed reset and an opportunity for renewal, but that’s not what it looks like. From where I sit, it looks like desperate flailing, and entirely unnecessary desperate flailing at that. If you want to punch yourself in the dick for no damn reason then have at it, but I’m not sure why you would want to do that. If the goal is to get back on track and eventually topple the Conservatives, instability like this at the top is not going to help. The party would be much better off getting Crombie out in front of people so that everyone outside of Mississauga can get to know who she is. Tour the province. Talk policy whenever you can. Be on people’s radar so that when the next election comes around, those people might think voting Liberal is a worthwhile thing to do.

I mentioned earlier that the Liberals are looking at this as a reset. I think we need to talk more about that.

Noah Parker, an organizer with a group of Liberals who had been urging a leadership race, said while Crombie did a lot of great work for the party, he is looking forward to working on electing a new leader.
“Just look at what happened with our federal Liberals, and the complete excitement and new flurry of fundraising and donors, and of course, the complete 180 of the electoral prospects of that party as a result of a leadership contest,” said Parker, who was also one of several Liberals elected Sunday to the party’s executive council.

Yikes. Talk about a fundamental misunderstanding of what actually happened there.

Yes, a new leader was necessary in that case. Fair or not, the public distaste for Justin Trudeau was such that he was dead on arrival. Had he stayed on, Pierre Poilievre would almost certainly be Prime Minister of Canada right now. But the Liberals fortunes didn’t change just because they were all like “Hey look everyone, we got a new guy!” The only reason, and I do stress the *only* reason that the Liberals are still in power is Donald Trump getting elected again and immediately threatening our economy and sovereignty. To our credit, we the voting public decided at that point that it might be best if we had someone with actual credentials in charge rather than creepy Temu Trump, so that’s what we did. The Liberals just happened to luck into the right person at the right time. Had America voted responsibly last November, there’s a pretty good chance that Mark Carney would have lost, credentials be damned.

What that was was a moment in time. There was a sense of urgency and immediacy that called for a course correction. Unless I’m missing something huge, I have no sense that anything like that exists around Ontario’s Liberals right now.

And so I ask again, why set yourselves adrift when there’s no course to correct?