Bonnie Crombie is finding her new life a struggle.
The leader of Ontario’s Liberals was chosen with the clear expectation she would find a way to revive the moribund provincial party and return it to some semblance of the fighting machine that ruled for an unbroken 15-year stretch.
She had the look: snappily clothed and photogenic, she was an obvious upgrade from Steven Del Duca, her awkward and unpalatable predecessor, and handily defeated three male rivals for the job. She had the record: a former federal MP, and 10 years as mayor of Mississauga, the sprawling suburb/city on the outskirts of Toronto that was once the personal fiefdom of the late great Hazel McCallion. “Seventy-eight per cent of Mississauga voted for me,” in her final re-election bid, she points out.
Yet, a year into her leadership the magic isn’t happening. Polling aggregator 338Canada projects that the Liberals would win just 12 of 124 seats if an election were held this week, the barest of increases over the eight it won in 2022. Another pollster, Mainstreet Research, calculates that both the Liberals and Official Opposition New Democrats have a zero per cent chance at present of forming either a majority or minority government.
The Toronto Star, which devotes extensive space to bashing the ruling Progressive Conservatives, felt the need to offer an assessment of Crombie’s troubles in an item titled, Here’s Why the Liberal Leader is Struggling to Find Her Footing and Take Down Doug Ford.
The inference of the headline is that an opposition politician’s primary job is not to develop a strong and sound set of policies to offer the public, but to “take down” whoever currently holds the position, much as American Republicans declared in the aftermath of the 2008 presidential vote that their top goal had nothing to do with effective governing, but was to ensure Barack Obama became a one-term president.
The Star found that Crombie, while determined enough and hard-working, has had trouble adjusting. Mississauga mayors don’t have a fervent press pack to answer to, and she hasn’t been a quick study. It’s not easy finding attractive candidates for a party in tough financial shape and coming off two crushing defeats. And of course she has to deal with the fact Ontarians are dead-keen to defeat a Liberal leader — any Liberal leader — whether it’s Justin Trudeau or an Ontario cousin.
In focusing on a Ford takedown as her prime goal, it could be argued Crombie is in the same boat as Pierre Poilievre. The federal Conservative boss has spent months single-mindedly assailing Trudeau while offering only vague hints at what he’d offer as an alternative. The Poilievre playbook consists of oft-repeated slogans, and plenty of pledges bereft of details on how they’d be achieved.
Poilievre, however, has the advantage of facing a deeply disliked opponent and a deep-rooted wish for change. Federal Liberals are living day-to-day, like a maxed-out bankrupt juggling credit cards in hopes their lottery numbers hit home before someone gets a chance to inspect the books.
In a world where incumbents are falling faster than the Canadian dollar, Ford remains a notable exception. The lure of another victory, and a third consecutive majority, is so strong his Tories can hardly wait to test the waters. Ford is widely forecast to call a vote in the spring, a year ahead of schedule, keen to get it in while the getting is good, and hopeful he can manage it before a federal race grabs all the attention.
Frustratingly enough for opponents, the Ontario premier is one of those politicians somehow able to do well despite their personal ratings. For much of his six years in office, he’s ranked among the country’s least-popular premiers, most recently tied for last with New Brunswick’s Blaine Higgs, who went down to defeat in an October election. Mainstreet’s recent poll found only 12 per cent of respondents had a “strongly favourable” view of Ford’s performance, against 36 per cent “strongly unfavourable.” There seems to be something in Ford’s bumptious, everyman persona and his readiness — if backed deep enough into a corner — to admit a mistake and seek forgiveness that allows for grudging forbearance.
He was harshly judged by some for his fumbling early response to the COVID-19 pandemic and has been forced into significant retreats since then, in particular a badly mishandled attempt to open the protected greenbelt surrounding greater Toronto to limited development. His government is spending $225 million to break a contract with a brewery group and get beer sales into convenience stores, just a year before the contract would have expired anyway, and just this week was admonished by Ontario’s auditor general for breaking its own rules and going $1.8 billion over budget in a controversial rebuild of Toronto’s aging Ontario Place waterfront park and entertainment site.
While $1.8 billion is a big figure, bloated numbers no longer seem to resonate with voters. Just weeks earlier Ford dedicated $3 billion to a $200 cash gift for Ontario residents, getting it out the door safely ahead of Ottawa’s clumsier offer of $250 and a tax break, outflanking the federal handout by spreading his bounty to virtually everyone in the province while Trudeau limited his to “hard-working Canadians” and took flak for excluding retirees, the unemployed and the disabled.
Crombie can’t be entirely blamed for stumbling over her learning curve when faced with such shameless chicanery. They don’t generally hand out this much free money in municipal politics. Her first big promise as Liberal leader, a tax cut for “the real people of Ontario,” hardly made the grade, especially in the context of growing weariness with political spending habits.
She’ll need to up her game if she hopes to make it a contest. In what’s become a season for ousting incumbents, the key is not just to master the means to join the fray but to successfully differentiate yourself from it.
National Post