Ontario Liberals need new ideas and leadership
A strong victory in a leadership contest is no guarantee of a general election win.
Any candidate for the Ontario Liberal Party (OLP) leadership may need only a powerful membership sign-up machine behind them to run away with the contest. They could then go on to lose another general election, and bring the party one step closer to extinction.
“Sometimes the party establishment isn’t necessarily aligned with where public opinion is going and that can be a problem,” says Bob Richardson, a former OLP chief of staff.
Richardson says it is both a provincial and federal problem, pointing to the triumphant leadership showings of former prime ministers John Turner and Kim Campbell, which were followed by disastrous showings in subsequent general elections.
Regarding the last leadership election won by Steven Del Duca, Richardson says Del Duca’s camp rushed to finish the leadership race as fast as possible. He says Del Duca’s supporters correctly decided a shorter contest would favour their ultimately successful candidate.
Fadi El-Masry, a candidate to become OLP president at the AGM in Hamilton this weekend, is pitching a more transparent leadership race process, including regional primaries to reduce the influence of party members in Toronto and Ottawa and be more representative of all Ontario.
“If our own members don’t have faith that we’re running an open process, then how can we expect Ontarians to trust and support the (Ontario) Liberal party?” says El-Masry.
“We’ve got to change how we do things. There’s no doubt about that.”
Del Duca certainly did not lack supporters within his own party, garnering the lion's share of endorsements from fellow former MPPs who were blown up by PC candidates in the 2018 provincial election. The problem for Del Duca is that few people outside OLP loyalists could think of a reason to vote for him.
It should not be surprising that a group of people who helped lead the party to the brink of extinction in 2018 keep making the wrong decisions in the present day.
In February, several members of the former Wynne and McGuinty governments publicly asked Ontario Green leader Mike Schreiner to lead the OLP, creating discord within Liberal ranks, just for Schreiner to turn down the offer.
Even had Schreiner accepted, he could very well have been defeated by party members who, unsurprisingly, may not want to have their party’s future dictated by the same gang who oversaw the last two election disasters.
“Having been burned in the last election, I think people are kicking the tires more this time,” says Richardson.
“I think people are more suspicious about jumping on a bandwagon.”
Even if OLP members choose to jump on a bandwagon once the party leadership really gets underway after the AGM, it had better be a candidate with new ideas.
Kathleen Wynne lost in 2018 largely because voters were sick of her party’s ideas and policies, and Del Duca lost in 2022 because voters could not understand what fundamentally set his ideas apart from Doug Ford’s.
There are a host of issues to choose from. Housing costs are through the roof, the economy continues to be sluggish and climate change is not going away.
If the OLP leadership ends with a landslide win, they had better hope it is on the strength of their ideas and not their ability to harness an in-party electoral machine.