Liberals plot their rebirth
It’s tough for most people to take the Ontario Liberals seriously when they have only seven elected members, no official party status, no permanent leader, huge debts and a largely demoralized membership.
These truths are not lost on senior party officials as they start what they believe is the long trek back to respectability and, eventually, to power.
Better fundraising, more fiscally responsible policy goals, more open and accountable party structures will be key as party executives begin to piece together a strategy to restore the public’s faith in the party.
The work, which gets underway in earnest this spring, will be tedious and at times soul-destroying. But such work is critical if the Liberals are to have any chance of success in the 2022 provincial election.
The Liberals’ long trek began when former finance minister Greg Sorbara, who was party’s campaign manager under McGuinty, sent an email in mid-December to current and lapsed party members urging them to become involved in rebuilding the party. Sorbara called it “a clarion call” for Liberal supporters to help the party “get back on track.”
Clearly, the most immediate priority is fundraising. The party is in debt to the tune of about $9 million. Since the June election, about 90 per cent of donations has come from people giving less than $100.
The challenge is to bring back large donors who annually kick in between $500 and the maximum $1,200 and who dropped their contributions during the waning years of the former government of Kathleen Wynne.
At the same time the party knows it needs to develop a new fiscally sound policy agenda, one that distances the party somewhat from the free-spending agenda championed by Wynne during the dying days of her government.
Health care, education, rebuilding roads and public transit and education should be the centre of the new agenda, the insiders agree. Also, the party should stay the course on many Wynne-era policies, including a $15 minimum hourly wage, pharmacare, an updated sex-ed curriculum and climate change.
“It’s all right to say there are lots more things we’d like to do,” a longtime fundraiser said, “but only after we have the budget under control, rather than just throwing more and more cash at every conceivable problem as Wynne did.”
In addition, the party needs a serious internal refresh.
The party hierarchy is generally seen as old, rigid, out-of-date and male dominated. It must recruit and promote the next generation of party leaders, in sharp contrast with the past years and the last election when many rank-andfile members felt too many “old people” were driving the bus.
Among suggestions to improve the party’s internal operations and transparency are annual leadership reviews, creation of a mechanism whereby location riding associations can review their MPP, and a plan to offer free party memberships.
By the end of her term, Wynne was thought to listen only to a tiny cadre of people. Today, Liberals need to listen to bankers, farmers, international students on their way to permanent citizenship, investors, autoworkers, moms and dads and single parents. That’s the only way they will become plugged into the real Ontario.
Recent polls suggest the Liberals are now tied with the NDP in support and are closing the gap with the governing Conservatives. So now is not the time for the Liberals to play it safe, to take tepid steps to reform itself and to arrogantly assume a relatively quick return to power. Only through such a total top-to-bottom review can the Liberals have any hope of emerging from the political wilderness.
NOTE: In my column last week I said former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell, who was appointed last July by Ontario Premier Doug Ford to head a Commission of Inquiry into the previous Liberal government’s budget spending, has advised the Ford government on health-care issues. A spokeswoman for Campbell says that since the appointment was announced Campbell “hasn’t met or discussed health care or health care budgets” with Ford, Health Minister Christine Elliott, the premier’s special adviser on health care Dr. Rueben Devlin, or anyone in their offices or the health ministry.