How the Ontario Liberal Party can Redefine Itself for the Next Generation
This article is based on a twitter thread written the day after the 2022 Ontario Election.
The results of the 2018 and 2022 campaign were devastating for Ontario Liberal supporters and activists. Having come to Liberal politics as a federal Liberal volunteer before becoming a provincial Liberal staffer, I used to joke that I was quite use to political heartbreak. While the tables have turned and it’s now the federal party enjoying repeated success and the provincial party struggling, my response is the same: get to work.
There must be time for grieving, especially on behalf of those who will be harmed the most under four more years of deep conservative cuts that enrich conservative donors and bankrupt the social safety net for the rest of us. But after our grief, we need to get to work on transforming the party and make different choices to change the outcome of the next election four years from now.
I believe we need to open up our party. The Ontario Liberal Party (OLP) removed barriers to membership by eliminating membership fees. Now we must remove barriers to decision-making by scrapping the delegated model of choosing our leader. The reason is simple: politics is no longer something that can happen behind closed doors, guided by party elders and funded by rich donors. Our fundraising rules have changed and political success is driven by who can attract the most voters, volunteers, and donors.
Delegated conventions harm our ability to attract grassroots donors, volunteers, and a wide coalition of voters. They tell people without a deep history of involvement in politics to stay out of it and let those ‘who know better’ to decide for them. When we tell voters to stay home and watch the decision unfold on TV without them, we encourage them to do the same on election day. When people are only invited in after the decisions have all been made, they won’t feel any ownership over whether we succeed or not.
Once we have a new model for choosing our next leader, we need a long race that allows for fresh faces to enter and build momentum. An open leadership model will require candidates to travel across the province to bring new people into the movement. They need time to do it.
My own view is that the potential candidates for leader should not include anyone who has sat in cabinet under a previous Ontario Liberal government. We need a fresh start that isn’t tied to past choices or internal factions. Trudeau was successful because he is charismatic, has a famous last name, and is a good speaker. But it was also because he couldn’t be tied to anything the Liberals did in government and because he was the bridge between long warring factions in the party.
Trudeau also used a growth model for building voter and volunteer support that sought to expand the tent, not rearrange the deck chairs. He also endorsed digital fundraising as the primary vehicle for funding a campaign instead of mega fundraisers. These are crucial points. OLP has taken the Ignatieff approach of trying to bring the band back together by focusing on GOTV without doing the work to expand the support base. Slicing and dicing a shrinking pool of voters leads to where we are now. When it comes to how best to raise the funds needed to fight a serious election campaign, the days of $2 million/night Heritage Dinner fundraisers are over. We need to grow our base of support so we can expand our casual, monthly, and max donor base. That means changing the culture around fundraising and making meaningful asks that make people want to donate.
When I talk about changing the culture, I’m referencing the culture inherited from the McGuinty days (before major fundraising changes in 2016–2017) when a small number of grassroots donors believed they were underwriting OLP’s winning election campaigns. In reality, it was the annual Heritage Dinner fundraiser attended by lobbyists and stakeholders as well as massive cheques cut to the party by those same lobbyists and stakeholders throughout the year. Those days are gone and all of us who are able have to open our wallets in addition to hitting the pavement if we want to win in the future.
I do not believe we lost the 2018 or 2022 elections on policy. If there is one reason the Liberal brand is so durable, it’s because Ontarians (and Canadians) generally agree that Liberals get the big things right. Liberals federally and provincially have a legacy of building up the social safety net while supporting a strong economy. Voters are with us on those things. If policy was the issue, they would not have twice given a majority government to a man who has never released a platform.
Despite this, there is a group of folks in the party who constantly call for a new policy convention. That’s fine. We should have one every cycle. But let’s not kid ourselves that policy or even our policy process is why we keep losing elections. The most recent platform was constructed through wide engagement with party members and the public. Doing it again in-person over one weekend won’t yield better results. Policy didn’t sink us in 2018 or 2022. Bad communication did.
OLP has not had a narrative frame since 2013–14. ‘The Way Forward’ was the last time the party articulated a vision for why anyone should elect us. Wynne framed the renewed Liberal party as ‘the activist centre’ that would help everyone trying to catch up after the recession. There was no coherent narrative argument during the 2018 campaign. In 2022, we ceded talk of moving on from the pandemic and toward rebuilding the province to Doug for and the Conservatives. This was particularly true when it came to the economy.
Conservatives are excellent messengers. They often lie but those lies are swallowed because they are couched in simple, easy to digest messages that connect with how people feel about the world around them and their place inside it. Conservatives speak in single sentences while progressives speak in full paragraphs.
Our policies don’t connect with voters because we try to use every word available in the English language to explain how they work instead of why they matter to the voter. Our communications efforts are directed at stakeholders who give endorsements instead of voters who cast ballots. But the reason to seek endorsements is to bolster your argument with voters. We’ve had it backwards for years and have been ignored accordingly.
A major reason why we get it wrong is because OLP campaign communications has long been driven by two groups: policy advisors and issues managers. One group tries to win campaigns on ideas while the other tries to win by responding to emerging issues. Both cede controlling the narrative from the outset to our opponents. Narrative experts (comms planners and speechwriters) are crucial to constructing campaign narratives but have been left out of party leadership roles in both government and election campaigns. That missing ingredient cuts out the heart of the campaign that connects it to voters.
Instead of creating a narrative and building the campaign around it, policy advisors pull together a loose and unconnected set of ideas to campaign on, pollsters road test them on the electorate without thematic context, and issues managers frame one-off ‘wedges’ around them. The result is a campaign about nothing in particular that stumbles from one shiny object to the next all while voters get entranced by the simple story about their life they are being told by our conservative opponents.
We need to tell a different story. It will require opening up the party, connecting with more people in more places, crafting a real narrative, adopting policies that fit that narrative, changing the structure of the team, and clearly communicating with voters. The next four years are going to be very dark for Ontario under Ford. But they can also be a source of hope if we take the time to seriously rebuild and refocus OLP into a progressive alternative that people of all walks of life actually see themselves reflected in.
Theresa is a former Communications Coordinator for the Ontario Liberal Party and former Communications Director to the Deputy Premier of Ontario.
