Ranking My Ballot: My Choice for Ontario Liberal Party Leader

Like many reading this, I am a voter in this leadership election. For the first time in a decade, I have not declared neutrality in a leadership election. For a number of reasons, I also decided not to join a campaign team as a volunteer.

With no preferred candidate from the outset, I wanted to approach this race as an independent but opinionated voter. I have written many pieces about the race and kept track of the policy details for myself and any other voters who might be interested.

I have given all the same general advice to each of the candidates and their teams based on the assumption any of them could win. I’ve always thought regardless who wins, I want to do whatever I can to help the candidates be at their best, including ensuring they are truly road tested during this race so they can be the strongest alternative possible to Doug Ford. At times that has meant aggressively challenging them when I think they are coming up short.

I’ve been wrestling with both the order I will rank the candidates on my ballot (if at all) and whether or not I would share publicly who I’m voting for. Truthfully, each of the candidates has been at the top of my ballot and at the bottom at one point or another in this race.

I have come to a final decision only in the last few days. I think that decision crystalized for me as I sat in a New York hotel room watching Democrats defeat anti-abortion and anti-trans Republicans across America on election night. It reinforced for me that fighting for human rights should not only be the top priority of a progressive voter but that it is also a sound electoral strategy for a progressive political party.

Since I haven’t been shy about sharing my opinions throughout the race, I’ve decided to continue with this openness when it comes to who I’m supporting. But before I do, I want to make a few key points.

1. My vote is based on my own priorities and what I think are the most important qualities the next leader should possess. If you want to weigh in on my opinions, fill your boots. But it won’t change my mind and your energy could probably be used more productively doing something else, like pulling vote for the candidate you support.
2. I don’t expect other members to share all of my priorities or arrive at the same conclusion I have. The great thing about being individuals in a (weighted) one-member-one-vote is we all get to have our own say in this election.
3. Regardless of who wins, each of the OLP leadership candidates would make a much better premier than Doug Ford. While all the candidates have shortcomings, my vote isn’t against any of them — it’s for the candidate I think has the edge based on the options in this race.

How I Made My Choice

I’ve thought long and hard about my choice in this leadership race, evaluating the candidates as leaders and weighing the policies they have put forward, the political climate we find ourselves in, the organizational capacity of a twice-soundly beaten Ontario Liberal Party, and my own first-hand experiences in politics over the last 15 years.

All of that led to me to ask, and base my decision on, my answers to the following questions:

THE LEADER AS LIBERAL STANDARD-BEARER:

• Do they have a progressive plan?
• Will they defend everyone’s human rights?

THE LEADER AS CHIEF CAMPAIGNER:

• Do they welcome input?
• Are they an accessible speaker?
• Are they ready to govern?

THE LEADER AS GIANT SLAYER:

• Can they deflate Ford’s strengths?
• Can they put Ford on defense?
• Can they match Ford on fundraising?

When I answered these questions and considered those answers together, Bonnie Crombie moved to the top of my ballot.

THE LEADER AS LIBERAL STANDARD-BEARER

Do they have a progressive plan?

When Bob Rae served as the interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, he quipped that the party was a lot like a bean bag chair — its shape largely resembled whoever sat in the leader’s chair last. He may have been making a joke but he wasn’t wrong.

The Peterson Liberal Party looked different than the McGuinty Liberal Party which looked different than the Wynne Liberal Party. Peterson spoke about moving “forward with fairness and opportunity for all”. McGuinty asked Ontarians to “choose change”. Wynne famously said she would govern from “the activist centre”. Each put forward a progressive vision for Ontario and won substantial mandates by responding to the times they were operating within, rather than trying to claim a specific place on the political spectrum.

And yet, despite the success of this approach, debate continues to rage inside the party about whether we are too far left or right to win instead of focusing on whether we have a plan that meets the needs of voters and helps grow our movement. I don’t think your average spends much time trying to plot out where each party stands on the political spectrum. I do believe their ultimate decision about who to vote for has a lot more to do with who will best help their families get ahead.

A lot of people jumped on Bonnie Crombie when she commented at the start of the race that OLP had previously governed too far to the left. I was one of those people, not because of any spectrum argument, but because of the kind of policies that statement might be calling out.

Afterall, in government I worked on the Basic Income Pilot, debt-free tuition, the poverty reduction strategy, the supportive housing program to end chronic homelessness, the food security strategy, and province-wide rent control. To this day I believe none of those policies went far enough. I’m as left-wing as it comes in this party. It immediately sunk her to the bottom of my ballot.

In addition to where her ideas might fall on the political spectrum, I also had my doubts that she would put out a robust platform. Given she was the presumed frontrunner in the race from the beginning, she could have taken the safer road of committing to very little. But she didn’t.

Whether she felt pushed by the membership to match the progressive platforms of her opponents or understood like Peterson, McGuinty, and Wynne before her that a leader must respond urgently and boldly to the times they find themselves in, in the end Crombie put out more policy planks than any other candidate. And each idea was just as progressive as anything the other candidates put forward. For example:

• On healthcare, she would guarantee access to mental healthcare and homecare.
• On education, she would introduce a youth mental health strategy and double funding to eliminate the repair backlog.
• On the economy, she would get more women into the trades and cut corporate taxes for manufacturers of zero-emission technologies.
• On climate, she would legislate the boundaries of the Greenbelt and create a Greenbelt Trust so no politician can tear it up.
• On housing she would phase in rent controls, deliver funding for emergency rent banks, and require long-term affordable units be created on provincial surplus lands.
• She is the only candidate committed to reinstating the basic income pilot Ford scrapped.

While her critics cling to a one-off comment at the start of the race instead of evaluating the policies she has put out since, this is not the platform of a centre-right ideologue indistinguishable from Ford. This is the platform of a progressive, province-building leader that the whole party can rally behind. She’s put in the work.

Will they defend everyone’s human rights?

One of the challenges of a leadership race is that all the candidates start to sound the same and there’s often little disagreement between them on policy. This is such a feature of a leadership race that the candidates routinely commented on it on the debate stage. So how does a voter decide which candidate’s version of Liberalism they want to move forward with when their platforms essentially put them in a progressive tie?

In the final debate of the race, the candidates were asked how they define Liberalism. Bonnie’s answer focused on human rights and our party’s legacy in creating the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I agree with her that the defense of human rights is foundational to our identity as a party. So much so that I believe a failure to vocally stand up for human rights is a deal-breaker in this race. From my perspective, Bonnie is the only candidate who has lived up to this core Liberal value in this election.

All over the English speaking world, trans people and trans rights are under attack. When the issue came up in Ontario in late August, I received wildly different responses from each of the campaigns in public and in private. I won’t go into all of that again because you can read for yourself what the outcome was on that issue here.

But when I reached out to Bonnie’s team, the response I got back was an immediate ‘yes we’ll put out a statement’. There were no excuses made about why it might not be politically feasible to defend trans rights (there was from other campaigns). There were no arguments made about how we should soften our support as a party in order to win elections (there was from other campaigns). There was no wobbling on whether we should stand up for the policies put in place by Liberal governments over the last decade (there was from other campaigns). There was only a clear answer that trans rights are human rights and that Bonnie supports this bedrock Liberal value.

While some have questioned Bonnie’s dedication to the Liberal cause and to Liberal values, I feel she has demonstrated better than any of the other candidates what it truly means to stand up for Liberal values when those values are on the line in the real world.

READY TO LEAD, CAMPAIGN, AND GOVERN

Do they welcome input?

I needed something to pass the time on a recent flight and put on an interview between Dalton McGuinty and David Herle about the 20th anniversary of the 2003 election victory. After losing in 1999, McGuinty said he embarked on a widespread listening tour, speaking to voters, stakeholders, and even policy experts from around the world who were trying out innovative things to improve the lives of their fellow citizens. He credits the insights he gained on this tour with forming the foundation of the plan that would ultimately win the 2003 election. But none of it would have happened if he thought he already had all the answers.

Listening to others, building consensus, and welcoming alternative viewpoints is an essential element of leadership. All of us in politics should be open to new ideas and perspectives. A person that believes they are always the smartest person in the room is the one most prone to surrounding themselves with yes-men and creating a team whose primary output is group-think.

That’s the fastest way to create a closed political clique instead of a growing political movement. It’s also the fastest way to become detached from the needs of voters. I’ve seen that version of the Liberal Party up close many times. I’ve seen some of that approach in this leadership race. Repeating that leadership style will lead to ruin.

Bonnie has said that she is happy to take on good ideas no matter where they come from. Her policy process during the leadership race has demonstrated this as she opted not to come into the race with her mind made up about how best to tackle the challenges facing the province. Instead, she consulted the membership as she traveled the province to come up with a platform that would resonate with the membership.

Supporters of her opponents scoffed at this online, suggesting this meant Bonnie had no ideas of her own. But I had a different take. While OLP has consulted widely on its platform in 2014, 2018, and 2022 through an open online process, members have been calling for an in-person policy conference for years.

The last major conference was held in 2010 — a decade and three leaders ago. Knowing that history, Bonnie’s approach didn’t bother me. Direct, in-person consultation is what the membership has been asking for so they can feel ownership over the platform at the door. This is the kind of approach we need if we are going to build the party back up into an election machine that can attract volunteers and win in 2026.

Are they an accessible speaker?

In government and on the campaign trail, I’ve worn many hats, but one of them was speechwriter. One of the most important lessons of speechwriting is that it doesn’t matter how beautiful your writing is if the delivery is off. While it might hurt our egos to admit, what’s being said often matters much less than how it’s being said.

Some voters respond best to rehearsed public speakers who never utter ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ in their remarks, like Obama or McGuinty. I’m much more partial to a more natural, retail delivery style that makes voters feel like they are an audience of one. After watching Doug Ford coast to victory twice without ever releasing a platform, it’s clear the leader and their style of message delivery are a powerful force in Ontario politics.

Kathleen Wynne is a great example of a natural or accessible speaker. Her speech at the 2013 OLP Leadership Convention is still the most powerful speech I’ve witnessed first-hand (and I was in the arena when Hillary Clinton delivered her historic nomination speech in 2016). While I have many favourite lines from Wynne’s speech, the one that stood out the most was actually the line she flubbed near the end. Acknowledging she messed it up, she came off as sincere and like she was having the time of her life. Many believe her delivery of that speech is what put her over the top to become leader.

I think Bonnie has a similarly effective speaking style. Her relaxed, ‘happy warrior’ delivery helps remove the distance between her and the audience and allows them to better connect with her message. While Ford possesses this skill one-on-one, he’s far more stiff at a podium and with prepared remarks. This is an area where Bonnie can take one of his strengths off the board by matching and surpassing it during an election.

Just as important as being able to deliver remarks as intended is the ability to read a room from a podium. Back in 2015, I was tasked with keeping Justin Trudeau’s path clear from onlookers as he waited ‘on deck’ to speak at a rally. I got a front-row seat for his fiery speech to thousands of Liberals in Brampton that ultimately shifted the momentum of the campaign and led to LPC winning a majority.

In the final debate of this leadership race, Bonnie demonstrated that she’s the candidate best prepared to deliver that kind of rally speech. She knows how to feed off of a crowd, changes her intonation in all the right places, and projects her voice so that the crowd feeds off her confidence. That’s the kind of delivery we need on the campaign trail if we are going to inspire voters to come out and vote Liberal.

Are they ready to govern?

There is a trend in American politics where if the voters are presented with a choice between a governor and a senator, they’ll choose the administrator over the legislator every time. 17 US presidents served as governors first while only three US presidents were elected as sitting senators. The assumption is that it’s better to entrust governance to someone who has already proven they can manage a budget and deliver services effectively rather than someone whose experience stops after the passage of legislation.

Amongst the candidates in this race, Bonnie is the only one with experience in managing an entire government and not just one ministry, department, policy file, or piece of legislation. As mayor of one of Canada’s largest cities, she has not benefited from the built-in caucus support premiers and prime ministers can rely on to pass their budgets. She had to build voting coalitions on Council every time she has delivered a budget.

For some, executive experience in government is not as important as knowing policy issues inside and out. Some people want the leader to be a policy expert that can serve as Wonk-in-Chief in office. But the role of a governing leader is to take an ‘inch-deep and mile-wide’ approach to issues so that they can keep juggling everything that come across their desk each day without dropping the ball on any of them.

This understanding is why we have an army of political staff to support politicians and an enormous bureaucracy to support the work of a sitting government. While the leader is the ultimate decision-maker, they are seldom the ones ironing out the final details. If they are the ones crossing every T and dotting every I, their failure to delegate will eventually spell disaster for their government.

That isn’t to say that because the most effective chief executives are generalists that they can’t also be quite knowledgeable about the issues. I’ve worked with people who used to brief Dalton McGuinty and I have sat in on some of Kathleen Wynne’s briefings as premier. Neither of these leaders came in with sector expertise on the toughest files they managed as premier. Yet if you ask anyone who engaged with them on those issues whether they were ever out of their depths, you will receive a firm answer of ‘never’.

What they had instead was a generalist’s multitasking ability to manage several issues at once without getting lost in the weeds as well as the humbleness every generalist possesses that acts as a constant reminder that they don’t have all the answers. I believe Bonnie shares these traits.

THE LIBERAL LEADER AS GIANT SLAYER

Can they deflate Ford’s positives?

Doug Ford may as well be called Mr. Teflon — no scandal seems to stick to him for more than a few months. While he became deeply unpopular in his first term in office, he used his folksy charm, everyman appeal, and a widespread pandemic-era bounce experienced by other incumbent governments to boost his popularity again. Senior OLP campaign staff admitted to me during the 2022 campaign that they had no clue how to dent his popularity. So they abandoned all efforts to do so.

What voters have always liked about Ford is his everyman presentation — he’s an average guy who, like them, is just trying his best. That’s why when he makes mistakes and changes course after public outcry, it only strengthens his bond with the public. In their minds, he means well and will make it right (to quote another platinum blonde everyman, Mike Holmes). After each Ford scandal and subsequent apology, “everyone makes mistakes” becomes the common refrain from average voters posting on social media comment sections.

Voters also like his folksy ‘aw shucks’ style of communication that gives him the unthreatening vibe of a friendly neighbour. When he combines that delivery with plain spoken key messages that lean toward common sense and away from expertise, voters feel like they can trust him to make the same decisions they would if they were in his shoes. That ‘gut check’ feeling he brings out in voters is what delivered him back-to-back majorities.

If we are to win in 2026, we have to make job number one undermining Ford’s personal popularity. We’ve tried highlighting Ford’s devastating record and, as some candidates in this race have recommended, contrasting our leader’s strengths with Ford’s weaknesses. It didn’t work. What will work is neutralizing Ford’s positives by choosing a leader that shares them, giving voters an alternative that delivers on the same things they like about Ford without all the scandal. I believe that leader is Bonnie Crombie.

Bonnie, like Ford, is a true retail politician in a party that often lacks them. Her many years in municipal politics have taught her how to relate to the public without the aid of a big partisan political machine clapping on cue behind her. Like Ford, she had to learn how to build her own political brand and operation by getting to know her community and constituents one-on-one. Those efforts have seen her elected as Mayor of Mississauga three times, most recently with 78% of the vote.

As leader of a provincial party, Bonnie and her supporters can’t expect her to soar to the same heights as she has municipally. But she can rely on the retail skills she’s honed during her her municipal career to help return OLP to contention by deflating the most powerful reasons voters still support Ford. While each of the other candidates in this race are lovely people, none of them can match and disarm Ford’s strengths.

Who can put Ford on defense?

Bonnie is fond of saying that she ‘rankles’ Doug Ford and she’s not wrong. Journalists as well as organizers within his own party have commented on how Bonnie gets under his skin. Before she entered the leadership race, PC organizers were whispering to the media that she was the candidate Ford did not want to face off against. In fact, many suspect that wanting to keep Bonnie out of the race was a primary driver behind Ford granting her request to make Mississauga independent from Peel Region.

A distracted Ford will not be at his best on the campaign trail. While many love him for his folksy charm, that charm quickly disappears when he becomes irritated. If he becomes testy on the debate stage as he squares off against Bonnie and Marit Stiles, he may quickly fall into hot water with women voters who know all-too-well the feeling of being talked down to. While there is an enormous gender divide in Ontario’s electorate, you simply can’t win without women voters.

Who can match Ford on fundraising?

When Doug Ford ran for PC leader, his campaign raised $1.3 million. Some of that money was raised long after the leadership race ended. The PC Party used a fundraising loophole meant to help pay off leadership campaign debts to instead skirt donation limits well into 2019. You may recall that both the PC leadership race and the general election were long since over by 2019, yet the money kept pouring in anyway. This situation highlighted two points: the Ford fundraising machine is highly profitable and will bend every fundraising rule in existence to get an edge.

During this race, Bonnie has raised $1.2 million without the need for loopholes or extra time on the clock to convince donors. While the other candidates have raised admirable sums of money, they simply pale in comparison to Bonnie. Only Bonnie has demonstrated she has what it takes to match Ford dollar for dollar in the race to build a campaign war chest.

Instead of matching her fundraising numbers, her opponents have questioned her methods. They have called out the fact that some people who donate to Ford have also donated to Crombie (even though hundreds of donors have been donating to multiple parties for decades). They have also questioned the fact that some of her donors make their careers as developers (but fail to mention they too have taken donations from developers). Yet, even after I asked, they haven’t said they would reject donations from those same donors during a general election or that they would seek to ban people with certain professions from making political donations.

Let me be clear: I believe we should get private money out of politics entirely. I think we should move towards a publicly-subsidized system where there’s no question that political leaders get their marching orders from voters instead of the perception that they get them from donors. But until that dream becomes a reality (or even a proposal from one of the parties), we need to campaign in the real world under the same existing fundraising rules as the other parties. Anything less is a strategic blunder.

Bonnie’s approach is the right one heading into 2026. We can’t afford to fight with one hand tied behind our backs by fundraising under self-imposed rules while Ford racks up every dollar available under the legal limit. The fact is, we don’t have the power to change the rules until we win back government. And beyond banning ‘bundling’ (which would be quite difficult to enforce), none of the other candidates have put a substantially different vision forward should that day ever come. They may believe there is a massive moral gulf between them and Crombie when it comes to fundraising but from where I’m sitting it looks much more like an attempt to create contrast in a race where there has been little.

I think when it comes to fundraising, we also need to be absolutely clear on the stakes for our party. The simple fact is that the per-vote subsidy is the one thing that has kept the party afloat in recent years. But it will be scrapped on December 31, 2024. We now only have a one-year window to get our fundraising firing on all cylinders. Without the subsidy, and without someone of Bonnie’s fundraising abilities at the helm, 2026 could be the last election we fight as a party.

Bonnie Crombie for Ontario Liberal Leader

I believe Bonnie truly stands for Liberal values, both in terms of policy and more intangible things like speaking up for those values when others won’t. She takes a sunny and welcoming approach to politics that will help create the largest possible voting block for our party in the next election.

She has the skills of a retail politician, including the ability to pump up voters on the campaign trail. She knows how to govern because she’s already spent a decade in the driver’s seat. And she is uniquely prepared out of all the candidates to take on Doug Ford in a way past campaigns have been unable to crack.

For all these reasons, I will be ranking Bonnie first on my ballot on Sunday.