The Next Ontario Liberal Party Leader as Chief Recruiter

In Theresa’s work with the Ontario Liberal Party, she delivered online volunteer training and managed its online training library in the lead up to the 2014 majority election victory. She also led the creation of the Organizing Ontario online training library after the 2018 campaign to help support party volunteers during the party’s rebuilding process.

Candidates, staff, donors, volunteers, and voters. More often than not, each sign up to join a political movement because of who is at its helm — the party leader. That reality means that part of the job of party leader is to act as Chief Recruiter, inspiring people to get involved and ensuring their experience is meaningful when they do.

Earlier this summer I had a conversation with someone who had witnessed the Ontario Liberal Party go from a widely supported volunteer-driven team in the pre-government McGuinty days to the hollowed-out, unpopular organization it is today. This discussion led to an important question — how did we fall so far from the grassroots movement that delivered 15 years in power?

I could talk for days about all the reasons why. But most of it is inside baseball that comes back to one thing: political parties that gain power become political clubs more intent on retaining power than growing the movement. Instead of continuing the outreach that helped propel the party to power, the focus switches to rewarding those who helped make it happen and holding onto the ‘base’.

This plays out in four different ways as political parties:

• Begin to treat voter outreach as a simple head-counting exercise
• Rely on staff to carry out political operations instead of recruiting an army of dedicated volunteers that staff can help direct and support
• Seek out a small circle of big, one-time donors instead of cultivating a wider pool of consistent donors that contribute on a consistent basis
• Allow candidate recruitment to decided by the leader’s inner circle and a small local executive rather than a wider group of local Liberals and the broader community

Conducting Voter Outreach as Head-Counting Exercise

Increasingly political parties are using data science to inform all their organizing decisions. The practice has come a long way over the last twenty years. But it has also created a culture in the Liberal Party both at the provincial and federal level where political organization is less about a concerted four-year effort to engage and recruit new supporters through practices like deep canvassing and more about hanging on by our fingernails to an ever-shrinking base.

This thinking exists in the highest levels of the movement. When the federal Liberals formed a minority government in 2021 with the support of less than one-third of Canadians, it should have raised alarm bells. Instead, a long-time friend and advisor to the federal party leader celebrated the party’s vote efficiency.

To me, that approach has always looked more like a recipe for disaster than an expression of genius. That’s because relying on vote efficiency can only carry you so far. When growing the party is not your primary goal, the efficiency of that vote can collapse.

Ontario Liberals watched that happen in 2018 when progressive voters, afraid of the possibility of a Ford Government, remained split between the Liberals and the NDP right up until the writs dropped. Then momentum broke towards the NDP and the Liberal vote completely cratered.

Recent election results have proven that the die-hard Liberal base of voters is simply not enough to win an election on its own. We have to engage more broadly.

Failing to Maintain a Volunteer-Led Movement

When your voter pool shrinks, so does your volunteer pool. OLP responded to this reality by increasingly placing paid Queen’s Park staff at the head of campaign operations instead of recruiting talent from within communities. This isn’t a dig at paid political staff — I was a paid staffer for years and know how hard they work and how much they sacrifice for the cause.

What I am calling out is the mindset of some leaders in the party that a political movement can win largely — almost exclusively — on the efforts of paid political staff. That thinking simply does not add up.

When I worked at Queen’s Park, there were around 400 paid Liberal staffers, of which about 100 regularly volunteered their time on political work like by-elections and voter engagement between campaigns. If you do the math, that’s not even enough people to serve as campaign manager across the province where 124 seats are up for grabs every election.

No, if a political movement is to succeed, it has to recruit volunteers and trust them to execute successfully on behalf of the party. But that is not our party’s culture after 15 years in power and even now after five years out of it. Few people are trusted by OLP campaign teams to pull off a winning campaign.

Rather than expand that circle of trust and introduce new training opportunities, we continue to shrink our expectations to what a small group of long-time campaign insiders can deliver on their own. This not only leads to burnout in staff but it also leads to disappointment and disengagement for volunteers.

With two devastating losses under our belt, single-digit seats in the Legislature, and a fundraising crisis on the horizon with the end of the per-vote subsidy looming, there’s nowhere left to go in terms of shrinking our expectations. We have to grow.

Ignoring the Possibilities of Recurring Donors

Ever since the banning of corporate and union donations in 2016, the party has struggled to find its financial footing. The winning campaigns of the McGuinty-Wynne years were largely financed through large-scale donations from corporations, unions, and wealthy Ontarians rather than everyday supporters. When those major gifts went away, so did the party’s fundraising strength. Today, it survives on the soon-to-sunset per-vote subsidy and election period injections of cash from Liberal voters.

To give you a sense of how much the party struggles to engage donors between campaigns, I’ll give you a recent example. Between 2014 and 2018, over 90% of all donations made to the Ontario Liberal Party were made in the final five months before Election Day.

This boom-and-bust cycle required the party’s leadership to cut expenses to the bone and direct the subsidy towards paying off campaign debts. With nothing left to cut and the subsidy expiring, the party needs a complete overhaul of its fundraising culture and approach to donor stewardship in a way only the new leader can usher in.

I’ve been sounding that alarm for over a decade to little avail. But if the party is to survive, it must learn to treat its donors as people and not just ATMs. It also needs to finally get on board with a fundraising strategy that puts sustainable monthly giving at the centre of its efforts.

Candidate Recruitment

I saw a lot of nomination meetings up close when I worked at the party office. It’s largely because of that experience that I’ve never involved myself in one as an organizer.

Sometimes the leader appoints or clears the way for a candidate from their inner circle. Other times the local executive does limited outreach beyond their own networks and actively pushes away new faces. Sometimes it’s a struggle to find a candidate at all because the party is so estranged from the local community that the campaign team has no clue where to even begin recruiting.

In each case, rather than use the candidate recruitment process to bring in new voters, new volunteers, and new donors, these races tend to become a competition where the losing candidate and their supporters sit out of the next campaign. Or worse — where there’s no competition in the first place.

OLP can’t afford to push away anyone who wants to meaningfully engage in the political process. And it has to create opportunities for people to see a role for themselves in that process in the first place.

The Leader as Chief Recruiter

Each of these problems can be solved but only if the next leader is serious about their role as Chief Recruiter and actively creates a welcoming culture within the party that aims to grow the movement.

So far none of the leadership candidates have weighed in on how they plan to shake off the party’s small-organization mentality in favour of creating a modern political movement that has the human resources to win in 2026.

However, we’re now just days away from their hands being forced. We will get our first glimpse of their ability to attract new supporters to the party when the membership sign-up deadline comes and goes on September 11.

But the work will not end there or even after the new leader is announced on December 2. It will take hard work and a willingness to challenge long-held beliefs and practices within the party to turn thousands of leadership voters into a winning coalition of over two million voters on election day.

Theresa has served as the Communications Coordinator for the Ontario Liberal Party, the VP Communications for the Ontario Women’s Liberal Commission, the Director of Communications to Ontario Deputy Premier Deb Matthews, and an election-speechwriter for former Premier Kathleen Wynne. As a member of ‘Team Neutral’, she helped manage the 2013 and 2020 OLP Leadership races.