What’s Next for Crombie and the Ontario Liberals?

The Ontario Liberal Party leadership race is finally over and a new leader has been chosen. Bonnie Crombie will be the face of the next Ontario Liberal campaign but there is a lot of hard work ahead for her and party activists if she is to become the next Premier. So, in the words of The West Wing’s President Bartlet, “What’s next?”

Meeting the Team

Bonnie took an important first step as the new party leader immediately after being elected. On Sunday morning, she met with the party’s ‘Provincial Council’ — an oversight body that consists of the members of the Executive Council, the presidents of each riding association, members of the Ontario Young Liberal executive, table officers of the Ontario Women’s Liberal Commission, the chairs of OLP’s permanent committees, and a number of non-voting members of this body.

In addition to this group, it will be important for Bonnie to sit down with the staff at party headquarters to get to know them and the challenges the party faces in getting election-ready. While this team technically serves at the pleasure of the Executive Council, a new leader and their team have in the past moved to put their own team in place at party headquarters. I think this is shortsighted for two reasons. One, HQ staff have valuable insights to give to the leader and the election team they will form. Two, when the leader eventually steps down either by choice or after an election loss, it helps to a team at HQ dedicated to the ongoing running of the party and not just the leader’s agenda.

Naming a House Leader, Caucus Chair, and Critics

As a sitting Mayor, Bonnie lacks a seat in the legislature. That means she’ll be even more dependent on her House Leader to lead the party in the legislature, which includes determining how the caucus will vote on legislation, negotiating procedural issues with the other parties, and a host of other decisions. When Steven Del Duca faced this choice, he tapped the obvious choice in former interim leader John Fraser. John is the most experienced member of the Liberal Caucus and would be the obvious choice to repeat.

Likewise, Bonnie will also need to pick a caucus chair to manage feedback from the caucus team and wrangle their shared legislative agenda. The caucus chair in the interim period was Stephen Blais but it might make more sense to appoint former leadership contenders Adil Shamji or Ted Hsu to this role. Adil has been very active in the legislature and always has a desire to convert that action into tools that party activists can use during canvasses in their local ridings. Ted is a known policy wonk and could be a great person to help advance Liberal legislative priorities.

Once the caucus chair is set, the leader will also have to assign critic roles. Since it’s a small caucus, each Liberal MPP will take on a handful of policy areas to hold the Ford government to account on.

One other question is whether Bonnie will appoint a deputy leader. Both Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne appointed deputy premiers to assist them in leading their governments but I can’t recall either carving out a deputy role on the political side. However, if Bonnie were to do so, the obvious choice would be Adil for backing her in the leadership race, for being a young rising star in the party, and for being a talented and bright mind that could be a great sounding board as Bonnie attempts to lead the party from third to first.

Forming a Leader’s Office Team

The new leader will have to form a leader’s office team. It will be quite small at first and likely be drawn from the leadership campaign team. Most of the senior advisors the new leader will rely on will likely advise on a voluntary basis given their existing employment and the party’s fiscal constraints. The paid team will manage the leader’s schedule and tour, handle the leader’s media engagements, and work with the broader group of people within the party working towards election readiness, amongst other things. After co-running Bonnie’s winning leadership campaign and having been at her side since she first ran for Mississauga Council, I think the obvious choice to lead this team is D’arci McFadden.

Maximizing Fundraising

Perhaps the toughest task facing the new leader is raising a significant amount of a required $11–13 million campaign fund in just 30 months. Bonnie has already prioritized this goal by setting a $1 million target for the party’s end-of-year fundraising campaign. That campaign already kicked off in mid-November and will likely include emails, social media, and a direct-mail piece. While this is the biggest fundraising period of the year outside of an election, it still usually only nets between $250–350,000. What Bonnie can do to help is go back to each of her leadership campaign donors and ask them to match what they gave to her with a donation of the same amount to the party, up to a maximum of $3,350.

Uniting the Party

Throughout the race, Bonnie committed to creating a big tent Liberal Party. Those on the progressive wing of the party who voted for a different candidate are looking for signals that Bonnie will deliver a vision for Ontario that resembles their own. Immediately after winning the leadership, she signaled that the party would host a policy conference in 2024. The party has not had a full-fledged in-person policy conference since 2010 and this will be a key opportunity for the leader to give a voice and a role in shaping the party’s platform to skeptical members.

To further unite the party, and as a nod to his strong second-place finish, I would love to see Nate Erskine-Smith tapped as a campaign co-chair responsible for steering the platform development process. I think this is a role he would excel at and enjoy and would be a great way to keep his supporters involved and excited about the prospect of a Liberal government. Given Nate has said he will not be running for re-election federally, he could have the availability needed to lead this process. This move would not be unheard of. After the 2020 leadership race, Steven Del Duca appointed Kate Graham to do the same as the person who brought in new people and energy to the Liberal family and led on policy during that leadership race.

Forming a Campaign Committee

The work of winning the next campaign begins almost immediately with the new leader tapping trusted advisors for key roles in their campaign machine. After a Chief of Staff on the Leader’s Office Team, the next person to be named is usually the Nominations Commissioner. This person will work to set the nominations rules that will select candidates in 124 ridings ahead of the next election. They will also select some committee members to help them with the search for potential candidates and manage the greenlighting process that approves candidates to run in nomination races.

While I don’t know who Bonnie will entrust with this role, my hope is that it is not simply someone who knows the constitution inside and out. What this role and the committee require is someone deeply committed to finding candidates that live up to Bonnie’s leadership commitment of putting forward a diverse and dynamic team of candidates.

Next usually follows a handful of other important roles: the Campaign Director, who manages the ground game during the election; the Campaign Strategist who manages the campaign narrative and messaging; the Fundraising Chair who works to build a multi-million dollar war chest; and some campaign co-chairs who usually oversee the policy process and otherwise act as hype-people. This team won’t be assembled immediately as doing so requires knowing who is interested, available, and the right fit for the campaign ahead. Usually this happens within 12–18 months of a campaign.

I have no great opinions on who should fill these roles (though I do have some on who shouldn’t). But I would love to see someone like Tyler Banham serve as the volunteer Fundraising Chair (with a paid fundraising director and staff team working with him) because that role requires someone who understands both major donors and the importance of sustainable giving programs. We also need someone who can convey that importance to the leader and the rest of the team should they try to take shortcuts in building up a strong and dependable donor base.

Getting Serious About Digital

Historically, political parties invest in digital and voter outreach and that investment helps propel them into government. Think Obama in 2008. Then they fall behind and are beaten by another party that is doing more on that front. Think Clinton in 2016. OLP needs a giant leap forward to catch up to the PCs and to take the kind of generational tactical step forward that wins elections.

In the past, digital campaigning has included voter and donor outreach on social media, by email, and list-building efforts in the party’s Liberalist database. We likely need 1.8–2 million Liberal voters to beat Ford. To do that, we need Data Sciences, the company tasked with managing Liberalist and analyzing the party’s support base, purely focused on that. One of the biggest complaints I heard after the 2022 election is that our data is stale and more work needs to be done both on the ground and in the database to turn the party back into a competitor.

That means the marketing side of digital campaigning should be put in other hands that can work alongside DS. The digital marketing team that continuously blew everyone away during the leadership race worked for Nate. That team absolutely needs to be integrated into the OLP machine to help drive engagement and create the feeling of a page being turned by the Ontario Liberal Party. It would also be good outreach to the team that helped deliver a solid second-place finish in the leadership race.

Likewise, rather than folding digital fundraising into the work of the team managing voter ID efforts, this important work should be jointly managed by the digital marketing team and a robust but nimble fundraising team that values the small dollar contributions online fundraising is known for. Historically the latter has been one person (me from 2012–2018) but this crucial team needs to grow in order to deliver results.

Finally, many commentators in the US are already calling the 2024 presidential election the ‘AI election’. Deepfakes and disinformation will only get worse as we approach 2026 and OLP needs a dedicated team tasked with identifying, countering, and defeating far-right tactics and messages. This team needs to be filled with digitally savvy people as well as those who are skilled at key messaging. We must learn how to inoculate voters against these practices before they can take hold and be given the resources to achieve this.

All of this suggests that Bonnie will have to do some thinking to find a Digital Campaign Chair that can oversee all of these teams and all of this work while working well with the other parts of the campaign team. That person can’t be an employee of a digital vendor and they have to understand politics in addition to digital rather than just one or the other. Too often this sort of role has meant bringing in someone from the tech sector who doesn’t understand politics or someone from politics who has no clue about digital. But this person must understand both in order to advise the Campaign Director and the leader properly ahead of the next campaign.

Building Up Local

The party is functionally dead in many parts of the province and failing to meet expectations in others. A key priority for the new leader must be helping to breathe life back into local Liberal circles, providing training and materials to local Liberal activists, and giving local voters something to be inspired by ahead of the election.

The Work Ahead

All of this probably sounds like a lot of work. And it is. But choosing a new leader was only the first step in the long road ahead back to government. While it may seem daunting, I couldn’t be more excited.