Ontario Liberals face 'a ton of work' before taking on Doug Ford's PCs in next election

After back-to-back election disasters, Ontario Liberals are acutely aware of how crucial the next campaign will be to their party's political survival.

"Three strikes and you're out, right?" quipped one Liberal organizer during a social event at the party's annual general meeting, held over the weekend in Hamilton.

The 1,500 Liberal members in attendance tried very hard not to project the image of a party licking its wounds from its two worst election results since Confederation.

Much of their optimism is based on a belief that Premier Doug Ford's Progressive Conservative government will be vulnerable the next time Ontario goes to the polls, in 2026.

"After eight years of Doug Ford, Ontarians will be looking for change in a way that they probably weren't this last election," said Dan Moulton, a party veteran who works for the public affairs firm Crestview Strategy.

But Moulton says there are no easy answers to the task facing the Liberals over the next three years.

"There's an argument out there that Liberals need to reclaim the left from the NDP, and I'd say that more than anything, we have got to reclaim the centre-left from the Progressive Conservatives," Moulton said in an interview during the party's weekend gathering.

"We're seeing a style of politics come from this government that's not terribly conservative, that occupies the space on the political spectrum that Liberals have long held," he said. "How do we compete with that? It's a really challenging question."

It's a question that will be debated over the coming months by whichever candidates decide to seek the leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party.

The leadership race hasn't officially begun, but the people who are most seriously exploring a run include:

• Yasir Naqvi, the member of Parliament for Ottawa Centre and former Ontario cabinet minister in Kathleen Wynne's government.

• Nate Erskine-Smith, the Liberal MP for the Toronto riding of Beaches-East York.

• Three of the eight Liberals with a seat at Queen's Park, all of them rookie MPPs: Stephanie Bowman (Don Valley West), Ted Hsu (Kingston and the Islands), and Adil Shamji (Don Valley East).

Some prominent Liberals are also courting Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie to seek the leadership. Crombie showed up at the weekend event and was glad-handing with party members in the hospitality suites. The former Liberal member of Parliament has neither ruled out nor confirmed whether she will run.

Liberals say the number of potential candidates considering running for leadership is itself a sign of hope for the party's future. They contrast that with the fact that the Ontario NDP acclaimed its new leader, Marit Stiles.

Yet for all the Liberals' professed optimism about the future, there's the cold hard reality that just nine months ago, Ford and his PCs took more seats than any party has won in an Ontario election in 35 years.

Naqvi says the Liberals need to rebuild the party at the local level around the province and listen closely to what Ontarians have to say about their lives right now.

"Mr. Ford probably started with all the good intentions when he spoke about being for the people, but the evidence more and more demonstrates that is to the contrary," Naqvisaid in an interview. "He's really for the rich donors. He's really for his rich friends. He has forgotten the people who've elected him."

Erskine-Smith also says the party needs to rebuild its volunteer presence in every part of Ontario.

"It's very important that we have generational renewal," said Erskine-Smith in an interview. "I think it's also incredibly important that we make our politics about ideas. We can't just be the not-Doug-Ford party. We have to stand for something ourselves in a very positive way."

The Ontario Liberals werethe last major party in Canada at provincial or federal levels to choose its leader by a delegated convention. That meant party members in each riding votedfor a slate of delegates, who in turn selected the leader.

That process favours the candidate with the strongest party organizing machinery, and it catapulted Steven Del Duca into the leadership in 2020. That contest wasn't even close.

A broad consensus in hindsight among party members that Del Duca was the wrong choice to take on Ford played no small part in their decision this weekend to change the method for picking the leader. The Ontario Liberals will now run their leadership race on a one-member-one-vote system.

Giving every member a direct say in the leadership will benefit the party in a variety of ways, said Ashley Csanady, a senior consultant at McMillan Vantage public affairs firm and a Liberal strategist.

The change provides "more ways to attract people to join the party and get involved ... and feel some ownership ofthe result,"said Csanady in an interview.

"In the last election, we actually got more votes than the NDP, but we didn't turn those into seats," she said. "I think it's because we've lost the volunteer base to actually knock doors and turn those votes into elected MPPs."

The Liberals attracted 1.1 million votes province-wide, about 8,000 more than the New Democrats, but captured just eight seats in contrast to the NDP's 31.

A central task for the party will be figuring out how to appeal to people in key ridings that voted Liberal in four straight provincial elections from 2003 to 2014, but swung to the PCs under Ford.

Jill Promoli was a candidate in one such riding (Mississauga-Streetsville). She says while campaigning last spring, she often heard from voters that they had no sense of what her party really stood for.

"Engagement was very low in our community," Promoli said in an interview.

"Our messaging was often disjointed and maybe not hitting on what was most concerning to people."

Ted Hsu, the Kingston MPP who is considering a leadership run, also says the party needed a clearer message.

One piece of anecdotal evidence that Hsuencountered came from his daughter's Grade 6 school project about the parties' platforms duringthe election campaign last spring.

"I asked her in the fall, 'What did the Conservatives want to do?' And she said, 'Get it done.' Then I said, 'What did the Liberals want to do? And she said, 'Well, I can't remember.'"

Selwyn Hicks, a longtime municipal politician in Grey County who ran for the Liberals in last year's election, put it this way: "We've got a ton of work to do. A ton of work."