How she rose to the top: ‘You never look down’

Crombie faces steep learning curve as she works to rebuild a party with just nine seats

Rock climbing, like politics, is not for the timid.

In her path from business to parenthood to politics, Bonnie Crombie has a reputation for reaching up.

The three-term mayor of Mississauga and mother of three did it earning an MBA as her oldest son Alexander grew from infant to toddler, and in a different way on the Totem Pole — a spire of rock rising 46 metres toward the desert sky in Arizona’s Lower Devil’s canyon.

“You’re not afraid because you never look down,” says the energetic 63-year-old who took up the hobby a decade ago at the urging of friends. To keep fit, she squeezes in several interval training workouts a week at the F45 gym chain.

Sitting in her campaign headquarters, Crombie puts down a takeout coffee, grabs her phone and darts around the end of a folding plastic table to show a photo.

The former Liberal MP is taking a breather on a sheer rock face with a climbing partner. They’re smiling like it’s a sidewalk selfie at Niagara Falls.

“You’re looking to see where you’re going to put your toe in, your finger in. You’re looking for little crevices,” Crombie continues, swiping through a few more images of the ascent.

“I love it because it’s the one time I have to be completely focused. I can do nothing except worry about where I’m going to put my little toes that’s going to hoist me up so I can put my finger in another crevice and go up.”

From her new perch in provincial politics, Crombie is now casting her mind to the next climb — winning a seat in the legislature, recruiting candidates with cabinet potential, raising millions and taking on Premier Doug Ford in the 2026 election.

“I do wake up in the night thinking, oh my gosh, this is daunting,” says Crombie, whose leadership campaign raised $1.2 million from donors — almost as much as her three rivals combined.

It has already been a few daunting years of change.

The new leader and ex-husband Brian Crombie, who met as campus Liberals at the University of Toronto before starting a family with two sons and a daughter, split in 2019 and divorced a year later. Then COVID-19 settled in, making the business of running Mississauga more complex.

She shares a Mississauga house with friend Tania Kolar, making the offer as soon as she learned Kolar had been diagnosed with breast cancer early in the pandemic and knowing she would need support.

“That meant the world to me, that meant everything,” says Kolar, a real estate agent, life coach and speaker who had just begun chemotherapy at the time and is now finished her treatments. “It takes a special person to do that. She was the first person to see me full-on bald. She was so supportive.”

Crombie’s varied resumé includes co-managing Michael Ignatieff’s 2006 GTA campaign for federal Liberal leader, running a start-up cosmetics company, working in sales and communications roles for McDonald’s in Boston and Disney in Los Angeles, and lobbying for the Insurance Bureau of Canada. She is in a relationship with Mississauga real estate broker Greg Gilmour.

With the pandemic winding down came the official call for Liberal leadership candidates.

“It took me a little while to get in the race,” Crombie says, crediting nudges from supporters who felt her experience leading a major city and high public profile as mayor since 2014 make her “the one who can beat Doug Ford.”

“I didn’t feel I had a right to say ‘no’ because I got into this game to make people’s lives better,” says Crombie. “I didn’t get into politics for an easy life.”

It definitely won’t be, says former Mississauga MPP and MP Steve Mahoney, who lost to Crombie in the 2014 Mississauga mayoralty race after she was endorsed by the retiring Hazel McCallion.

He cautions Crombie will have to prepare for the more bruising cutand-thrust of partisan provincial politics, with the Liberals in a distant third place behind Ford and the official opposition New Democrats under Marit Stiles.

“Mississauga council tends to … be a bit of a love-in at times,” Mahoney tells the Star. But at Queen’s Park, “they’ll come gunning for you bigtime with just about anything they can.”

Bring it on, says Crombie. “I’ve always been pushed to work very hard and accomplish a lot,” she says, recalling the upbringing by her mother, Veronica Stack, still living on her own and “feisty” at 87. “It was always rise up out of adversity.”

Crombie looks back to sharing a room with her mother in High Park after her parents divorced over her dad’s “serious alcoholism.”

“We lived with my grandparents — so did a lot of other people. It was a rooming house,” she says, leaning forward and lowering her voice.

“We didn’t have a car … we didn’t have vacations. It was very simple. But I didn’t lack for anything. I felt loved,” she adds, recalling “good times” making sauerkraut and perogies with her mother’s parents, both Polish immigrants.

Scheduled visits with her father, Ed Stack, to get “a milkshake and a hamburger” or to go to High Park didn’t always pan out, as she sat, all dressed up, on the front porch looking for his car. Then her mom would come out.

“It would just break her heart to see me waiting so she’d say, ‘Daddy called, he can’t make it today and he’ll come next week. You can get changed and play with your friends,’ ” says Crombie, briefly choking up and putting a hand to her mouth. “I learned later that he never really called.”

When Crombie was 9, her mother wed real estate agent Michael Sawarna, the man Crombie calls her “real dad.” The trio lived in Etobicoke, where Crombie attended Michael Power-Saint Joseph High School.

She had part-time jobs at Woolworth’s Mississauga location, Thrifty’s, Pant City and Bowring at Sherway Gardens, keeping up her grades while being active in sports.

“I wanted to have my own money, you know, to be responsible, so I wouldn’t have to ask.”

While at the University of Toronto, she landed a dream job — flight attendant for Air Canada, filling in when full-timers were on vacation. It paid well, enough to afford her own apartment in her final year of an honours bachelor of arts degree. There were runs to Europe, where she later took French immersion at Sorbonne Université in Paris.

“The year I got hired, they were looking for people with multiple languages,” says Crombie, who at the time could get by in French, Polish and Ukrainian. She plans to get her French back.

Some political observers suggest Crombie had an easy ride, first as a Mississauga city councillor and then into the mayor’s office, thanks to the late McCallion’s imprimatur and mentoring.

Leading Ontario’s Liberals will come with a steep learning curve as Crombie sets out to rebuild a party that failed to win the 12 seats needed for official party status in the last two provincial elections. There are just nine Liberals in a legislature with 124 seats — and Crombie won’t be on the floor to lead them until she wins a seat.

“Bonnie’s going to find that very difficult. God bless her and whatever work that winds up being but it’s got to be tough,” says Brad Butt, now a Mississauga councillor. A Conservative, he defeated Crombie in 2011 when she was running for a second term as MP for Mississauga-Streetsville.

While Crombie likes to note she won the 2018 and 2022 mayoral elections with an ever-increasing share of the vote, Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown says the real battle was beating Mahoney.

“Certainly, Bonnie owes a debt of gratitude to Hazel there,” adds Brown, who was Progressive Conservative leader at Queen’s Park before Ford. “There’s been no one who ran against her of any name recognition the last two times.”

In the race for leader, Crombie endured shots from Ford, her rivals and from within the Liberal ranks. She overcame some early slips where she mused about development on the Greenbelt and moving the party to the right, later saying she meant toward centre from too far left.

Ford’s Progressive Conservatives used Crombie in their own fundraising appeals, blasting her for running for leader while mayor — a job she took an unpaid leave of absence from on Oct. 7.

She took the Tory attacks as backhanded compliments, since the Tories didn’t single out other leadership candidates.

“I feel like I should reach out to the premier and say I should get a cut of that (money),” Crombie quips. “I think he’s worried I’m a lot like him. I’m very retail. I work hard like him. I go to any event.”

Linda Jeffrey, a former Brampton mayor and Ontario cabinet minster who backed Liberal MP Yasir Naqvi (Ottawa Centre) in the Liberal race, called Crombie “all sizzle, no steak” and “a risky bet for our province,” suggesting she would not provide a “distinct contrast to the Conservatives” because she has accepted leadership campaign donations from developers.

Crombie says she was puzzled by them, having dealt with Jeffrey in their roles as mayors of neighbouring municipalities.

Crombie also pushed back against what she saw as an ageist attack last summer from fellow candidate Nate Erskine-Smith, the 39-year-old Liberal MP for Beaches-East York.

“We should be thinking of this as what kind of party do we want to build for the next 15-20 years and I think I have that opportunity to build renewal in a way that Crombie doesn’t,” he said at the time.

Crombie’s retort, in an opinion article in the Star, was blunt: “Direct or veiled, any suggestion that a woman’s age has a negative impact on her ability to contribute … isn’t just plain wrong — it’s harmful.”

At a stage where most people look forward to leaving the rat race, Crombie insists she’s a long way from the finish line.

“I don’t see retirement in my future. I never did. Look at my mentor,” she adds in a nod to McCallion, who served as mayor of Mississauga until age 93. “It’s very hard for me to sit back and not do anything. I would make people around me pretty crazy.”

Daughter Natasha Crombie, 27, a business consultant with a major firm, vouches for that.

“She’s fearless. She was always a go-getter. She’s never done anything one foot in. She just gets more comfortable.”