Grits must now play catch-up in race with Ford Cohn

The front-runner finished first. But for the next 2 ⁄ years, she’ll be 1

2 playing catch up.

Bonnie Crombie sealed her victory in the Liberal leadership race Saturday. Blessed with a huge head start, thanks to strong name recognition, she ran a cautious and controlled campaign against her rivals.

But her front-runner’s role is no more. Now comes the inevitable role reversal for the just-crowned Liberal leader, who inherits a thirdplace party struggling to regain its status.

Going forward, the Liberal frontrunner is running to catch Premier Doug Ford, whose governing Tories are far out in front.

“We’re in for a bigger fight ahead,” she told cheering supporters after her victory. “But this is our moment.”

On the eve of Saturday’s victory, Crombie got good news from an Abacus poll for the Toronto Star showing most Ontarians viewed her as unstoppable in the Liberal race against her opponents Nate Erskine-Smith, Yasir Naqvi and Ted Hsu. But in the broader election campaign ahead, her work is just beginning.

That same poll showed Ford’s Tories have achieved a death-defying recovery despite months of bad publicity over the Greenbelt scandal. The premier whose government is now being probed by police still has the approbation of far more Ontarians than his two newly installed rivals — Crombie and the NDP’s Marit Stiles (who won the leadership by acclamation last February).

But there are early signs that Crombie could change the state of play, despite starting from so far back.

The Abacus results showed the governing Progressive Conservatives with 42 per cent support, with the leaderless Liberals languishing at 23 per cent, locked in a virtual statistical tie with the NDP’s Stiles stilled stalled at 24 per cent. With Crombie as leader, however, the Liberals would vault ahead to 31 per cent, leaving the NDP behind at 20 per cent and reeling in Ford at 39 per cent.

That’s a mere 8-per-cent gap, which would leave the Crombie Liberals well positioned to narrow the PC lead in the campaign to come. To be sure, polls are merely snapshots in time, especially in a province where voters spend little time pondering the comings and goings at Queen’s Park.

But if the newly victorious Crombie can continue eating into NDP support — establishing herself as the unrivalled dragon slayer capable of reining in Ford’s fire-breathing rhetoric — she would already have won half the battle even before the next campaign begins. Both Liberals and New Democrats are forever fighting over the same anti-Tory votes to establish themselves as the most promising contender, which means beating back the other opposition party is always the prerequisite to beating out the governing party.

That preliminary contest is sometimes described as a “progressive primary,” but it’s hard to know whether that voter pool is truly made up of left-leaning progressives, or merely anti-Tory (now anti-Ford) Ontarians. Either way, the question for Crombie is whether she has what it takes to rally Ontarians, and whether she has more of it than the NDP’s Stiles.

Unlike the NDP leader, who inherited her party’s leadership uncontested, Crombie is now battle tested after a gruelling campaign. Despite her attempts to remain above the fray, preserving her lead while her rivals took potshots, Crombie learned the importance of resilience — a word she invoked repeatedly in her moment of triumph Saturday.

The most successful politicians understand the strategy and brutality of boxing, where you learn how to take a punch when you commit the inevitable gaffe of lowering your guard. To win the match, you have to pick yourself up off the mat to fight the next round right after you lose the last one.

“We’re going to show exactly how resilient we are as a party,” she told cheering supporters in her victory speech. “My Mom taught me resilience.”

Crombie made mistakes early in the race — in the opening round — when she talked out loud about taking the Liberals to the right (she meant right back to the centre they once straddled). Then she used loose language on the Greenbelt that was taken out of context (No, she wasn’t proposing to bulldoze it like Ford, merely musing about the minor adjustments of past Liberal governments).

Yet she learned from her gaffes and tried to projected gravitas. Liberals know that Crombie remains a work in progress, even if not as progressive as some might want — though she promised “smart, progressive solutions.”

Ultimately, Crombie’s opponents underestimated her — mistaking those early mistakes for mortal wounds or moral failings, even as she quickly made course corrections and corrected the record. Most Liberals who listened were left with little doubt of her track record in Parliament, her legacy as a three-term Mississauga mayor, and her fidelity to Liberal values on health care and education.

When Crombie’s opponents attacked her fundraising prowess — papering over their own limitations in raising money — she reminded Liberals that their party had reformed Ontario’s fundraising laws only to lag badly behind the other major parties ever since. You can’t fight fire, or Ford, without funds.

Until recently, the Liberals had been burdened by the heavy baggage and bad karma attached to their 15-year dynasty, which fell from power in 2018. The accumulated detritus dragged down Kathleen Wynne as premier, and weighed down her short-lived successor as Liberal leader, Steven Del Duca, in the 2022 campaign.

The party is in a hurry to forget Del Duca and forgive Wynne, while footnoting her predecessor Dalton McGuinty (both former premiers called for unity Saturday). Liberals were determined to cast off the barnacles that burdened the party in the past.

But the base may yet come back in future. It’s worth remembering that the Liberals won more votes than the NDP in the last election, only to lose out thanks to the vagaries of our voting system (their seat count once again fell below the threshold for official party recognition, while the NDP won the consolation prize of official opposition status).

If Crombie isn’t always a perfectly polished politician, the same can be said for the current Ontario premier and, for that matter, the incumbent U.S. president. What matters more in today’s political climate is not perfection but presentation, recognition and retention.

Crombie, like Ford, presents as a celebrity retail politician who pops. She stands out in a crowd much like the Tory leader does, commanding attention.

In the Liberal leadership campaign, Crombie’s opponents consistently underestimated her appeal and her steel. For all his hubris, Ford is not nearly so foolish — he has been tracking Crombie’s progress from the outset, mindful that she shares his skill for connecting with voters.

For many Liberals, Crombie’s demonstrated ability to get under Ford’s skin — and get into his head — marked her as the candidate to beat in the leadership race. If only because she seemed best placed to beat him in a general election.

For the moment, the premier is sitting pretty in first place. But, mindful that his new Liberal opponent shares his talent for turning heads, Ford keeps looking over his shoulder.