LILLEY: Bonnie Crombie faces serious challenge for her leadership

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Bonnie Crombie may have increased her party’s seat count, regained party status and boosted the total number of votes, but some still want her gone.

The leader of Ontario’s Liberal Party faces a leadership review this coming September, as per the party’s constitution, and it won’t be easy.

It’s odd that someone who was able to make such an improvement to her party’s standing is facing a challenge in just a few weeks, but such is politics.

The leadership review is required under the party constitution and isn’t a commentary on Crombie’s leadership – though some would like it to be. The party’s Annual General Meeting runs from Sept. 12-14 in Toronto and will include a membership vote on the future of Crombie’s leadership.

In a video released via social media on Tuesday night, Crombie began making her pitch to stay on as the provincial Liberal leader.

“I’ve been travelling across the province, participating in regional meetings, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts directly with you about what went well in the last election, and well what didn’t,” Crombie said.

She went on to talk about a review of the 2025 campaign, her desire to see the party do better and her plan to make sure that happens including naming candidates earlier for the next campaign.

“I’ll say that right now: We intend to open nominations in many ridings as of January 2026, to ensure that we have a head start recruiting candidates,” Crombie said, noting that earlier nominations allow for greater local fundraising and organizing.

Despite Premier Doug Ford telegraphing an early election nine months before it happened, the Ontario Liberal Party was not ready. Some candidates in key ridings the party could have won were not named or nominated until after the election was called.

That Ford would have gone early was one of the worst kept secrets in Ontario politics.

Still, Crombie, in my view, has earned the right to stay.

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Under Crombie’s leadership, the Liberals have gone from 7 seats in the 2022 election to 14 in the 2025 contest. They went from 1.1 million votes in 2022 to 1.5 million votes in 2025 and regained official party status, a designation they had not held since 2018.

Sure, Crombie lost her seat, similar to another opposition leader at the federal level, but she made things better for her party.

Despite all of this, Crombie faces a challenge to her leadership from a former leadership contender and from an apparent grassroots group that may have ties to that former leadership contender.

Nathaniel Erskine-Smith ran for leader of the Ontario Liberal Party in 2023 and came second to Crombie. Now, the rumour is that Erskine-Smith wants to take another run at the party leadership and take Crombie out in the process. New Leaf, a supposed “grassroots” group, appears aligned with him.

Let me say this about both of them.

The knock against Crombie is that she is lazy and won’t do the work to rebuild the party. That is something that I hear from Liberals and that her supporters deny, but if true then party members will take her out over it.

The knock against Erskine-Smith is simpler and one that any party would have trouble with. If you can’t be part of a caucus, how can you lead a caucus?

Erskine-Smith has built his career as a renegade, an outsider, but politics is a team sport. If you want to be a party leader, you not only need to know how to be a team player, you need to know how to lead a team.

He doesn’t know how to be a team player, and that is something he has shown time and again.

He was leaving federal politics to spend more time with his family until he was appointed to cabinet, then he changed his mind and ran again. Then after not getting into cabinet, he is chafing and looking at a provincial run.

If he won, he would take the Ontario Liberal Party to the left of the NDP.

Anyone looking to appoint Erskine-Smith as Ontario Liberal Leader clearly wants them to keep losing. That isn’t to say that Crombie would win, but at least compared to Erskine-Smith, they would have a shot.