Ontario Liberals decisively shut the door to internal policy debates

Any serious and competitive political party features internal policy debates and votes that allow at least some portion of its membership to give formal policy feedback that has at least some chance of being representative of the wider non-partisan population.  Every federal political party with seats in the House of Commons does this.  The Peoples’ Party of Canada does not, with predictable marginality accordingly.  Provincially, the Ontario Liberal Party has a similar dubious distinction, with no delegated or membership-wide policy debates since former Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty was Premier.

In that light, it makes sense that the Ontario Liberals have struggled to catch up with the Progressive Conservatives and at times the New Democrats ever since 2018.  The OLP has suffered institutional decline and now lacks a stable policy agenda that can be distinguished from whoever is the Leader of the day.  Much of the Liberal rank-and-file understand this, which is why every 2023 candidate for OLP Leader professed support for restoring policy conventions, including the victorious Bonnie Crombie.  But as a cynic could have foreseen, recent events at the London OLP Annual General Meeting have proven the opposite: that the party has now doubled down on not allowing any policy debates or votes amongst its membership, not before suffering another disappointing electoral outcome.

To be sure, Bonnie Crombie upon her election did go through the notions of “asking” the Executive Council for the return of policy conventions.  But I had emailed the President and the Council prior to the leadership election asking if they would respect the stated will of the incoming Leader on this matter - to which I received silence.  Naturally the Council under the leadership of President Kathryn McGarry – a former Cabinet minister under former Premier Kathleen Wynne, someone who knows how to make herself employable by a Leader – came up with the scheme of a “policy convention” to jointly occur with the General Meeting.

The result?  The convention in London did not feature genuine “policy workshops” worthy of the name so much as policy panels by an arbitrary selection of plausible experts on pre-selected subjects.  Despite opportunities for questioning, not a single policy idea was solicited by the audiences, let alone written down for future impact.

My own efforts for the weekend were focused less on these panels than on two separate constitutional amendments authored by myself to try to force the return of actual policy debates (along with two other pro-democracy proposals of mine).  The OLP Constitution already promised that there would be “Annual Policy Development Conferences” yet had also established that only Council could declare them.  Various OLP Councils over a decade violated the Constitution by simply not calling Policy Conferences.  So, I presented two different proposals as varying enforcement mechanisms, with the help of a few Constituency Associations and twenty members.  Conveniently, the Council put forward its own cynical proposal to eliminate all references to “Annual” Policy Conferences, with no mandatory schedules for their ever re-occurring.

Having experienced the crookedness of the constitutional plenaries in two prior conventions, I was able to foresee the defeat of my own proposals and the passing of the Council amendment without debate.  So over multiple weeks I emailed the Leader six times via her publicly available address at bonnie@ontarioliberal.ca, encouraging her to participate.  Her office still had nothing to say when I accused her in front of a dozen of her own supporters of practicing the “see no evil” approach of looking the other way while sycophants who desire employment under her stack the deck.

The convention organizers took a page from the federal Liberals and booked the plenary for 8:00am-9:30am on the Saturday morning, such that perhaps 300 of the 1000 registered delegates showed up.  Naturally, without any warning such big whigs as the Executive Vice-President and the former Constitution Committee Chair unpredictably condemned my amendments for undermining executive “flexibility”.  None of my claims, neither in explanation or defense of the proposals nor in criticism of the proceedings themselves, were contradicted by any other person; all my arguments were merely obscured and ignored.  I even made accurate predictions proven in real-time, only for that accuracy to make little persuasive difference to an audience poisoned with rampant misinformation.

After my amendments failed, I had the chance to speak publicly in the form of candidacy for a regional position on the Executive Council.  I ran against a pleasant young fellow with energetic partisan campaign experience, but who was tied to the Leader and who lacked visible interest in democratic reforms such as ending the sociopathic Presidential control upon Councillors’ email responsiveness.  I warned voting delegates of the Eastern region, “If the institutions of the party are incomplete in their accountability, the policy feedback loop will remain broken, Ontarians won’t be interested in our message, and we won’t get better results next time.  It is incumbent on us, as a broad group, to work to make this party more accessible to the majority of Ontarians who didn’t vote in 2022.”  Despite positive compliments from many delegates, I lost the vote 70 to 3.

I also had the opportunity to publicly question the Executive Council during an “accountability” session at the convention.  I asked the body, “Does anyone from Council have any idea as to why there has been no policy resolutions processes for over a decade?  Or did prior Councils leave no memo on the matter?”  The Executive Vice-President deflected with a response about policy surveys under the current Council, saying, “The talk of “nothing is happening” is just not true.”  It is obvious that the Executive Vice-President was insecure about explaining the motivations of prior Councils, because his own Council shared the same corrupt motives of grovelling to the Leader for employment opportunities by pandering to the Leader’s worst instincts for full policy control.

Only a naïve partisan can look at these events and conclude that this is a party that has learned its lessons from the defeats of 2018 and 2022.  At the time of writing, the PCs enjoy something of a 16-point lead over the OLP, an observation that seems to be lost on the entire governing class of the party.  The OLP now has a generation of partisans whose attachment is based solely on the past Liberal governing record and on anti-Ford animus, rather than based on a substantive policy agenda, and this generation dominates all decision-making. 

At this rate, it would be astounding if the Doug Ford PCs failed to win the election again, despite their warts and all.  Ontarians will likely re-elect a party with a dubious governing record before they vote to elect a mere glorified campaign college.