Unpublished Opinions
Ottawa, Ontario
About the author
Stefan Klietsch grew up in the Ottawa Valley outside the town of Renfrew. He later studied Political Science at the University of Ottawa, with a Minor in Religious Studies. He ran as a candidate for Member of Parliament for Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke three times from 2015 to 2021. He recently graduated with a Master of Arts in Political Science at the University of Carleton.
Ontario Liberals decisively shut the door to internal policy debates
September 26, 2024
The Ontario Liberals have shot themselves in the feet by decisively shutting down the prospect of any internal policy debates and votes before Ontario goes back to the polls
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.
References
Comments
Stefan,
I want to take a moment to respond to your piece with the respect and thoughtfulness that a subject like this deserves. As you know, I was at the OLP convention too, including the plenary voting session, so I speak from direct firsthand experience—as you no doubt remember. Therefore, I can offer my perspective not as an outsider looking in, but as someone who participated and observed the same events. I've actually been proverbially chewing on this follow up with you ever since then...just got distracted with work and other responsibilities.
Firstly, I absolutely agree with your fundamental point about the lack of transparency and grassroots engagement within the OLP’s policy discussions. It’s a real issue that needs addressing, and I share your frustration. There’s no question that a healthy political party must allow its membership to engage meaningfully in policy debates.
However, I feel compelled to point out some elements in your arguments that weaken your position. One of the key issues is a tendency towards cognitive biases—confirmation bias, in particular. It’s clear that you’ve gone into these events with a deep-seated suspicion of the leadership and the Executive Council, which has led you to interpret their actions as purely self-serving and malicious. While there is certainly room for critique, assuming the worst in every action, without fully considering alternative explanations, does not help build a constructive case.
Additionally, several of your comments and speeches, while well-intentioned, leaned heavily into inflammatory rhetoric. At various points, you resorted to ad hominem attacks, directing personal criticisms at individuals like Bonnie Crombie and Kathryn McGarry instead of focusing purely on the issues. This kind of approach often does more harm than good, coming across as confrontational and polemical rather than as reasoned advocacy. From the outside, your interventions seemed less about engaging in a productive debate and more like you were carrying a personal grudge due to the lack of the kind of open engagement you want.
I understand that you feel strongly about this, but the way you present your case makes it seem like you’re on a crusade to unilaterally impose a very specific vision of how policy discussion should happen—one that perhaps aligns more with what the Green Parties of Ontario and Canada use. I actually agree that their models of participatory democracy are fantastic, but expecting that same model to be adopted wholesale by the OLP, which operates under a different organizational structure and philosophy, is not necessarily realistic or pragmatic. Change has to be incremental and adapted to the existing framework.
In sum, while I acknowledge and support many of your concerns about the lack of policy debate within the OLP, I think it would strengthen your case to moderate the tone and broaden your perspective. Instead of assuming malice or incompetence on the part of the leadership, we should aim to engage the party leadership in respectful, non-accusatory dialogue about how the party can evolve to better reflect the desires of its membership.
Kindest regards,
Blake
Hi Blake, I need to clarify for the record that some of your comments are unfortunately misleading. I actually said very little about Kathryn McGarry or Bonnie Crombie in any public forum prior to this blog post, let alone engaged in "ad-hominem" attacks. If you feel confident that there are any such examples of such public comments, please feel free to share them. During plenary I only made criticisms of the process itself or of expected critics.
You have lectured me on not rushing to judgment, but respectfully you have rushed to judgment by not asking me any questions to elaborate my accusations here. My accusations come from experience trying to work with all the persons in question, not from any rush to judgment. I have been an OLP member since 2019 but it took me until 2023 to deduce the motivations of the OLP authorities. And I certainly have not shown prior negativity towards Bonnie Crombie in particular. While I voted Nate for Leader, you can see one of my earlier blogs on this very site where during the leadership contest I made the mistake of singling out Yasir Naqvi for suspicion on the policy debate file. But I was very correct in many of my other predictions, from successfully anticipating that Eric Davis would speak against 1 of my amendments to anticipating that Council would not answer my public question about the resolutions obstinance of prior Councils. I would not have gotten as many predictions as correct as I did from hasty rushes to judgment.
You write, "I actually agree that their models of participatory democracy are fantastic, but expecting that same model to be adopted wholesale by the OLP, which operates under a different organizational structure and philosophy, is not necessarily realistic or pragmatic. Change has to be incremental and adapted to the existing framework." I have never suggested that the OLP should wholesale copy the way that Green Parties arrange policy debates - in some ways the OLP plenary processes became *too similar* to that of the Green Parties, to my consternation. But I need to respectfully remind you that the core demand here is very simple: **every other major political party you can think of** has at least some kind of policy resolutions debate and vote, and the OLP does not. Sometimes you can only be so polite about such exceptional stupidity!