Reflections from the losing Presidential candidate on the 2025 Ontario Liberal Party Annual General Meeting

The outcome of my own campaign and initiatives for the OLP AGM

My most prominent endeavour at the Ontario Liberal AGM was my candidacy for the Ontario Liberal Party Presidency against the incumbent Kathryn McGarry.  In the end, the contest concluded with the incumbent President winning with 776 votes versus 148 votes for myself – something I had approximately predicted when I suggested to a friend that I might get 10% to 20% of the delegates’ vote.  That was a notable improvement from the 70 to 3 vote result for my regional candidacy for the 2024 AGM, if perhaps due to the number of pre-existing detractors of the President and my use of the delegate mailing list this time around.

Very little surprised me in the contest process and outcome.  As predicted, the process was quite fair in applying the same rules equally to all candidates, quite contrary to what happened to me when I sought the Deputy Leader position of the Green Party of Ontario.  But the process is transparently crooked in forbidding more pointed criticisms of the other candidates, which prevents oneself from publicizing the skeletons in the closet that I know that the incumbent President has (i.e. her cynicism in never acknowledging any of hundreds of emails I have sent her).

Obviously, I failed to persuade the majority of the 500 or so delegates who would have listened to my blunt but platform-detailed speech.  At the same time, many voting delegates would not have attended the speeches and most registered delegates did not vote in the Council elections.  Persuading some number of delegates within the space of a single email and a 6-minute speech is something I take some pride in and appreciate.

Incidentally, although I am confident that there are no complaints about my use of the delegate contact lists, there is something perverse about the fact that these delegate lists are arguably essential to making Council contests competitive - yet delegate lists are granted to candidates who have not yet been vetted through tests of nominator support.  (Naturally, I already have a draft constitutional amendment to fix that problem, if I obtain the 20 member endorsements or 3 PLA endorsements needed for submission to a future AGM.)

My pro-grassroots constitutional amendment to take straw polls of the membership on plenary submissions was defeated after opposition in plenary by a certain Matthew Slatt, whom I was completely unfamiliar with, and by the Constitution Committee member Eric Davis, who has a long history of spurning attempts at outreach.  There was nothing that I could have done to anticipate these two individuals nor to prep speakers to address them accordingly – they used the tactic of expressing emotion to intimidate potential would-be supporting speakers from stepping forward.

The outcomes of other constitutional plenary proceedings

Despite the clear opposition of the Constitution Committee, a constitutional amendment was passed to adopt remote participation methods for future AGMs – but with a catch.  The catch is that sub-amendment text was added to delay implementation of the amendment to “Upon the close of the 2026 annual meeting” – conveniently buying time for the Constitution Committee to submit an amendment for its repeal by the next AGM, before there is any change in the AGM format whatsoever.  I had predicted in advance that the Committee’s Eric Davis and Jack Siegel would be advocating against the amendment – I have since asked if they still plan to repeal it, with no response given.

I had told multiple members of the party that Ryan St. Jean’s amendment was marked for death by the Constitution Committee, and naturally Jack Siegel spoke against that amendment as well.  So, there will be no improvement to the financially prohibitive and obtuse candidacy restrictions that caused the party to delay candidacy approvals for the 2025 Ontario Election.

I have tried repeatedly to pitch other OLP members and PLA associations to give me the support thresholds needed to submit various constitutional amendments to reign in the unaccountable control that the Constitution Committee has exercised over plenary outcomes, but my pleas have not been met with nearly enough interest.  If I cannot get more support for those amendments for the next AGM, then I am truly at a loss of how the party can be helped to save it from itself prior to 2029.  When I was involved in the Green Party of Canada I noticed a similar trend of constitutional amendments reducing the powers of its party's Leader and Federal Council always failing – the OLP cannot sustain the same trend and expect a much better fate.

The sour note on which the AGM ended: an unnecessary humiliation for Bonnie Crombie

In terms of attempting and failing to make a difference, one could say that I was one of the biggest losers of the convention.  Nothing however made me feel humiliated, let alone anywhere on the level that the Leader Bonnie Crombie evidently was.

In the 2023 leadership contest I voted Nate Erskine-Smith for Leader and remain content with that decision.  (I voted Alvin Tedjo for Leader in 2020, with Kate Graham being my would-be second choice.)  I also voted “Yes” on the leadership contest question for this AGM, partly out of a sense of loyalty to Team Nate and friends in the New Leaf Liberals and partly out of a belief that leadership contests should occur with some regularity like regular Council elections.  But it was not my intent to vote in favour of a humiliating outcome for the competent incumbent Leader.  And if I had been given the freedom to do so, I would have respected Bonnie by waiting until the conclusion of her speech before making my vote choice.  Her speech was underwhelming, but that is to be expected given the lack of stakes attached to it.

Leadership “reviews” as done by major political parties in this country are perverse in both their processes and their expectations.  It is widely expected that Leaders have such intense workloads that parties cannot afford the democratic niceties of subjecting their Leaders to the accountability of constant leadership contests.  But it is also widely understood that incumbents have an inherent advantage in any process where a potential rival cannot receive formal recognition, so it is widely expected that incumbents must receive super-majorities of support to stay on.  In other words, for the process to not be rigged in favour of the incumbent, we supposedly need to rig the vote against the incumbent, by allowing a minority a veto on their tenure.

Which is what has led us to our present circumstance, where a Leader who was voted in by most of the membership and whom most members never voted against, went through the humiliating spectacle of pledging to stand firm in the position before promising to drop the position entirely.  And that outcome was due to a minority of a minority (43% of a delegated body), which goes to highlight how one of the only votes of the general membership has been so easily undone in this autocratic political party.  New Leaf Liberals celebrated their victory, but they never asked for the Leader to be disrespected with the vote scheduling, and I trust that they also would have preferred a more graceful leadership change than this.

The New Leafs’ Nathaniel Arfin repeatedly made clear that he would welcome Bonnie’s participation in a leadership contest.  Why Bonnie seemingly never considered this option and pivoted straight from “No contest” to “It’s over for me” seems to speak ill of her team and the advice that they were feeding her.

I feel redeemed in my campaign speech’s declared interest in replacing leadership reviews with leadership contests.  Clearly leadership “reviews” as currently structured serve the interests of no one – there should simply be more leadership contests more frequently, even if on more compressed timelines and less resources spent on each one.

The more that things change in the OLP, the more that they stay the same

Although I failed to crack 20% of the delegate vote in my Presidential campaign, other Council contests had candidates endorsed by New Leaf Liberals and by Team Nate.  It is plausible that the 43% of delegates who voted “Yes” to a leadership contest also largely overlapped with votes for non-incumbent Executive Council candidates.  (One New Leaf friend got somewhere around 40% of the delegate votes.)  As someone who happily voted the incumbent Councillor David Farrow for Executive Vice-President, I do note the bizarre outcome that a minority of delegates exercised a veto on the Leader, but not a veto upon anyone else on the Council.  Essentially, the Leader was tossed out, but the rest of the OLP establishment remains virtually unchanged despite equivalent support.

So here we come to the core problem where the more that things change in the OLP, the more that they seem to stay the same.  The re-elected OLP President Kathryn McGarry before the leadership review outcome already made clear that she would not implement a policy resolutions process alongside a leadership contest.  The same President who oversaw the prior inaccessible leadership contest will oversee the next leadership contest as well, leaving open the question of what would be different from the last contest rather than the same.  And the same President who defended the inaccessible financial fees for prospective election candidates will presumably be overseeing the election rules for the OLP’s next election campaign in 2029 or sooner.

Whoever is the next OLP Leader may plausibly be without awareness of the obvious institutional defects above, and may be learning these problems from scratch.  Unfortunately, it does look like the OLP is in some fundamental respects back to where it was in 2018: searching for a new Leader while not addressing the hollowing-out of its internal institutions.  The window for changing this party in time to make a real difference for the next provincial election is fast closing…