Crombie’s rise up from third place is impressive, but still not enough

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National Post’s Chris Selley and National Post contributor Anthony Furey discuss the latest in the 2025 Ontario election. Watch the video or read the transcript.

Anthony Furey: Hi, I’m Anthony Furey, joined by National Post columnist Chris Selley. Good morning, Chris. How are you?

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Chris Selley: I’m very well, Anthony. Good morning.

Furey: Yeah, we’ve spent these past few discussions talking about Doug Ford, Doug Ford in Ontario, Doug Ford in Washington and Donald Trump and tariffs. And I think a lot of people in Ontario might forget that there are other political parties, and there are other leaders to those parties. They’ve just failed to get some attention. I think that’s one of the interesting aspects of this campaign, just the inability of Bonnie Crombie, the Liberal leader, Marit Stiles, the NDP leader, and Mike Schreiner, the Green Party leader, to really get any traction out there in this rather uniquely framed Ontario election.

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Selley: Yeah, I mean, I guess that’s why Ford called it when he did, is that he’s in a very advantageous situation. He’s risking some kind of backlash, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. I feel like both, I mean, the NDP and the Liberals certainly seem to be struggling. I keep hearing them say, you know, “We need to hold Doug Ford accountable for holding this unnecessary election.” And it strikes me such an odd message to ask people to vote for you in an election that you say shouldn’t be happening. I mean, it strikes me that if there shouldn’t be an election right now, then by inference, you think Doug Ford should still be premier, in which case, maybe I just won’t show up to vote, or maybe I’ll just vote Conservative. They don’t seem to have been prepared to really hit him where it hurts. The Liberals this week have gone pretty hard on health care, which I think — hallway medicine — which I think is exactly what they should be doing. But on the other hand, they did it with Ford in Washington kind of gobbling up all the news. So, it is kind of a weird sort of failure to launch situation, and they don’t have a lot of time left.

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Furey: In my latest column, I was talking about the great expectations that were held for Bonnie Crombie, and so far she’s failed to deliver. She was seen in some respects as the Justin Trudeau of the Ontario Liberals, the person who would lead them to the promised land, out of the third party place that Kathleen Wynne left them in after she decimated the party. Yeah, Bonnie Crombie has really failed to deliver. She was supposed to be the more moderate or centre-right or fiscally conservative Liberal leader. Chris, you were writing about the fact that Bonnie Crombie was saying we shouldn’t be covering up the Sir John A. McDonald statues and so forth, but I don’t think there’s been much attention actually brought to that. People don’t really know about those points. She’s not making them their primary ones, so she’s failed to gain traction there. And then there’s the challenge with the NDP, Marit Stiles. They get into opposition, second place party, so that’s pretty good for the NDP. We traditionally think of them as the third place, but they’re just struggling to keep that going. It’s not like we were thinking this is the election where the NDP would form government. More of what we were thinking is, “Is this the election where Bonnie Crombie will leapfrog and herself form government?”

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Selley: Yeah, well, I she has leapfrogged the NDP, it looks like. I’m always — the expectations are always a problem, I think, in politics. I mean, why did we think, even if Bonnie Crombie was everything that people said she was, as a good leader, it wasn’t a reasonable ask — I don’t think — for her to really beat Ford in a situation like this, where he calls such an advantageous election for himself. I mean, you know, they can hope. But to me, I mean, after two complete trouncings in 2018 and 2022, she’s got the Liberals back at sort of 30 per cent in the polls. You know, it looks like they’ll be official opposition. I don’t know, those don’t seem like unreasonable expectations, and it seems to me that she’s meeting them. But of course, that’s the, sort of, that’s the Liberal mindset, specifically, is that if we don’t win, something horrible has happened. And, you know, there needs to be recriminations and we can never talk to this person again. And I don’t know if she’s going to get another chance, but I think she’s certainly a heck of a more impressive than the Stephen Del Duca. Low bar, admittedly.

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Furey: Speaking of low bars, I know I alluded to the fact we’d mentioned the Green Party, but I only want to mention it to say that we should not mention the Green Party. I find it remarkable that there’s still news features that show that the four pictures — headshots — of the party leaders, as if the Green Party is equivalent. I’m going to go out there and say I think it was a mistake to let Elizabeth May join the leaders debate for the first time back in that Stephen Harper election 20 years ago, because it kind of set the standard that the Green Party kind of deserves equal standing, regardless of how little they even do, and I feel we should sort of pull that fourth place status from them and just relegate them to fringe party status in conversations.

Selley: I mean, I don’t mind if there’s only four people in a debate, I don’t mind. I think when you start getting into, sort of, six or seven, it gets to be a bit of a mess. I mean, the Ontario Greens are certainly more relevant than the federal Greens. Again, as you say, low bar. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s certainly a three-way race. I agree that there’s not much point paying attention to the Greens, but then, you know, I don’t mind having someone in a debate who’s going to kind of throw a few curveballs in there when everyone else is so rehearsed and, you know, they’re set at one, two, three.

Furey: Alright, well let’s leave it at that for today. Thanks everyone for watching.

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