É«É«À²

Second, the bad news for Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie: She had to resign after her own leadership review fell short last weekend in É«É«À².

Will these different vote counts make a difference to Ontario politics? Don’t count on it.

For all the NDP cheers and Liberal tears, Ontario’s tale of two opposition parties has no happy ending on the horizon.

Crombie won the vote but lost the party. She achieved a 57 per cent majority in her favour, but fell short of the arbitrary benchmarks now baked into Canadian political lore for leadership reviews – for better or for worse.

How do you measure success after losing an election? The calculus of contemporary political parties is nothing if not curious.

All it takes is a democratic vote that tops 50 per cent to win the top job at any leadership convention. But in any subsequent leadership review, that democratic threshold no longer secures your job.

Which means that a minority of 43 per cent was outvoted, but it ultimately won the battle to banish Crombie. That may sound like the tail wagging the dog, but the tyranny of the minority can be the cruel reality of party politics.

Now the Liberals must start from scratch to find another leader and find a way to fundraise in the limbo years that lie ahead.

To be sure, New Democrats are making the most of Crombie’s bad break, for it is a useful distraction in depressing times. After watching all the Liberal disunity and disruption of recent days, the NDP is boasting about its own unity of purpose as it rallies behind Stiles.

New Democrats are endlessly chuffed about retaining the formal title of Official Opposition party in the legislature, after besting the third-place Liberals in the seat count in last February’s provincial election. Never mind that it’s a consolation prize for a losing party that captures second place.

Official Opposition status is a badge of honour, but it is also a fig leaf that camouflages the party’s ongoing fall in public opinion polls – before, during and after the last campaign.

Is Stiles losing any sleep over her own review? Not now, not after spending much of the summer travelling the province to shore up support.

There was a time, nearly two years ago, where she was tested by party dissidents unhappy with her handling of the crisis in the Middle East and the fallout in Canada. Stiles had expelled a wayward MPP from caucus for failing to loop in the leader’s office about her statements on the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Protesters took that as a lack of solidarity by Stiles, but politics is a team sport where MPPs are expected to show solidarity with the party line. Much of that NDP second-guessing over the Middle East has since faded from public view, although it may well resurface on the convention floor this weekend.

Yet if Stiles was ever in any trouble, it’s safe to say that the tumult over Crombie can only help. After all, the NDP has big enough problems with voters without creating more for its leader.

The latest public opinion poll from Abacus Data pegs the party’s provincial support at a paltry 12 per cent, compared to 27 for Crombie’s Liberals (before her fall from grace) and a daunting 53 per cent for Doug Ford’s governing Tories. Federally, the NDP is doing even worse, stuck at six per cent.

In the Feb. 27 election, the NDP’s popular vote dropped to just 18.5 per cent, down from 23.7 per cent in 2022. That’s a downer, leavened only by the disproportionate share of ridings won by the NDP – 27 seats, compared to just 14 for the Liberals.

By contrast, the Liberal share of the popular vote soared from 23.9 per cent in 2022 to a robust 30 per cent in the February election. That’s hardly a vote of confidence in New Democrats, so why will Stiles escape the vote of non-confidence suffered by Crombie this weekend?

Changing leaders wouldn’t change things for the Ontario NDP. More to the point, does anyone else of consequence want her job right now?

Lest we forget, Stiles won the leadership by acclamation in 2023 because no one else could be bothered to run. New Democrats are also in the middle of a federal leadership race of their own, so the last thing Ontario’s NDP needs is a parallel contest.

After all, the federal New Democrats have seen this movie before, when Tom Mulcair was forced to resign after winning barely 52 per cent support in a 2017 leadership review. In the aftermath, the party seems no further ahead as it once again looks to change leaders all these years later.

Which is why New Democrats will vote for more of the same this weekend, even while Ontarians are less and less interested in what Stiles and the party are pitching. That’s politics.