No good options for Crombie and Ontario liberals after election loss

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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.

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Anthony Furey: I am Anthony Furey with National Post columnist Chris Selley, the day after the Ontario provincial election. And Chris, I think the big news is that there is no big news. We anticipated there wouldn’t be much of a change in terms of seat count. There wasn’t in terms of leadership. Doug Ford has a renewed, strong four-year majority mandate. And the noteworthy aspects are that there perhaps aren’t any, which I guess in itself is interesting. I would chalk this up as a soft vote for stability. How would you describe what transpired?

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Chris Selley: Yeah, I mean it was interesting to me that the turnout was actually a little bit higher than last time around. We’ve talked about this potentially being the worst turnout or the lowest turnout ever. I’m not one of these people who lies awake at night worrying about turnout. But, I thought that was an interesting development. Bonnie Cromby, you know, this leaves the Liberals in a heck of a pickle. She says she’s going to stay on. There’s really no good options that I see for the Liberals there. She doesn’t want to be the person who takes this momentum, these 14 MPPs that she has — they’re back to official party status — and then try to tell one of them to step down so that she can run in a by-election. And nor does the party want to take this momentum. They have some, they’re back up to 30 per cent in the polls, overall. Nor do they want to launch into a leadership race. So that’s, I think, one of the interesting things that I’ll be watching, certainly, in the coming weeks.

Furey: It’s a good point. I think if there was anything that was a bit of a shocker it’s that Bonnie Crombie did not win her own seat and that, as we’ve discussed before, she’s a an under performer more-so than we expected. She was in many ways supposed to be the provincial version of Justin Trudeau to kind of turn the party around from third-party status, and she has not so I think they’re probably not too pleased with her, But at the same time who else are they going to go to? I think they had a difficult time enough doing this campaign, let alone doing a leadership race. As for the opposition NDP, I’m not sure where this leaves them, either. Marit Stiles will have been leader for a while now, and they are just kind of treading water. How do you envision them fulfilling their role moving forward?

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Selley: I mean I think hanging on to official party, sorry not official party status, but official opposition status for the NDP, listening to them last night, I think they were genuinely happy about that, which I suppose speaks to what they think of their own sort of ceiling. This was Marit Stiles’s first election, but then in lot of parties you don’t get a second if you don’t win or at least improve on your standing. And she didn’t do that, but I think it’s more than enough for her to hang on, and it was the first election, as I say, people didn’t really know. Name recognition was a huge obstacle here in this campaign. People knew Doug Ford much more than knew Bonnie Crombie or Marit Stiles. So I think they’re in a fairly decent position potentially to capitalize on Liberal weakness. It seems to me the Liberals would want to try to convince Crombie to go without having to go through a leadership review and all the time that that would take.

Furey: Chris, what do you think this means for the Ontario PC party in terms of what are they gonna do? What are they gonna govern? And therefore, what does it mean for the residents of Ontario? I think that Ford has a strong mandate for economic development and job growth to be a pro-business premier, which he has been since 2018 when he, on day one, he put up the open-for-business signs. And that all ties into why we’re having this election early, the responding to Trump tariffs factor. So I think he’ll be doing that, what else will he do in terms of addressing other issues? We spoke before about how health-care and education hasn’t been as prominent as it could be, despite it being the biggest files and despite them both being in pretty rough shape.

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Selley: Yeah, well, certainly Jane Philpott who’s heading up the Conservatives, the government’s primary health-care efforts, she’s going to be in the spotlight now. I think people are going to be paying more and more attention to actual progress on that file as opposed to sort of their individual experiences, right? We need to see systemic change. We need to see numbers get better, hospital beds, hospital capacity, things like that. I’m also interested to see what Ford can do with this sort of Captain Canada image that he has cultivated. I mean, one of the more interesting moments during the campaign for me was Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston using it to sort of announce a big cut to inter-provincial trade barriers if with willing reciprocal provinces. And you know that’s something that the provinces can do regardless of Trump and should do regardless of Trump. But it requires the provinces to get together and work together, and I’ll be interested to see if Ford can kind of keep rustling up that kind of support.

Furey: All right, it’s been great to have these conversations with you, Chris, these past few weeks, and thanks to everyone for watching.

Selley: Thank you.

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