(Toronto) It is current Mississauga mayor and former federal MP Bonnie Crombie who will be tasked with leading the Ontario Liberal Party and running against Premier Doug Ford in the next provincial election.
Posted at 5:06 p.m.
Allison Jones and Liam Casey The Canadian Press
Ms Crombie was elected as the party’s new leader on Saturday following the third round of voting.
After two defeats in recent elections, the Ontario Liberal Party is trying to rebuild itself. During her victory speech, Ms Crombie acknowledged she still has a lot of work to do before the 2026 election.
“We’ve built this big, strong Liberal team and now I hate to break it to you, but we have to work even harder,” she said.
“You know why, because Doug Ford and his conservatives will be after us at any moment, so we have to be ready. We have to be ready to work even harder, but together,” she said.
In the third round, Crombie defeated Nate Erskine-Smith, while Yasir Naqvi and Ted Hsu were eliminated in the previous rounds.
For the immediate future, Crombie will have to decide whether she wants to run for a seat in the Legislative Assembly or whether she would prefer to stay out of the arena to focus on rebuilding her party, which has failed to win enough seats in of the Legislative Assembly to win the last two elections to gain official party status.
A mother of three, Ms. Crombie was elected mayor of Mississauga in 2014. She was previously a local councilor and Liberal MP for the Mississauga region.
During her campaign, she boasted that she had “resisted Doug Ford and the Conservatives” during her years at the helm of Mississauga, a city of 700,000 that is a suburb of Toronto.
She also strongly opposed Mr. Ford’s proposed changes to the way municipalities collect certain fees from developers who help cities finance their infrastructure – the Association of Municipalities of Ontario said that decision would cost municipalities $5 billion have cost. She also positioned herself for the dissolution of the Peel Region, in which Mississauga is located.
Recent polls suggest the Liberals have the best chance of competing with the Progressive Conservatives in the next election of any of Ms Crombie’s leading candidates.
The Liberals boasted of attracting a record number of senior members to this leadership race, while more than 100,000 people were eligible to vote for the new leader. In the previous two leadership elections, there were 44,000 and 38,000 members in good standing, respectively.
However, only 22,827 members voted in last weekend’s poll. That number was still higher than the 12,988 Ontario Liberals who voted in the 2020 leadership race and the 19,438 who took part in the 2013 vote, according to the party.