The last Ontario Liberal election platform didn't connect with voters. Bonnie Crombie is going for a fresh approach

LONDON, ONT. — Nine months after being elected Ontario Liberal leader, Bonnie Crombie in London all weekend as they begin to hammer out new policies to take them into the next provincial election. And with that campaign possibly , Crombie will be looking to build some momentum for herself and a Liberal party still recovering from batterings in both the 2018 and 2022 elections after governing for 15 years.

“After six years of Doug Ford’s cuts, and handouts to his rich insider friends, Ontario families are looking for a new government that they can trust — one that will protect public health care, fix our education system, and put the real people of Ontario first,” Crombie said in a statement to the Star. “This weekend, over 1,000 Ontario Liberals will gather in London to do just that,” said Crombie, who was elected leader last December after having served as the long-time mayor of Mississauga and a federal MP. “We are and doing the hard work needed to prepare for the next provincial election, and begin development on an election platform that does more for you.



” The meeting includes policy sessions on topics such as health, education and housing. Crombie is set to deliver a major speech Saturday night. “At this point in the electoral cycle, it’s important the leader ensure that her caucus and candidates are on the same page — I think the watch word here is electoral preparedness,” said Jonathan Rose, head of the political studies department at Queen’s University.

“To me, this is a much more inward-looking, rally-the-troops sort of meeting,” Rose said. “They’re the people that work in the trenches during elections. The important thing is to motivate them.

” Other speakers include former B.C. premier Christy Clark and former federal health minister Jane Philpott, now head of the medical school and health sciences faculty at Queen’s University, both of whom have been critical of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Provincial Liberals worry the national party’s unpopularity is hurting their chances of a comeback in Ontario. The Liberals have just nine seats in the legislature, which is not enough to garner official party status — although they include one they did manage to wrest from the PCs in a byelection last year in Kanata-Carleton. And while they were not expected to win , the Liberals managed a strong second after the PCs, after having finished third there — behind the NDP — in the 2022 general election.

Crombie was quick to put out a statement about the byelection result, saying “we’ve been the underdogs since day one, yet the voters sent a clear message that we are the only party who can take on Doug Ford.” The Liberals’ 2022 platform under then-leader Steven Del Duca — which included buck-a-ride transit, optional Grade 13 and no provincial sales tax on takeout food under $20 — failed to register with voters, and a scathing internal review slammed the party for poor vetting of candidates, as well as a lack of volunteers and money. The party had admitted the platform overlooked key issues, “was not well-timed and was not well developed.

” This time around, with policy discussions that include teachers’ unions as well as a former planner from the City of Toronto and other “big names coming to speak, what the party is trying to do, in part, is to show that it is building a broader coalition,” said McMaster University’s Peter Graefe, a political science professor. The three-day conference will give the party a chance to hear from grassroots Liberals and come up with ideas to attract a wider base of supporters, added Nelson Wiseman, a political science professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. An Abacus poll that surveyed 1,028 Ontarians online from Aug.

14 to 17 found the PCs had the support of 42 per cent of voters, with the Liberals at 26 per cent, followed by the Official Opposition New Democrats at 21 per cent. While such online polls cannot be assigned a margin of error, a similar-sized random sample would have one of plus or minus approximately three percentage points, 19 times out of 20. But Wiseman said “polling doesn’t mean that much between election campaigns .

.. we’ve seen in the past in Ontario elections that things can turn on their head during the campaign period when there’s more focus, and especially in the last week to 10 days before a vote.

”.