This coming weekend will see a few folks all across Ontario trek from home to a polling station to cast a ballot in the Ontario Liberal Party’s leadership contest. The party is using ranked ballots for the first time, allowing participants to rank their candidates one through four and has moved away from a delegated leadership convention to a One Member/One Vote model. In this regard, the Liberals are finally catching up with Conservatives who have been using this model for leadership races for quite some time.
The most important component of this model is that each riding is allocated 100 points and the candidates are awarded points mirroring their vote percentage. The race features four candidates – Ted Hsu, Yasir Naqvi, Nate Erskine-Smith, and Bonnie Crombie – and has seen the membership of the party triple in size to over 100,000 members eligible to vote.
Leadership contests are the most impactful elections we can participate in as Canadians in our modern political climate. The top-down centralized approach that has taken root at both the federal and provincial levels has degraded the value of our ballot in general elections, and there are precious few politicians who have the spine to be independent when their constituents need them to be. Beyond that, having good leaders of both the Conservatives and Liberals is good for the general political climate, so I always endeavour to sign up for the one-year memberships during leadership contests.
With the Greenbelt scandal so fresh, there has never been a better time to demand accountability from politicians about whose money they take. Legal doesn’t always mean it is moral, and the way that our system allows high net-worth individuals to send large donations to politicians by ‘bundling’ is most definitely wading into the immoral side of the pool.
2021 changes by Premier Ford now allow each person to donate a maximum of $3,300 annually. A family of four with the means to do so can donate $13,200 on their own to each riding across the province. It is completely legal for a family to shower a political party with hundreds of thousands of dollars, and some do, as the Greenbelt scandal showed. To give some perspective, Quebec does not allow any single individual to donate more than $100 dollars annually.
In the Liberal race, who you take donations from has become a hot-button issue. Bonnie Crombie has raised more money than the other three candidates combined with a significant number of maximum donations being received. Furthermore, the developer community features prominently among her donor base. Rightly so, the other candidates have pressed Crombie around the fact that it is a liability to be beholden to the same folks that corrupted proper development processes and has the province now embroiled in an ongoing RCMP investigation.
Beyond the politics of money, much of the race has been standard campaign fare for Canadian politics, with housing and health care being at the forefront. Ontario is staring down the barrel at a number of stressors with ‘where is everybody going to live’ being at the top of the list.
This is not the first time Canada was asking itself that question, and Nate Erskine-Smith has a policy plank that is a flash from the past. Publicly available, off-the-shelf plans that would allow for significant reductions in approval times and lower costs. Our small towns are dotted with the houses built right after the Second World War and they all look the same for a reason; those plans were standardized, publicly available, yet tailored to the region of the country they were located in.
The clincher for me on why I’m hoping Nate Erskine-Smith wins though has nothing to do with policy; it is the independence he offers for future members of his caucus. As a federal MP he has a track record of voting for his constituents first, even when that means voting against the Liberal Party. A leader who brings an attitude that elevates service to the community over loyalty to a party has the opportunity to alter the trajectory we are on right now.
It is that kind of attitude that could see rural progressives, who don’t appreciate being dictated to by folks in Toronto, entertain voting Liberal again.
***
Stewart Skinner is a local business owner, former political candidate, and has worked at Queen’s Park as a Policy Advisor to the Minister of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs. He can be reached on Twitter: @modernfarmer.
