Former Ontario Liberal Party candidates are hoping that June’s campaign report, released these days, will help the party avoid making the same mistakes and changing its identity. The report released seven months after the Liberals’ crushing defeat by Doug Ford paints a portrait of a party in complete reconstruction.
Gilles Proulx felt listened to by his party for one of the first times since the start of the election campaign when he read the party’s performance report. The former Franco-Ontarian candidate for the Nickel Belt riding outside Sudbury struggled to get party answers from the time he became a candidate and received little party support during the campaign. Midway through the campaign, the party reportedly told him that he had no chance of winning his constituency. “It’s very discouraging,” he said. The Liberals eventually got 10% of the vote in Nickel Belt.
At the provincial level, the political organization did not do much better since 24% of voters gave it their vote and only eight deputies were elected, one more than in 2018. Chief Steven Del Duca, who resigned on election night after not even being able to win his own constituency, did not inspire confidence among members according to the report. The party tried to be “too much of everything,” the document reads. Two elders told the To have to having had difficulty differentiating themselves from their opponent from the NDP.
The Ontario Liberals did a similar exercise following the 2018 provincial election and came to identical conclusions. “We really need to make changes [cette fois-ci] because, otherwise, we will never win an election,” comments Gilles Proulx. Amanda Simard, a losing candidate in Glengarry-Prescott-Russell, said the report can serve as a guideline until the next campaign, four years from now. The record, she says, is “pretty legit.”
Lack of direction
The party was unable to communicate its platform and ideas to the electorate, and to some extent to its own candidates, throughout the campaign. “People at the gates sometimes knew before me that there had been an announcement,” recalls Gilles Proulx. “The platform contained precise concepts that were difficult to translate at the door”, underlines the Dr Sylvain Roy, candidate in the riding of Newmarket–Aurora. A more direct and consistent message was requested by members in 2022.
The majority of rural members and candidates also found the platform too focused on issues affecting residents of the Greater Toronto Area, where the vast majority of voters are located. The party released its plan for rural Ontario on May 19, two weeks before election day, which came too late, according to Kirsten Gardner, candidate in the Eastern Ontario riding of Stormont Dundas–South Glengarry. Rural areas have been “completely ignored,” she says.
The volunteers also left the party. For example, 82% of local campaign leaders said recruiting volunteers was their biggest challenge. Amanda Simard said she was struck by the extent of the problem. The Dr Sylvain Roy explains for his part that he lacked diversity within his team. “Our volunteers were mostly white men in their fifties,” said the man who was running for a riding in the suburbs of Toronto.
The party could not count on a major political machine to support its candidates. “The inexperience of canvassers resulted in inconsistent and sometimes inaccurate data,” reads the report. On election day, Amanda Simard remembers knocking on the door of Conservative voters when she was supposed to go encourage Liberals to go and vote instead, because she did not have the right information. Some members of the central campaign team also had full-time jobs and therefore could not devote themselves fully to the election.
Amanda Simard, Gilles Proulx and Sylvain Roy will all remain to some degree involved in the Ontario Liberal Party. The report recommends that the party encourage former candidates to remain in its fold “by specifying that their commitment does not automatically qualify them to become candidates again”. Kirsten Gardner, for her part, says she’s had enough of politics. Too angry with her experience as a candidate, the former deputy mayor of a small municipality did not even participate in the meetings that led to the drafting of the report.
This story is supported by the Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the Government of Canada.