Loyal she began, wild she remains

It has been a big week in Ontario’s provincial politics.

On second thought, that sentence actually seems like an understatement.

It has been a huge week in Ontario’s provincial politics.

Three things happened that might fundamentally reorient the politics of this province for a long, long time. I say “might”, because it is extremely difficult to predict how Ontarians will respond to these events, how each party will adapt to our new reality, and how everyone is feeling in the lead-up to our next election sometime before June 4, 2026. Who knows, we might have another bizarre event (like the pandemic) that makes the Ford Tories seem really appealing again, even if from nothing more than a consistency perspective. Stranger things have happened.

The way things play out isn’t certain. The Ontario Liberals might become a viable option under their new leader. The Greens might capture the energy of their by-election victory and stage an Atlantic Canada-style coup, relegating either the Liberals or NDP to fourth place. The rules of the legislature might be entirely changed in the wake of Sarah Jama’s legal action. Or we might have another election where things stay the same, giving us 10-to-12 years of uninterrupted Ford Family rule over Ontario.

So let’s look at the Ontario Liberal leadership, the Green by-election win, the latest in the ongoing issues relating to Sarah Jama, and how each of those might upend Ontario’s politics.

A tight race for third

On December 2, the Ontario Liberals very, very, very slowly announced the results of their leadership race. The party used a deeply convoluted system of points, physical polling stations for the election, and definitely-not-Instant Runoff Voting, belabouring results announcements with a litany of congratulations and thanks to volunteers. Thank the people who work to put these events on, sure, but like…do it faster, maybe?

Under a quarter of Ontario Liberal Party members (22.5% to be exact) cast ballots for one of the four candidates (physical polling stations might have contributed to the low turnout when an online vote would have been easier, but more on that later).

M-I-S-S-I-S-S-AUGA

Mississauga mayor Bonnie Crombie was long touted as the front-runner. She racked up endorsements from people like former Ontario Liberal leader Lyn McLeod, former Deputy Premier Dwight Duncan, and Hamilton East—Stoney Creek MP Chad Collins (the only Hamilton-area elected official to make an official endorsement in the race). She was the most establishment of the establishment candidates, even if she didn’t hold a seat in the legislature (she was an MP until 2011 when she was defeated by Conservative Brad Butt, who now sits on Mississauga council with her).

Crombie’s campaign made the case (officially and unofficially) to move the Ontario Liberals to the right in an effort to challenge Doug Ford’s PCs on their home turf. This case was made very subtly, though, as her campaign was heavy on personality and light on details. Her campaign website said that, as leader, she would “make life easier and more affordable”, “improve our publicly funded education system”, and “take urgent action on climate change”. Insightful and detailed.

Making matters worse, clicking on the “Learn more about our opportunities for Ontario” link brought you to this page:

lol

Articles that came out after her win provided a little more insight into her plans, including a “patient-centred” healthcare approach, offering provincial rebates on development charges, allowing municipalities to use ranked ballots, eliminating EQAO standardized tests, and cutting provincial interest on OSAP loans.

The 411 on the NES

Despite this, her campaign can be contrasted with that of the decidedly more progressive Nate Erskine-Smith (also known by the fun acronym NES), the current Beaches-East York MP. His campaign was a policy wonk’s dream, complete with infographics, detailed plans, and press releases on policy specifics. He ran on a campaign of ending exclusionary zoning, building affordable rental housing, moving toward universal post-secondary education, lowering the voting age to 16, and bringing in sweeping electoral reform.

While Crombie’s strategy was to move right in response to Doug Ford’s Tories winning two back-to-back majorities, NES wanted to move slightly left and beat the NDP at their own game. Much like Trudeau did in 2015 (the election in which NES was elected to Parliament), his strategy was to let the NDP fall over their own feet (one of the party’s main skills) and scoop up enough of their voters, while holding the OLP base and gathering up disaffected PC voters to go from third place to winning a majority. NES was making the pitch to the provincial party to use JT’s playbook.

Honestly, NES’s strategy makes more sense. As part of my postdoctoral fellowship, I’m part of a research lab which polls Ontarians during elections. In Ontario’s 2022 provincial vote, we asked voters where they’d position themselves on the political spectrum (0 being most left, 10 being most right). While a plurality plop themselves right in the middle (number 5), a few more Ontarians consider themselves left-leaning than right-leaning. Granted, over half of our respondents were either in the middle or 1 point to either side, but slightly more respondents said they were on the left than the right.

It isn’t just public opinion. Going after anyone left of centre is a better move…especially since leftists haven’t been super energized by recent NDP campaigns. There was the Green surge in 2007, the ONDP bleeding urban seats to the Liberals in 2014, and the fact that, despite Kathleen Wynne literally giving up on her campaign a week before the vote in 2018, the NDP only managed to win 40 seats, even when the Ontario PC leader was Doug - brother of Rob - Ford. By presenting a more professional and viable progressive alternative, NES might have been able to peel off even some diehard NDP support.

The vote

The focus during the OLP leadership campaign was on the Crombie machine, which had been parading around on the day of the results announcement saying she would definitely win on the first ballot. This was, in part, because NES and Ottawa Centre MP Yasir Naqvi (who was also running) had come to an “agreement” last month, encouraging their supporters to rank the other second in an attempt to stop Crombie from winning. The Crombie camp hoisted the flag high to downplay the threat from the NES-Naqvi alliance.

In the end, that alliance almost worked. Kingston and the Islands MPP Ted Hsu, the fourth candidate, was dropped from the first ballot after only securing 10% support and his votes were redistributed. When Naqvi came last in the next round, there was a possibility for that agreement to pay off. Crombie had led the pack, but with a much smaller vote total than expected. It was NES who was out-performing the polls, which had him around 12% support, but had managed to earn 29.3% by the second ballot. And while most of Naqvi’s supporters did shift to NES, it wasn’t enough, and Crombie won on the last ballot with 53.4% of the vote.

lol

Winning the points

Remember at the beginning where I said the Liberals used a convoluted points system? They assigned each riding 100 points, each campus club 50 points, and each “women’s club” 5 points. Points were allocated based on the percent of the vote they got. If Crombie won 50% of the vote in a riding, even if there were just 5 voters, she’d get 50 points. Or like how Naqvi won all 5 points from the Kanata-Carleton Ontario Liberal Women’s Club because there was 1 voter and they voted for him. As reported by the party on Monday, the number of eligible voters ranged wildly, from the 4,359 in Brampton West to just 27 in Kiiwetinoong. Fun fact, 50% of those in Kiiwetinoong turned out to vote while just 4.6% of eligible Liberals turned out in Brampton West. Ooof.

Turns out the first round points weren’t too far from the first round votes. Crombie won 41.1% of the first round vote and was allocated 43% of the first round points. NES managed 26.6% of the vote and got 25.7% of the points. On the final ballot, the results were very, very close. Crombie won 52.3% of the popular vote, while NES managed 47.7%.

The Hamilton-specific results are interesting. They come from the 5 Hamilton-area ridings, plus the Hamilton Region Women’s Club. There is no McMaster OLP club, apparently (they seem to have disappeared sometime around 2022 when every single political club seems to have disappeared).

The candidates who won in the first round were the same candidates who won in the final round. In the end, NES only carried Hamilton Centre (with 52%), but Crombie won every other riding. In the end, 58% of Hamilton-area Ontario Liberals voted for Crombie. Even more interestingly, only 666 votes were cast (spooky) across all of Hamilton while 2,703 party members were eligible. That’s a voter turnout of 24.6%. The riding that came out in the most force was Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas, but still, only 192 party members bothered to vote (Crombie won HWAD with 58.7%). Only 81 party members bothered to vote on Hamilton Mountain, which should be an OLP target seat. Whomever the OLP candidate on the Mountain is (I actually had to look up who ran in 2022 because I forgot), they’re going to have to organize the hell out of potential Grits up there. This is a party that won 52% of the vote up there just 20 years ago, so to see them fall this far is…interesting.

Okay, this points and votes deep-dive might be boring for some, so I’ll stop after this point: 1,049 voters who supported Hsu and Naqvi just didn’t rank anyone else, so, when their candidates were dropped, their votes were “exhausted” and no longer counted. Had all of them selected NES, he would have won the leadership by 31 votes. May as well call him a mouse because that would have been a squeaker! I realized this because of PollingCanada and Kyle Hutton on X/Twitter, both of whom are cool folks.

A party divided

This result isn’t great for the Ontario Liberals.

The best indication that a Canadian political party is in trouble is having an establishment candidate win with only a narrow majority after a few rounds of voting during a leadership race. In 2006, Stéphane Dion won with 55% on the fourth ballot of the federal Liberal leadership and led his party to a crushing defeat in the 2008 election. Andrew Scheer won the 2017 Tory leadership with 51% and O’Toole only took 57% in the third round in 2020. It took Thomas Mulcair four ballots to win 57.2% in the NDP’s 2017 leadership race, just like it took Audrey McLaughlin four ballots to get 55% in the party’s 1989 leadership election. None of those leaders did very well at all.

Hell, even looking at Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s 1968 Liberal leadership win (taking 51% on the fourth ballot) doesn’t prove anything. The elder Trudeau was the outsider in that election - so much so that Judy LaMarsh, Canada’s Secretary of State who organized the Centennial celebrations the year prior, was caught on a hot mic telling Toronto-area MP Paul Hellyer to drop out and endorse York West MP Robert Winters to ensure Trudeau didn’t win with the famous career-ending phrase: “Don't let that bastard [Trudeau] win it, Paul. He isn't even a Liberal!” After Pierre Trudeau moved on, John Turner only managed to earn 54% support on the second ballot in the 1984 Liberal leadership and then promptly lost that year’s election to another political outsider: Brian Mulroney. Mulroney defeated former PM Joe Clark to become Tory leader in 1983, offering a similar performance to the one PET gave 15 years earlier.1

Despite this being the case, Ontario’s media is going to great lengths to position Crombie as the premier-in-waiting.

Immediately after her win was announced, Martin Regg Cohn got to work talking up the new leader. Writing for Star-affiliated papers, MRC was quick to defend Crombie. While acknowledging the OLP’s flagging poll numbers, he wrote that she isn’t perfect (comparing her to Ford and to Joe Biden, interestingly), but says:

Then, on Wednesday, MRC came out with another piece, this time attempting to launder Crombie’s win by making it seem like NES (so many acronyms this week, sorry) focused on what he called “zombie” ridings with low membership numbers to boost his overall points total.3 This ignores the fact that Crombie’s points total was higher than the percent of the popular vote she earned, but fine. The article goes on to stile the Liberals as “a coalition of compromisers, pragmatists” and slams NES for being a “self-styled maverick, a backbencher who boasted about breaking from caucus solidarity in Ottawa” who “badmouthed” and “mansplaned” that he was better because he was a young man and Crombie was bad because she was an older woman.4 The effort with which MRC tries to shred NES’s credibility serves to position Crombie as a winning feminist icon, rather than the NIMBY-aligned, developer-friendly, moderately successful suburban politician she is.

John Michael McGrath does similar work over on TVO, reminding us that few modern Ontario governments get three successive majorities (ignoring the eight successive PC majorities from 1945 to 1975) and that a Conservative win federally will make the provincial Liberal brand look better.

lol

How to win as a Liberal

Before Tuesday, polling put the Liberals at 23% support, which is just under a percentage point lower than the vote they earned in the 2022 election. The Progressive Conservatives are doing much better; while 44% of Ontarians disapprove of Doug Ford’s performance as Premier (with 54% of Ontarians saying he has mainly made decisions that benefit himself, his friends, and his supporters), 42% of Ontarians would still cast a ballot for their local PC candidate if an election were held today.

338Canada projected that an election held today would result in almost the exact same seat count as we saw in 2022 with the Tories winning a supermajority of 83 seats in the legislature.

lol

Then, after a couple of days of wall-to-wall coverage of the OLP convention, the Liberals spiked to 34%, just 2 points behind the PCs. Modeling that, the Liberals could be in line to take 45 seats (including every seat in Mississauga, going a long way to meeting Crombie’s expectation of taking “all seats in Peel Region”5) with the Greens picking up Parry Sound—Muskoka. The NDP would lose 16 seats (mainly in the north and Toronto while keeping the two Hamilton seats it currently holds and recapturing Hamilton Centre from Jama) and the Tories would shed 23 seats, setting them up for a minority government.

Right turn ahead

Polling aside, the Ontario Liberals are now poised to slide to the right. Indeed, during the leadership campaign, people pointed out how similar Crombie and Ford are to one another. The day she announced her campaign, she said she would be okay with stripping land from the Greenbelt (which she later walked back). And, as The Trillium found in August, Crombie’s campaign was bankrolled by some wealthy developers. A Vaughan-based developer had 10 of its executives donate to her campaign - 9 of whom donated within three days of one another. Executives with the same developer also donated to Doug Ford’s leadership campaign and the Ontario PCs.

For anyone hoping the Ontario Liberals would provide a viable alternative to Doug Ford in the next election, sorry to disappoint.

Bonnie Crombie is a version of Doug Ford that (probably) won’t pander to anti-gay bigots and won’t use the word “folks” as many times during a press conference. The Ontario Liberal Party will now just give us the same policies as the Ontario PCs, just with one of those “In this house, we believe” lawn signs thrown in.

Crombie’s still got a long way to go if she’s going to defeat Doug Ford. But something else just happened that is complicating her path to power. Or, more accurately, something that could complicate both Bonnie Crombie AND Marit Stiles’s paths to power.

Ein Novemberfest für die Grünen!

It was honestly anyone’s guess how the November 30 by-election in Kitchener Centre would go. Even Green Party leader Mike Schreiner said that, if his party won, it would be very close.

Since 1999, Kitchener Centre has elected Tory, Liberal, and NDP MPPs. In the last provincial election, incumbent NDP MPP Laura Mae Lindo captured a respectable 40.6% of the vote, only shedding about 3% off her 2018 total. In 2022, the PCs held their own with 27% while the Greens gained almost as much as the Liberals lost. Given that the KCW area is where the fringe right wing populist New Blue Party was founded, the fact that their candidate pulled in 5% of the vote in 2022 wasn’t surprising.

Lindo was offered a spot in the University of Waterloo’s Department of Philosophy in January and decided to step down from the legislature (as an academic looking for a full-time gig, I get that). But Lindo also noted that, as a single mother to three kids, it was a challenge to balance working between Kitchener and Toronto, especially with child care costs being what they are. While there were some rumours of tension between Lindo and new NDP leader Marit Stiles (Lindo had considered a run for the leadership against Stiles earlier this year), that wasn’t the main focus of her decision to resign and, in an interview with CBC’s The Morning Edition in Kitchener, she didn’t rule out returning to politics in the future.

A who’s who of candidates

Given the dynamism of the Kitchener Centre riding, every major party had a reasonable shot. The Liberals had hoped the energy around their leadership campaign would give their candidate, civil servant and 2022 candidate Kelly Steiss, a boost. The Tories kind of phoned it in by nominating Rob Elliott, a party semi-loyalist who lived 150 kilometres from Kitchener, as their candidate. But it was the NDP and Greens who really threw their energy into winning. Both parties nominated Kitchener city councillors - the NDP picked two-term Ward 9 councillor Debbie Chapman while the Greens nominated Aislinn Clancy, the recently-elected Ward 10 councillor.

In the end, it wasn’t even close. Aislinn Clancy of the Greens won a resounding victory, pulling in a hair shy of 48% of the vote. Every other party lost support. The NDP dropped nearly 14% (the Kitchener Centre ONDP riding association and Lindo herself distanced themselves from the NDP campaign) while the Liberals earned under 2,000 votes. The PCs sunk to 13% of the vote - the lowest the party has ever polled in the riding. Even the New Blue party’s support dropped off a cliff, with the right wing populist outfit earning about 1/4 of the votes they managed to scrape up last year.

Anatomy of a Green win

The Greens have been working on this seat for a while, both federally and provincially. In 2021, Mike Morrice took the seat from the Liberals, becoming the first Green MP elected in Ontario.

There are two important reasons why they were able to win that seat.

The first is the complete implosion of incumbent Liberal MP Raj Saini’s campaign. First elected in 2015, Saini became the subject of sexual harassment complaints just as the 2021 election ramped up. The Liberals were desperate to avoid a scandal, so distanced themselves from their MP and said that, if he was elected, he would not sit in the Liberal caucus. And nothing like that ever happened to the Liberals again. Saini was forced to “step down” as the candidate, despite the deadline for removing one’s name from the ballot passing.

The next paragraph gets a little heavy, so skip it if you’re not feeling up to it.

Only after the election did the real story come to light. Saini and his staff had been the subject of a sustained harassment campaign by another one of his staffers who used an escalating series of psychological torture techniques to undermine her own boss and, in the words of an HR review, “creating a toxic environment”. The employee was terminated in 2020 by Parliament for her abuse of Saini and her co-workers, which an earlier report was necessary “in order to ensure a safe and healthy work environment for the remainder of the staff.” The employee’s actions included crank calling her own office (once 60 times in one day), changing a co-workers passwords after a fight, and threatening self-harm after Saini gave that other staffer her passwords back. By all indications, it was this former employee who made the allegations, even speaking to the Waterloo Region Record about the experience, which was refuted by all of Saini’s other staffers and the evidence Saini provided to the paper.

Because of Saini’s late withdrawal from the race, Kitchener Centre Liberals moved to the Green camp as a way to stop the Conservatives from winning the race by default. The riding’s former Liberal MPP even endorsed the Green’s Morrice, telling the Record: “He offers a fresh start and local perspective - not politics as usual by the bigger mainstream parties.”6

The second reason the Greens won Kitchener Centre in 2021 is because of the hard work on the part of Morrice. The Greens had nominated Morrice in 2019, hoping the popular sustainability entrepreneur would boost their fortunes in the riding. Morrice turned out to be a skilled campaigner, actually…you know…campaigning. Far too many candidates from parties that don’t seem to have a shot in a riding end up not actually doing the hard work of knocking on doors, keeping lists of supporters, attending events, participating in debates (Conservatives excluded), and even putting up signs. But Morrice put in the work and came in second in 2019. All the more impressive, he announced after the campaign that he had received a cancer diagnosis and delayed surgery until after election day so that he could focus on the community he wanted to represent.

When the 2021 election was called, Morrice was ready to go. Even without Saini’s dropping out of the race, he would have had a strong shot. He built the infrastructure necessary to win a campaign and, in the end, won with 35% of the vote. In his first speech in Parliament, he told the house:

The Greens have been building a party infrastructure in Kitchener that helped Clancy win last week’s by-election. Reports after indicate they worked and worked and worked to win that seat, with Clancy’s husband even making pizza for the team every night. They got YIMBYs, they got disaffected partisans from other parties, they got 400 volunteers AND daily help from the party leader.

A volunteer that Clancy’s team poached from another party told the Record after the election that, while canvassing for the other party felt “mechanical”, when he campaigned for the Greens, he got the “feeling like I made a difference.”7

Clancy has already said the first issue she wants to tackle at Queen’s Park is housing affordability, which, if she’s able to effectively address (or, at the very least under the current PC majority, become a champion for) can show the voters of Ontario that the Greens are a multifaceted party worth paying attention to in the next election.

Problems for the other folks

Here’s why this might complicate things for Crombie and Stiles.

If we see a Green wave in 2026, it would likely mean that Green leader Mike Schreiner will hold his seat in Guelph and Clancy will keep Kitchener Centre. It might also mean that the Greens could take one to three of their next three target seats: Parry Sound—Muskoka, Wellington—Halton Hills, and Dufferin—Caledon. Those three seats are currently held by the Progressive Conservatives, so no big deal there. But if the Green wave bumps their numbers up across the province, we might get some vote splitting.

Now, I’ll be the first to say that the idea of strategic voting is so totally antithetical to a democracy. We should be able to vote our conscience, no matter what. Under a ranked ballot system, we can vote how we like and then rank our other preferences for a later count, at least showing our true feelings at first. And under proportional representation, our vote is more likely to count and then the people we elect get to work collaboratively to form a government. But strategic voting throws that all out the window, forcing us to sacrifice our values from the onset.

Still, the Tories aren’t implementing electoral reform any time soon, especially when they can control 2/3 of the legislature despite 60% of voters opposing them. The game is already rigged in their favour.

A Green bump might peel voters away from the NDP and Liberals in key seats. It could help the Conservatives keep ridings they narrowly held in 2022 like Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, Thunder Bay—Atikokan, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, and Cambridge. It could also see ridings the NDP clung onto by a small margin (Oshawa, Niagara Centre, Ottawa West—Nepean, Thunder Bay—Superior North) or the Liberals had a shot at (Scarborough Centre, Eglinton—Lawrence, Etobicoke—Lakeshore) go full Tory.

The question is: does it matter? If the Liberals run a tepid PC-clone campaign and the NDP bumbles around in the wake of infighting and conspiracies, does it matter if the Greens take that vote? If the Greens run a respectable campaign, does it mean they deserve the votes they earn, even if the system we have is so broken that it doesn’t change the outcome?

Or, as is entirely possible, the Greens might become an ascendant political force in Ontario.

In Atlantic Canada, the Greens have become a major alternative to the Liberals and Conservatives, outpacing the NDP in both New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. In the former, they even formed the Official Opposition after the 2019 election. There are other countries, like Germany and Scotland (yeah, I said Scotland is a country), where the Greens have overtaken their traditional centre-right liberal parties. It isn’t hard to imagine a BC-style change happening here, where the Liberals collapse and the Greens become the major third party.

Oh, and speaking of parties/the lack of parties:

The Centre cannot hold

Two rather interesting things have happened in the world of Sarah Jama, the now firmly-Independent MPP for Hamilton Centre.

The first is that Jama’s lawyers are pushing forward with her application for a “judicial review” of the legislature’s decision to censure Hamilton Centre’s MPP after her tweets about the conflict in Israel and Gaza. This judicial review is an entirely different matter from her lawsuit against the Premier, but will more directly address the issue of her now-voiceless constituents. It is anticipated that Jama’s motion for a judicial review will happen in the new year.

The actual censure motion was advanced by Paul Calandra, the PC House Leader who, more often than not, stands as Doug Ford’s surrogate in the legislature. The motion basically uses “parliamentary privilege” to deny Jama a voice. Speaking to the motion, he said that:

Calandra’s assertion is that, by expressing her personal views, Jama so damaged the reputation of the Ontario legislature that the other members needed to ostracize her and her constituents to show respect for themselves and their constituents. Hamilton vs. Everybody, babyyy.

As David Said and Greg Flynn wrote in a piece in The Conversation, this case is fairly unique, as it “pits the parliamentary privilege of an individual member against that of the legislature as a whole.” The authors note that this case differs from others in that what Jama did “occurred outside of, and without any impact on, the legislative process.”

When PC-turned-Independent MPP Randy Hillier was censured by the legislature, it was on the grounds that he made racist remarks toward a federal cabinet minister, undermined public health efforts, and was encouraging insurrection against the state. During the Ottawa Convoy, Hillier encouraged his followers to inundate Ottawa emergency services with fake 911 calls to prevent the police from dealing with the occupation effectively. Hillier’s actions were actually disreputable and amounted to an effort to hinder the functions of the state.

Contrast that with Jama’s actions. Might people have critiques over the tone, timing, and intensity of her comments? Yeah. Might people disagree with her statements? Totally. Is it reasonable to say that the obsessive focus on the conflict in Israel and Gaza is a distraction? Absolutely. But her social media statements and personal opinions can’t be compared to Hillier’s active efforts to undermine the credibility of the state.

Jama’s conduct should be judged by her constituents. Paul Calandra should not have the power to strip a voice from the people of Hamilton Centre because he disagrees with Jama’s stance on the conflict. If this review finds that the PCs unfairly silenced Jama, that’s one less tool in their eerily authoritarian toolbox they can use to punish all those who dare stand in their way.

A party-less riding association

The second issue is something rather unique. On December 3, Jama posted on social media that an “independent” riding association would be forming in Hamilton Centre. A post, set over a background featuring the colours of the flag of Palestine, informs us that there will be a meeting of this new group on Tuesday, December 12 from 7 to 9 PM at the ATU Hall, 1005 King Street East.

An “independent” riding association is an interesting concept. Riding associations usually exist to be the local-level organizing body for a political party. They run nomination contests, organize local fundraising efforts, and generally advance the party’s message in a specific electoral district.

Turns out, “independent” riding associations are a totally legitimate thing. I’m actually astonished I - a certified political nerd - didn’t know that. In fact, another independent member of the Ontario legislature, Haldimand—Norfolk’s Bobbi Ann Brady (who, as a former PC staffer, wanted to run as a PC, but was rejected so the party could nominate Haldimand mayor Ken Hewitt without a fuss…this backfired on the Tories when Brady’s old boss, the retiring MPP Toby Barrett, endorsed her independent bid) also has a riding association to support her - presently the only one of the five independents in the legislature with one. Jama’s will bring that number up to two.

The implication here is that Jama is fine being an independent and intends to carry on with this, even into the next provincial election. Riding associations exist to give activists something to do between campaigns, serving the important purpose of getting everyone ready for the next election. By organizing a riding association, Jama is signaling she fully intends to run in the next provincial election as an independent.

A new new party

A small part of me had wondered if Jama and her supporters would be starting a new party.

On November 9, Elections Ontario approved three new “reserved” party names. If you want to start a new party in Ontario, you have to first fill out a P-3 form that “reserves” a name for you for a year while you appoint a CFO, an auditor, and get the whole thing up and running.

Elections Ontario needs to make sure your name isn’t offensive (like “The Masturbators Political Party of Ontario” requested in 2012), misspelled (like “The Sovereighnty Association Party of Ontario” requested in 1995), close to another party name (like “The Ontario Tory Party” requested in 2018), or straight-up confusing (like - and this is all one name presented exactly like it was in the application - “The 1st National Negro/Israelite/Black Community Political Leadership Group for Human Rights Restoration/Slavery Reparations/Social Justice & Economic Equality Rights Reinforcement Party”, also requested in 2018).

Of the three party names approved on November 9, two were registered after Jama was ejected from the ONDP caucus. Interestingly, both were registered by people who might have been using fake names. The first was the “Silenced Party”, registered by Max Power. The second is the “Labour Party of Ontario”, registered by Charles Taylor.

I say those names might be fake because they’re a combination of plausible, common, and famous. Max Power is what Homer Simpson changes his name to in Episode 13 of Season 10 of The Simpsons (right around when the show started getting bad). Charles Taylor is a McGill-based political philosopher who was one of Jack Layton’s professors and was a four-time NDP candidate, including running once against Pierre Elliot Trudeau.

“Max Power” is the third-most prolific “reserver” of party names in Ontario, having 7 applications associated with that name going back to 2015 (when a Max Power registered and then withdrew the party name “The Twenty First Century Party” before re-applying with the name “30th Century Party”…wanted to seem really ahead of the times, I guess).

And, tying “Labour Party of Ontario” and prolific name reservations together: the most prolific “reserver” of party names in Ontario is an “Ian Hood”, who has 20 requests going back to 1975. In that time, Ian Hood has requested:

1. Three variations of the “Ontario Republican Party” from 1975 to 1993.

2. Five variations of the “Reform Party of Ontario”, all within a few days of each other in 1994.

3. A whopping eleven variations on the “Labour Party of Canada (Ontario) from 1994 to 2001.

4. And the stand alone: The Unity Canada Party, in February of 1977.

Only three requests were ever even approved and he let all of them expire. Oddly, one of those requests was for “Labour Party of Ontario Canada”.

We don’t even know who Ian Hood is, honestly. There’s an “Ian Hood” who harasses people in Toronto’s High Park (could be, but no way to tell). There’s a US-based polyamorous bartending witch with that name (less likely, but cooler than the other one). But there don’t seem to be any records of an “Ian Hood” involved with legitimate labour groups in Ontario.

Anyway, a Charles Taylor (likely not the Charles Taylor) seems to have that one reserved now.

I reached out to the nice folks at Elections Ontario who indicated that, while identification documents aren’t required at the time a party name is reserved, there’s an internal process they follow that isn’t open to public scrutiny. They gave me an opportunity to take a look at the original forms, but I’m not sure that’s something I’m ready to do right now.

Regardless, what’s the point of registering a party name using a fake personal name? You’ll have to eventually make a public declaration if you want to turn your reserved party name into an actual political party. Indeed, I think the only reason someone would reserve a party name using a pseudonym would be to prevent a legitimate group from getting their hands on a popular name.

Jama seems to be perfectly content as an independent right now. Branching out and starting a new party would be a lot of work, but might have the benefit of organizing her disparate coalition of supporters and focusing them on not only keeping Jama in office, but building infrastructure to get like-minded people elected province-wide.

Where to from here?

How Crombie steers the waterlogged ship S.S. Liberal, how the Greens build off a big by-election win, and how Jama fights to both restore her voice and organize her riding will impact this province in a profound way for a long time. But it is a long time before 2026 and, as we all know, things can change pretty fast in Ontario’s politics.

But with a new Liberal leader, a reinvigorated Green Party, and a move to organize the independents, it is fair to say this week might have changed things in Ontario in a big, big way.

Loyal she began, wild she remains.

Meanwhile, on the hellsite

Leave her alone, internet bullies! She’s a Canadian treasure!

The woke and the asleep

I don’t blame you if you don’t know about “School Resource Officers” or “SROs”. It is one of those things connected to education and school governance that usually only gets coverage when something goes wrong or someone wants to change the program. According to a description provided by the Public Safety Ministry:

These SROs are controversial because, fairly simply, they are police officers in schools. While the intent is to work on getting students away from “delinquency”, we all know that the roots of crime go much deeper than the “delinquent” or “antisocial” actions that a police officer might be observing. Few officers have the skills, training, and resources to deal with the root causes of someone’s actions and are trained to manage one specific instance at one specific time after something bad has happened. When the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board terminated their SRO program, they did so to find an alternative that wasn’t as militarized and harmful to racialized students.

Up in Simcoe County, there’s been some debate about SRO programs. While their Catholic board voted to end the SRO program they had in place, a review by the public Simcoe County District School Board (SCDSB) - which never had an SRO program - indicated that:

Implementing an SRO program would have created overlap with existing programs, so the board decided to not move forward with creating one.

That was back in May. Fast forward to this past week. The Simcoe County Council (the upper-tier municipal body made up of the mayors and deputy mayors of the 16 towns and townships in Simcoe that aren’t Barrie and Orillia) decided to strongly chastise the SCDSB for not having an SRO program.

On November 28, the Simcoe County Council voted to send a letter of support to the local council of one of their member municipalities - Adjala-Tosorontio. That municipality recently debated a motion which would have encouraged the SCDSB to implement an SRO program.

Now, remember, the SCDSB has never had an SRO program.

That didn’t stop Bradford West Gwillimbury Mayor James Leduc from telling the county council that “We need our police back in our schools.”11 Clearview’s Deputy Mayor, Paul Van Staveren, chimed in and agreed: “Basically, the school board has kicked out the police services…This goes right back to the school board feeling they’re intimidated or whatever. I think we need to come down a little heavier … (and) say we want this.”12 And then Midland’s Mayor, Bill Gordon, came in with this gem:

What are you all talking about!?

The SCDSB never had an SRO program. The board did allow officers into schools to address public safety issues, but never had an SRO program. Their decision to not create an SRO program was less “woke” and more “we don’t want to go broke”.

But Simcoe County’s elected officials decided to crank the dial on the Culturewarometer up to 11, each doing their best to audition for whatever Conservative Party nomination contest they plan to run in. The SCDSB is a separate level of government that cannot and should not be bullied into implementing a program by a bunch of anti-woke mayors with who have no idea what they’re talking about.

Though it was Collingwood’s Deputy Mayor, Tim Fryer, who gave away the real reason they’re on this issue:

There you go. Simcoe County pays a lot for its OPP service. And, in order to keep channeling public money to the provincial police, they need to justify their spending. If they effectively bully the SCDSB into creating an SRO program, then they can tell the taxpayers that the next police budget increase (and, therefore, property tax increase) is justified because there’s a new program they have to fund.

It is interesting to see a culture war argument about schools originating from a different municipal government, instead of from some weird hard right pressure group or religious extremist trustee.

Cool facts for cool people

• The Oshawa kangaroo punched a police officer.

• London’s anti-anti-abortion flyer bylaw might be expanded to prevent radical anti-choice activists from displaying pictures of what they claim are aborted fetuses on city streets. The expansion to the bylaw is being pushed by, among others, Ward 6 councillor Sam Trosow who has the advantage of also being an associate professor at the law school at Western University. Trosow told the London Free Press that he acknowledges it is a limitation on their freedom of expression, saying “There’s a legitimate purpose (to the bylaw), which is the prevention of harm. It’s narrowly tailored to meet that purpose and there’s no less-restrictive alternative.” The move is being opposed by the far-right Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform, which is the primary group behind the visual harassment campaigns of graphic flyers and posters. As I mentioned back in early November, campaigns against these horrific flyers have been led by women who experienced traumatic miscarriages and who don’t want others to be hurt by these images. Let’s hope London keeps leading the way on this to protect people from the visual harassment of these religious extremists.

• In transit news, the Philadelphia-area transit provider, SEPTA, did a trial run where they put automated cameras on seven of their busses. The cameras are pointed forward and take photos of the licence plates of vehicles that have illegally parked in “bus only” lanes. Over two months, the seven cameras were used on just two routes. In that time, the cameras recorded 36,392 vehicles obstructing the bus lanes. The ticket for doing so is $101, meaning the city could have raked in over $3.6 million from that pilot project alone. Stop blocking bus lanes, people!