Why is Bonnie Crombie trying to force every progressive Liberal to leave?

Yes, I'm both a Liberal and a socialist. Yes, it's a little weird. No, I'm not leaving.

Bonnie Crombie speaking at the Police Association of Ontario’s 2024 Fall Membership Meeting, boasting that she wants police to drain taxpayers of every single penny they have. | Copyright © Bonnie Crombie, licensed under fair dealing.

Bonnie Crombie has kept her promise; she will lead the Ontario Liberal Party from the right-wing. She will promote the discredited ideologies of neoliberalism and austerity that Dalton McGuinty enforced; she will make the Liberal Party into a worse version of itself.

I had a bad feeling this was coming, since the last tax cut announcement that Crombie made with Stephanie Bowman, the Liberal MPP for Don Valley West. The specifics of that private member’s bill concern me greatly, even after it was defeated by the Ford government.

On June 4^th, Crombie and Bowman put out a press release announcing that an Ontario Liberal government would slash the corporate tax rate in half, from 3.2% to 1.6% in the bottom bracket. They would also raise the limit for that income bracket to $600,000 a year, up from the current limit of $500,000.

Rewinding to the context of six months ago: Doug Ford announced he was spending $225 million to end the Beer Store monopoly ahead of schedule, and then the Ontario Liberals made a claim that he was lying about the true cost, and that it was actually a “billion-dollar boozedoggle”.

Then, with a straight face, the Liberal Party turned around on a dime, and proudly boasted about our plans for a corporate tax cut which, by our own estimates, would remove $1 billion in revenue from the Ontario budget every single year.

The Ontario Liberals tell me to get mad at Doug Ford spending a billion dollars for a one-time fee, and then on the same day tell me to support the idea of slashing a billion dollars in revenue annually.

And don’t forget that Canada already has the lowest corporate tax rate in the entire G7 for small-to-medium sized businesses. Capitalist greed-mongers are already getting a free ride at the expense of the Canadian worker. Crombie made a choice, despite that, to advance policies that would make inequality worse.

To me, this was a dangerously concerning development, a sign that the political party I’ve dedicated myself to is mutating into something unrecognizable to me. But it was Crombie’s big announcement for a personal income tax cut, that saw my fears realized, of a right-wing shift in the Ontario Liberal Party.

On November 12^th, Bonnie Crombie made a promise to slash personal income tax across the board for the vast majority of Ontarians. Currently, the second-lowest personal income bracket in Ontario’s tax system is $51,446-$75,000 dollars, and income within that slice is taxed at a rate of 9.15%.

Crombie says that her hypothetical government would cut that rate down to 7.15%. This would not just benefit people whose total income is within that bracket; everyone who makes more than $51,446 dollars per year will have that slice up to $75,000 dollars taxed at 7.15%.

The only group of people it won’t benefit are the poorest Ontarians among us, in the lowest tax bracket; gig workers without a minimum wage, disabled people unable to survive on anemic ODSP rates, and seniors who have had their pensions stolen by corporate raiders.

Crombie also promised she will slash the provincial sales tax on residential heating and hydro bills, taxes which are mainly paid by homeowners, rarely by rental tenants. Ultimately, these tax cuts are targeted to help everyone except poor people.

They will cut taxes for business owners but not their workers; they will cut taxes for landlords but not their tenants. This slash-and-burn philosophy, almost by design, will hurt the poorest people in our province the most.

I say almost by design, but in truth, it’s hard to believe that this attack on the poor is not intentional. And it is even harder to believe after reading Bonnie Crombie’s ludicrous right-wing speech, at her outrageous fundraising dinner for millionaire elites.

Tickets to that dinner had two pricing tiers: (a) $1600 dollar tickets including the cocktail reception and dinner; and (b) $3375 dollar tickets including both of the above, and also a VIP reception with Bonnie herself.

Nobody gives that kind of cash to a politician if they do not have expectation that the investment will be returned. The idea that any human being would freely give someone thousands of dollars, and then expect nothing in exchange, is an absurdity unworthy of debate.

Indeed, the average Ontarian would never be able to afford this kind of event, only the wealthy powerful who already dominate our society. This is exactly why former Ontario Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne banned them, and established the per-vote subsidy in their place.

But Doug Ford reversed that ban, and doubled the provincial donation limits to the absurdly high $3375. Québec, in contrast, has set their limit to merely $100, and as a result, les partis politiques dans la belle province are forced to appeal to the mass public, rather than the privileged few.

So, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre on December 3^rd, Bonnie Crombie spoke to a crowd of her wealthiest supporters, receiving the same largesse from the Bay Street crowd that Kathleen Wynne rightly knew to be a poison unto our politics.

What did Crombie say to her benefactors, behind the closed doors? What remaining elements of Kathleen Wynne’s progressive legacy did she promise to unravel, for the benefit of the rich and the powerful?

“Justin Trudeau is wrong about the carbon tax, and we should let the rich corporations you own pollute for free.”

“Instead of Doug Ford and Justin Trudeau giving you a rebate, we should slash your taxes permanently.”

“It doesn’t matter that safe consumption sites save lives; if poor people make rich people in the suburbs uncomfortable, we should let them die.”

Crombie goes on constant, endless diatribes about how she’s nothing like those Liberals. She’s a “centrist”, she’s a “moderate”, and it’s always “Team Bonnie” and never the “Liberal Party”, because she resents the fact that Trudeau and Wynne changed the Liberal identity into a progressive one.

Ultimately, Crombie has given the game away: she’s a “different kind” of Liberal, because she’s actually a Conservative.

I genuinely believe that if we had a sitting Liberal government in Ontario, and it was the Tories who did not have a leader, that Crombie would have run for the PC leadership instead.

Bonnie Crombie thinks that the Liberal Party should adopt Conservative policies, fiscal and social, because in her heart she is a Conservative, and she revels in the ability to dispossess progressives of our own party.

Her surrogates rant and rave about “identity politics” and other bigoted dogwhistles, while Liberal MPPs like Stephen Blais boast directly to me that the Liberal caucus won’t be attending Pride. If the colour was blue instead of red, nobody would guess she was leading a “Liberal” party.

And the funniest part? Truly, the funniest part out of all of this?

Democratic socialists made the choice to join the Liberal Big Tent in the early 2010s because NDP leaders like Thomas Mulcair and Andrea Horwath were also centrist neoliberals who didn’t give a shit about poor people.

Like many left-wing Liberals who came of political age during the Trudeau/Wynne era, I compromised some of my socialist positions, in exchange for joining the Big Tent of the Liberal Party.

I joined a party which, unlike the NDP, has the capacity to actually win elections; I chose imperfect progress over no progress at all, and in exchange the Liberal Party knew that it had to commit to that progress to keep our support.

This the true extent of Bonnie Crombie’s hubris: she refuses to admit that she needs progressives votes, but progressive voters don’t need her.

In Canadian provincial politics, there are no serious Liberal parties left outside the Atlantic. In Québec, they exist in name only, and from Manitoba westward to British Columbia, it is the provincal NDP wings which gain the support of federal Liberal voters.

It is only in Ontario where the Liberal Party is still putting up a fight in the popular vote against the NDP and the Tories, but a third election without achieving party status could very well finish the Ontario Liberal Party for good.

I don’t want that. I’m proud to be a member of the federal and provincial Liberal parties, despite my extremely frequent history of cricitizing my own team. It has been the honour and the privilege of my lifetime to work on elections for left-wing Liberal candidates.

But when Bonnie Crombie won the leadership race for the Ontario Liberals one year ago, she only won 53% on the final ranked ballot. 47% of the weighted votes, in a contest with four candidates, ranked Crombie either last, or not at all.

Crombie had half the entire party membership, on that final ballot, say they like literally every other candidate more than they like her. And yet, she still has the audacity, the unmitigated gall, to send her surrogates to progressives and pressure us to leave the Liberal Party?

Fuck that. I’m a Liberal, and I’m a socialist, and as weird as that can be, I take the promise of the Big Tent sincerely, even if Crombie only sees it as a weapon to enforce compliance. I refuse to leave the Ontario Liberal Party so that people like this can destroy everything progressives have built.

I will not donate to or volunteer with any Liberal MPP or Liberal nominee who advances Crombie’s reactionary agenda. I will not donate to or volunteer with Crombie’s central party headquarters, as long as Crombie allows her surrogates to denigrate other Liberal organizers.

But most importantly, as a columnist? I will never be silent when Bonnie Crombie, or Justin Trudeau, or any Liberal politician, does something that I know will hurt people. I will never let myself be pressured into silence, and I will always put people over party.

Despite Crombie’s erosion of progressivism within the Liberal Party, I’m still proud to be a member of the Big Tent. I refuse to give up the fight and allow the Overton window to shift even further right than it already has.

So, whether Bonnie Crombie likes it or not, I’m going to grab those tent poles…and I’m going to run so far left I end up looping the globe.