By Pepper Parr
December 4th, 2023
BURLINGTON, ON
While 103,206 party members were eligible to vote across Ontario Nov. 25-26, only 22,827 actually bothered to cast ballots.
That is not a good number and something Bonnie Crombie is going to have to overcome is as she gets ready to take on the job fill time early in the New Year
The big job for Bonnie Crombie and the provincial Liberals will begin after the holidays.
The polling numbers, once she had the job in the bag were good – good enough?
Without her as leader, the Tories were at 42 per cent, the NDP at 24 per cent, the Liberals were at 23 per cent, and the Greens at seven per cent.
With Crombie, the Liberals jumped to 31 per cent, the Tories dropped to 39 per cent, the NDP slipped to 20 per cent and the Greens were at six per cent.
Crombie conceded the Liberals — who remain three seats short of official party status in the legislature and the additional funding and opportunities to ask questions of the government that come with it — face a daunting task with voters.
“Earning trust is a step-by-step process.”
Meanwhile Premier Doug Ford is going to have to get used to having questions put to him – something he hasn’t been very good at when it come to Bonnie Crombie.
During the leadership campaign, Crombie put forward a variety of policies she said would undo the damage of the Ford years, from bolstering the Greenbelt with a “water and food belt” of lands protected from development and clearing the surgical backlog from the COVID-19 pandemic without resorting to for-profit clinics.
Crombie won the leadership job – that was expected. Now she has to pull a political party that has a massive job ahead of it.
Calling climate change an “existential threat,” she pledged financial aid to help make homes emissions-free and resilient to threats caused by climate change, such as heavy rains and rising temperatures.
The new leader would also restore the role of a stand-alone environmental commissioner, which Ford scrapped in 2018, and repeal his controversial Bill 124 wage restraint legislation that capped most public sector workers to one per cent annual wage increases. A court found the law unconstitutional, but the PC government is appealing.
To improve health services, she unveiled a plan to pay personal support workers — who do the bulk of care for frail elderly residents in nursing homes, where there is high staff turnover — a minimum of $25 hourly and registered practical nurses at least $35.
She proposed a “bill of rights” for gig workers, indexing Ontario Works social assistance payments to inflation and doubling payouts under the Ontario Disability Support Plan, and to reinstate the basic income pilot project that Ford axed. As well, more rent controls would be phased in to give tenants increased protection.
Also on housing, Crombie would provide funding to municipalities for emergency rent banks to help tenants in crisis avoid eviction, levy a tax on vacant houses in urban areas and make it easier to convert vacant office buildings to mixed-use residential.
All good platform planks – but lurking behind is that 22,827 of the 103,206 eligible Liberals who were eligible to vote bothering to do so.
I was liking her while she was ‘centre left’ don’t like my leaders blowing in the wind. The one thing I do agree on is looking after the frail and the elderly, It seems to be proven thats all we had to do during the pandemic.