Ontario Liberal Party delegates elected a former cabinet minister on Sunday to be the new party president, putting her atop the fresh executive that will soon begin shaping its upcoming leadership contest.
Kathryn McGarry was a nurse before entering politics and had two failed provincial runs in Cambridge before breaking through in 2014. She was named to cabinet by then-premier Kathleen Wynne in 2016, serving as minister of natural resources and then transport minister for a short stint in 2018. McGarry lost her race in the Liberals’ trouncing in 2018 and jumped to municipal politics for one term as Cambridge’s mayor before losing her re-election attempt in 2022.
The Ontario Liberals’ executive elections were one of the last orders of business at the party’s 2023 annual general meeting, held in Hamilton over the weekend.
Six party devotees were elected to roles on the Ontario Liberals’ internal governing body, while another 11 were acclaimed. Most members are new to their positions.
A top priority for the new executive is to put together the party’s upcoming leadership contest.
By a yet-to-be-determined date, all Ontario Liberal members will have the opportunity to vote to elect the party’s next leader after delegates on Saturday amended the party’s constitution to implement a weighted-one-member-one-vote system. The party’s past leadership elections were decided at delegated conventions. The change to a one-member-one-vote system follows many similar decisions by major Canadian political parties, including the Liberal Party of Canada.
McGarry didn’t have much to say about how she’d like the leadership election to be structured while speaking to reporters after her election on Sunday.
“That is yet to be determined,” she said, adding that the party’s new executive has to tackle all the constitutional amendments — not just one-member-one-vote — before she can answer that question.
Both Nathaniel Erskine-Smith and Yasir Naqvi — current Liberal MPs positioning themselves to run for the OLP’s top job — said on Saturday that they’d prefer the vote to wrap up by the end of the year.
“The party isn't only in third place, but having travelled a great deal of province, it is a shell of its former self,” Erskine-Smith said on Saturday. “We need that serious grassroots renewal and there’s a lot of hard work ahead. Whoever the next leader is, they're going to, in my view, need at least two years to get election-ready.”
“By election-ready, I don't mean by June 2026. I mean six months before the next election,” he added.
Naqvi said the party should elect its new leader “sometime in November or December of this year, so that the new leader has the opportunity to start doing the rebuilding work, building a platform, building a team, (doing) the important fundraising that needs to happen so that we are ready for the June 2026 election and (to) defeat Doug Ford,” Naqvi said.
Two other new executives The Trillium spoke to over the weekend also signalled that they’d prefer a new leader elected sooner rather than later.
“I would love to see a leadership race that concludes in 2023,” Adam Reinhardt, the party’s new vice-president for the central east region, said. “I don’t know that we have time to wait until 2024. We need to be able to promote our leader and make them a household name, if they are not already.”
“I have reasons for why I want to see it happen sooner rather than later, but I want to talk to my (fellow) executive council members first,” said David Morris, one of the party’s vice presidents for Toronto. He added that he hopes the executive council comes up with a timeline soon.
McGarry’s presidential election victory over Natalie Hart and Fadi El Masry was decided by a paper thin margin, Liberal party sources told The Trillium.
Hart placed a close second. El Masry was third. It was the first contested presidential election since 1999, McGarry said.
Some procedural drama pre-empted both the election and the weighted-one-member-one-vote decision, but ultimately both were followed through with smoothly.
About 1,500 party delegates — a mixture of MPPs, staff, volunteers and rank-and-file members — attended the Liberals’ annual general meeting, representing its best showing in decades.
Heading into the weekend, there was a widespread belief that the party’s get-together was the most important one it’s had this century.
The Liberals hold just eight seats at Queen’s Park, despite securing more votes than the 30-seat NDP in last spring’s election, putting them short of official party status at the legislature, and cutting them off from significant funding.
In general, there was a sense of the party’s rejuvenation among attendees of the Liberals’ weekend meeting, albeit one that’s couched with a cautious awareness of the importance of the party’s forthcoming leadership race.
Everyone already campaigning — in the unofficial sense, prior to the race’s launch — for leadership was at the annual general meeting. Each of the three all-but-set potential candidates, MPs Erskine-Smith and Naqvi and MPP Ted Hsu, hosted hospitality suites over the weekend to mix and mingle with potential supporters.
Bonnie Crombie, Mississauga’s current mayor and a former Liberal MP, also attended; her name has been bandied about as well.
Rookie MPPs Adil Shamji and Stephanie Bowman also seemed to be laying the groundwork for potential bids; Bowman hosted a hospitality suite and Shamji handed out business cards directing Liberals to a new website, joinadil.ca.
