Bonnie Crombie's team is getting more than a little desperate.

Fighting the New Leaf Liberals with...hecklers? Really?

Bonnie Crombie, pictured from behind, watches from the sidelines as the Federal Liberals take a separate team photo without her Ontario Liberals, on June 29^th at the 2025 edition of Pride Toronto. The two groups maintained more separation than in previous years. | Copyright © Jake Landau, all rights reserved.

The campaign to unseat Bonnie Crombie from the leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party continues! You’ll already be familiar with the New Leaf Liberals; I recently interviewed their co-founder Noah Parker for It’s Getting Pretty Late with Jake Landau, and you can listen to the podcast here:

Episode 20 - July 6, 2025 - Noah Parker

The New Leaf Liberals hosted their most recent event in Ottawa on July 17^th, featuring Mr. Parker’s co-founder in the movement, Nathaniel Arfin. Unfortunately, I was not able to make it into Ottawa to observe, and this became doubly disappointing the day after, when I discovered the event featured something unexpected: a heckler.

Several people present at the event have confirmed that while Mr. Arfin was attempting to give remarks to those attending his event, he was repeatedly heckled by a pro-Crombie individual, who they identified as Curtis O’Nyon.

Mr. O’Nyon currently works in Ottawa as Senior Counsel of Federal and Municipal Relations at the Global Public Affairs lobbying firm. Party members claim that during the Ontario Liberal leadership race in 2023, he served as the Eastern regional rep for Bonnie Crombie’s campaign.

It’s unclear whether Mr. O’Nyon coordinated his heckling adventure with anyone on Crombie’s team, or whether he was acting of his own accord. It most certainly did not endear any of the attendees of the event to his position, and it’s already become hot gossip on the Liberal twitter circuit.

But it’s just one recent example from the past couple days of a new dynamic in the Ontario Liberal Party: Bonnie Crombie’s supporters are getting desperate.

Recently, the Toronto Star’s Queen’s Park Bureau Chief, Robert Benzie, published a piece of reporting about Bonnie Crombie that I would criticize as resembling stenography more than journalism. The majority of the piece consists of direct quotes from her promotional video, without commentary or contextualization.

At the very end, he describes the New Leaf Liberals in much the same terms that Crombie’s surrogates do, “co-founded by a backer of MP Nate Erskine-Smith”. This is a misleading characterization, as evidenced by my own interview with Noah Parker where he went on at length about how he and other Burlington Liberals want Karina Gould.

And yet this canard about NES is one of the desperate lines of attack that Crombie’s supporters keep repeating. They claim the New Leaf Liberals have no valid complaints about Crombie’s terrible electoral performance, and that they must secretly all be fifth columnists working on Erskine-Smith’s behalf.

Right-wing Liberal MPP for Orléans, Stephen Blais, took shots along those lines at Erskine-Smith on Twitter today, claiming that “The [Ontario Liberal] leadership isn’t a backup plan or safety net. Building for the future takes hard work and someone who is going to stick it out. #BuildwithBonnie”

To be frank, I don’t see anyone treating the Ontario Liberal leadership as a backup plan or safety net, except for Crombie herself. It doesn’t matter that she couldn’t win her own seat in the city she was mayor of for a decade, and it doesn’t matter that she has no plan to find another seat to try, she still feels entitled to the plum six-figure salary that comes with being leader.

Truthfully? The Party is now just her backup plan, after voters said they didn’t want her. And it’s costing Ontario Liberals a lot of money to be Crombie’s backup plan.

Lucille Collard, the Liberal MPP for Ottawa—Vanier, claimed in her own tweet yesterday that the Liberals have “momentum”, and that “the last thing we need is another leadership race.”

I have nothing but contempt for the suggestion that holding a leadership race hurts a party. Historically, they tend to boost volunteer engagement with political parties, as well as generate significant revenue through the large entry fees charged to candidates. There’s nothing respectable to me about a politician in a democracy claiming that voting is burdensome.

John Fraser, the Liberal MPP for Ottawa, posted another derisive snipe at those upset about Crombie’s underperformance, stating that he’s supporting her in the leadership review because “Our cause is a collective one. Not one of personal ambition.” Because clearly those who oppose her faction are merely selfish, in his eyes.

Caucus member Stephanie Smyth for Toronto—St. Paul’s claims that abandoning Bonnie would be going “backwards.” Tyler Watt of Nepean and Ted Hsu of Kingston both show their support for Crombie without directly insulting her critics, but they jump in on the action too.

It is not lost on me that right after the New Leaf Liberals host an event in Ottawa, an event which is crashed and heckled by a Crombie supported, suddenly there is a mass coordinated action by a swath of Liberal MPPs reciting the exact same pro-Crombie talking points, from a script they were all clearly given by the leader’s office and told not to deviate from.

And it’s really not lost on me that Matt Gagné, Regional VP-East for the Ontario Liberals, went on Twitter to boast about how caucus members were whipped to all post this stuff at the same time today. Honestly, it’s pretty egregious; they don’t typically admit it out loud, you see.

He also stretches the rhetoric against the New Leaf Liberals even further, claiming Crombie’s opponents have “failed delusions of grandeur”, that they’re uninvolved with the party and just jealous that “we’ve revived the [Liberal Caucus Services Bureau] and raised millions.”

Listen, Matt. Buddy.

If we’re talking about delusions of grandeur here, it’s probably the failed politician who performed terribly, yet somehow believes the slightest or mildest criticism of her is a deep personal attack and betrayal. That’s not a healthy mindset, that’s narcissism.

The sheer weight with which Crombie’s team is trying to crack down on the leadership review is an act of desperation. Literally all the New Leaf Liberals have done so far is talk at the pub with other Liberals, and Crombie’s circle is so scared of this that they need half of caucus to all coordinate a public response? They need random people to come and heckle while Liberals try and talk to each other?

That’s not the attitude of people who think their boss will be leader much longer. It’s random flailing without any rhyme or reason, and it will not change the likely outcome of the leadership review, which is Crombie’s departure. But you know what will decide the outcome?

The votes cast by the delegates, who will attend the Ontario Liberal AGM from September 12^th to 14^th in less than two months, at the Sheraton Centre in Toronto. And if you’re a Liberal who wants to be a voting delegate at that leadership review, make sure to register your intent at this link, before the deadline at 23:59 Eastern Time on July 25^th!

So make sure to register before that deadline if you’re interested, since it will pass in a few days! And count me among the interested…because I wouldn’t miss this spectacle of this clown show for anything.