A Party Built
to Win and Govern.

After each of those losses, this party did the honest thing. In 2018, we gathered at Provincial Council and put the people who had run the campaign in front of members to answer for it, and after 2022 and 2025 volunteers gave up their evenings for months to interview candidates, survey members and write down what they heard. The three reviews that came out of that work are careful, candid documents, and the people who wrote them deserve our thanks, as does everyone who kept a riding association alive through a decade in opposition with little money, few tools and nowhere near the help they needed.

Read the three reviews side by side, though, and you notice that they are nearly the same document. Early nominations, field organizers, a campaign director in place long before the writ, clean voter data, a plain-language message about the economy, a platform before the advance polls. The 2025 committee recommended, almost line for line, what the 2022 committee had already recommended, and this year the New Leaf Liberals, organizing from outside the leader’s office, reached many of the same conclusions once again.

So our problem was never a shortage of good advice. Our retrospectives are full of it. What they never came with was an execution plan: a timeline, clear responsibility for delivering it, and reporting that members could actually follow. That is not entirely an indictment of the people inside the party, who have had to meet high expectations with fewer resources every cycle, including years without official party status. But it is time to build on the work they have done and actually change how this party operates.

This document is my plan for doing that. It means choosing candidates earlier, developing our platform openly with members and caucus, giving riding associations more resources and a greater role in the party, building our field organization long before the election, fixing the technology our volunteers depend on, raising money consistently, and rebuilding the Ontario Liberal Party as a genuine big tent that can speak to people well beyond those who voted for us last time. The details matter, and the rest of this document lays out how we get there, who is responsible and when it should happen.

Much of what follows is not original, and I do not pretend otherwise. It is what Ontario Liberals have already told ourselves, often repeatedly. The difference is that good intentions and good recommendations have to become obligations, with people responsible for carrying them through and members able to see whether we are actually doing what we said we would do. A party that wants Ontarians to trust it with government should first show that it can govern itself.

There is a part of this that no reform plan can do for us. The leader has a duty to carry themselves, every day, in a way that shows Ontarians we are ready to govern, and members have a duty, once the leadership election is over, to set aside the cynicism and disagreements and work as a team. Power is the force that holds governing parties together. We do not have it, so it takes discipline instead, and the understanding that our fight is not between factions inside this party, or even ultimately with the current government, but for the confidence of a public that wants a happier and more prosperous future for themselves and for each other.

People are exhausted by politics, and for good reason. Our job is not to ask them to care more about politics. It is to give them something worth believing in, and a credible path toward making Ontario better.

None of that replaces a good leader. All of it is what a good leader owes the people who knock the doors. Hold me to it.