Bonnie Crombie

She ran Mississauga for years and the city became completely unaffordable. Now she wants to run all of Ontario? My rent is nearly 40% of my take-home pay and that happened on her watch as mayor. The Liberals had chances to fix the housing and affordability mess and didn't. I need to see something very different before I believe it. Actions matter more than campaign promises.

After years running Mississauga, what do residents actually have to show for it? Traffic is a nightmare, housing is completely unaffordable, and the city has massive infrastructure backlogs. The affordability crisis built up on her watch as mayor and there was no urgency. Now she's leading the Ontario Liberals and expects people to trust her again. People are hurting and politicians need to own their record. Hard pass until I see real action.

Bonnie Crombie served as Mayor of Mississauga from 2014 to 2023, building a decade-long record managing one of Canada's largest cities through significant growth, transit development, and the transition away from the era of Hazel McCallion. She then took on the Ontario Liberal leadership in late 2023, inheriting a party that had been reduced to 9 seats in 2022 and had lost official party status. The mandate was rebuilding — restoring the party's credibility and organizational capacity in preparation for the next election. In the February 2025 Ontario election, the Liberals increased their seat count to 14 — enough to regain official party status, a meaningful threshold after years in the wilderness. The party won roughly a third of the popular vote. These are genuine improvements on a low base. The result also contained a painful personal dimension: Crombie failed to win her own seat in Mississauga East-Cooksville, becoming a party leader without a seat in the legislature. That outcome constrained her authority and fuelled internal doubts about whether she could lead the party into a full campaign from a position of strength. In September 2025, a leadership review returned 57% support — above the party's 50% threshold but below the 66% that many had set as an informal bar for confidence. Crombie read the room and resigned. The party's post-mortem found that her campaign's health care focus did not match voter priorities, which were centred on affordability. Crombie took on a genuinely difficult rebuilding task and made measurable progress. Whether the pace of that progress was sufficient, and whether her strategic instincts were well-calibrated to Ontario's moment, are the questions that define her record. Reviewed as a citizen who wants a strong Ontario Liberal party as part of a healthy provincial democracy — and who saw a leader who worked hard for the rebuild but couldn't complete it.