EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
With just over one week until the provincial election, Bonnie Crombie is out with an appeal to NDP voters: to vote Liberal at the ballot box.
"I'm reaching out today to NDP voters, and I'm asking them, if you want to change our health-care system, please vote for Ontario's Liberals. And together, we can change the government," Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie said at a campaign stop in Hamilton on Tuesday morning, echoing a message she first shared on Monday evening in the second leaders' debate.
"They will choose me because they want a family doctor, they want lower wait times in their hospitals, and they want to live more affordably, they want to put money back in their pocket," Crombie said in response to a question about why NDP voters would choose her party. "And right now, we have the wind in our sails, but we need them. We need them if we're going to change this government, and we need to change the government and send Doug Ford packing."
Calling the state of health care and affordability in Ontario "heartbreaking," the Liberal leader pleaded with voters to join forces.
"If we all came together and we made it a priority to fix our health-care system, and we voted with one voice, we can change the government, because the only way to fix health care is to change the government, and it's not too late," she said.
NDP Leader Marit Stiles shot back Tuesday morning, saying her focus continues to be on winning over Conservative ridings.
"That just tells you everything you need to know about that party, where they're at, right? Their path is they're just trying to make party status," Stiles said at a campaign stop in Toronto.
The Liberals held nine seats at Queen's prior to the election campaign. It takes 12 seats for a party to be officially recognized in the legislature, affording it access to additional funding, more floor time in the chamber and greater representation on parliamentary committees.
"My focus is, and continues to be, flipping blue seats to orange ... many of the people standing here with me are going to do that, and people all across this province. We have amazing candidates and we have already incumbents in every corner of this province with boots on the ground."
While Stiles has maintained since the start of her campaign that this is her goal, she addressed Liberal voters directly during her campaign launch on Jan. 29.
She said that while Liberals did some good things while previously in office, "those are not the values of the current leader of the Ontario Liberal Party."
"Today's Liberal leader would be right at home as a cabinet minister in Doug Ford's government. Bonnie Crombie doesn't want to get rid of Doug Ford. Bonnie Crombie wants to be Doug Ford," she said at the time.
Promoting herself as someone who is fiscally responsible, Crombie has also tried to differentiate herself from the NDP leader. She claimed this week that the New Democrats are about "high spending" and "promising everything to everyone.” A couple of months before the election, she had gone further, saying the "radical NDP is too focused on fighting fringe wars to get anything done."
Pallas Data CEO Joseph Angolano, who conducts polling for Village Media, said that unless something major changes in the homestretch of the campaign, Crombie's appeal to NDP supporters won't help the Liberals hold the Progressive Conservatives to a minority.
Angolano echoed Stiles in saying that it is more likely to help the Liberals achieve official party status for the first time since it lost government in 2018. The party's straightest path to achieving that, according to Angolano, includes taking seats from the NDP in downtown Toronto.
There are Liberal-PC battles in the Greater Toronto Area — Ajax, and parts of Mississauga and Etobicoke — where NDP vote-shifting to the Liberals could potentially wrest those seats from the PCs. However, the same vote shift would have the opposite effect in other parts of the province — in parts of northern and southwestern Ontario, for instance — where the fights are between the PCs and the NDP.
That's counterproductive for the kind of voter who wants to see the Progressive Conservatives defeated.
"I understand why the strategic vote play is so attractive to many progressives, but you need perfect knowledge in all these ridings to figure out what to do, and the strategic vote argument only makes sense when you have a PC party that's at 40 per cent or below 40 per cent in the polls," Angolano said, adding that no polls have shown PC support that low so far in the campaign.
The Liberals' pitch to NDP voters comes after Natasha Doyle-Merrick pulled out of the race as the New Democrats candidate in Eglinton—Lawrence just before the registration deadline last Thursday in an attempt to prevent a PC victory.
"I recognize the race in Eglinton–Lawrence is a clear two-party contest between Liberals and Conservatives. To prevent a Conservative win and more years of neglect, I’m stepping aside to avoid a vote split," Doyle-Merrick wrote in a post to X.
Asked on Tuesday if there was more room for co-operation between the Liberals and NDP, Stiles said she was "disappointed" with Doyle-Merrick's decision.
"I think that everyone deserves to be able to vote based on their values and their beliefs," she said. "And I do also think that our offer is very different."
-With files from Jessica Smith Cross and Charlie Pinkerton