While Federal Liberal leadership aspirants are free to subject their candidacy to a year-long striptease before declaring, Ontario Liberals do not have the luxury of time. With the membership cut-off in just four weeks, there’s little time to play coy.
Yasir Naqvi mulled it over for a few days before deciding to bide his time for a future bid. This week, Dwight Duncan and Chris Bentley both announced they would not be candidates for the leadership – or the next election. Both decisions are understandable given the amount of time these men have spent in politics, and the baggage they would carry into a leadership race.
On the other side, Sandra Pupatello has all but confirmed she will run, and all signs point to her being the frontrunner.
None
Sandra Pupatello
Kathleen Wynne
Michael Bryant
George Smitherman
Gerard Kennedy
Charles Sousa
Eric Hoskins
Glen Murray
Deb Matthews
David Caplan
Brad Duguid
John Wilkinson
David Orazietti
Yasir Naqvi
Dwight Duncan
Chris Bentley
3 responses to “OLP Leadership Update”
Sandra Pupatello will be premier
Maybe – and the leadership rules/timeline certainly work in her favour.
But we all know how difficult delegated conventions can be for frontrunners. Depending how many other candidates run, I’d probably be inclined to bet on the field over her.
Pupatello, well she’ll be Premier for about three months. 🙂 She’d be a good opposition leader but I don’t know that she’s Premier material. Duncan gets that he’s not suited to the job, I don’t know that Pupatello has figured that out for herself yet. Could anyone imagine her in a minority government? She thinks the art of compromise is best achieved through yelling.
My prognostications…
I think one of Wynne/Matthews will give it a go.
Sousa does too, but Hoskins won’t. Too new, not enough support within caucus.
Kennedy will do it if he can get a guarantee from Albanese that she’ll step aside in York South-Weston, but likely won’t try to remove DiNovo from his old Parkdale seat. YSW is where he wanted to run originally, anyway.
Orazietti might give it a shot but like Duguid he is a lightweight.
Murray is hubris personified and he’s not popular amongst MPPs.
I would have put money on Wilkinson being the next leader had he not lost his seat by a whisker last election.