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Ontario’s Liberals were stuck in third place when she took over as leader barely 15 months ago. Now, coming off a strong performance in Monday’s televised debate, every poll suggests she has moved her party into second place, leapfrogging ahead of the seemingly stalled NDP.

The good news for Crombie is that she’s no longer in the back of the pack. The bad news is that the distance to catch the leader of the pack, Doug Ford, still seems insurmountable in those same public opinion surveys ahead of the Feb. 27 election.

Which is why she is trying to make news on the day I’ve chosen to tag along on the first of three campaign swings with the major party leaders.

Crombie has a two-pronged pitch — a Liberal confession in search of an NDP concession.

Liberal voters alone can’t topple Ford’s Tories, she concedes. Nor can New Democrats, she argues.

Unless they combine forces.

Hence her unabashed appeal to traditional NDP supporters: Lend me your votes.

New Democrats can “see that the wind is in our sails,� Crombie says in an interview from her campaign bus as it lumbers down the Queen Elizabeth Way.

Emblazoned with her party’s health-care appeal in bright red, the bus is blazing a trail that’s not quite a path to Liberal victory — more like a plea for solidarity to prevent a third consecutive victory for Ford’s Progressive Conservatives. With the Liberals rising steadily and the NDP stalling or declining, she repeats the pitch at every stop.

“There is a bandwagon effect,� Crombie tells me, warming to her subject. If New Democrats “see our numbers are increasing and we look like we have our momentum — and our agenda speaks to their needs — absolutely they will join us.�

It’s an old political play being redeployed by the newest leader to arrive at Queen’s Park after nearly a decade as Mississauga’s high-profile mayor: If Liberals and New Democrats keep fighting each other — and splitting the anti-Ford vote — Tories will always win the day.

Crombie drives home the message both on the bus and off. Her first campaign stop is the Clifford Brewing Co. in Hamilton, where a gaggle of supporters and media are waiting to hear her speak.

Inside the gleaming craft brewery, where pallets of East Hamilton Lager and Devil’s Punchbowl beer are stacked to the high ceilings, she huddles offstage with area candidates to make sure she has everyone’s name and riding straight. On cue, onstage, the candidates form a human backdrop and the leader launches into her campaign stump speech.

There is no talk of buck a beer in this brewery, no promises of beer in corner stores — the empty slogans in Ford’s previous campaigns that never resonated with the craft brewers like this one who sell premium products. Instead, Crombie is all business — and pocketbook politics — promising so many small business tax cuts, income tax cuts and reduced housing fees that it’s hard to keep track of how they stack up against Ford’s giveaways and the NDP’s promised handouts.

Crombie talks passionately about the doctor shortage and hallway health care — critiques that are cornerstones of her campaign. Yet she says little about how she’d pay to fix everything, beyond cutting government waste and eliminating Ford’s wasteful tax cuts — only to replace them with her own tax breaks.

Ceiling fans whir overhead as the Liberal leader puts her own spin on the polls — and the political calculation facing voters if they don’t want to see Ford re-elected as premier yet again:

“If we all came together and … voted with one voice, we can change the government,â€� she tells the crowd. “We see the race narrowing between the premier and myself, and that’s why 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.’â€�

All that said — and speech delivered on script — Crombie’s pitch may be a tough sell. Even if she can persuade skeptical NDP supporters that the Liberals have displaced their party in second place, she must also overcome the hostility of diehard New Democrats who might see her as a bad fit, and the party’s weakness in rural and Southwestern Ontario.

Crombie initially branded herself as a right-of-centre Liberal — a counterpoint to the last premier from her party, Kathleen Wynne, who leaned left. Crombie later rebranded herself as a fiscal conservative and a social progressive — a classic Ontario formulation.

Either way, Crombie insists, the battle to topple Ford isn’t about ideology but winnability. It’s about viability and survivability.

After all the scandals and setbacks besetting the Tories, “There comes a tipping point where people say, ‘That’s the line in the sand for me,’� Crombie tells me later. The challenge for the opposition parties is that voters “need a viable alternative� — and that’s not the NDP in tough economic times, she insists.

Crombie faces an uphill battle to win, but she has come a long way since winning the provincial Liberal leadership in late 2023 to take over a losing party. A longtime mayor of Mississauga with a high media profile, she made the most of her strong name recognition in a hard-fought leadership campaign where she was consistently underestimated by her Liberal rivals in 2023 — much as she is by her NDP and PC rivals in 2025.

Before helming Mississauga, Ontario’s sixth-biggest city, Crombie won election as a Liberal MP. She also had a life before politics, working as a corporate executive and management consultant (while managing a family).

“I’ve run companies, I’ve run a government� — business and mayoral experience that she says her NDP rival, Marit Stiles, lacks.

Crombie’s star power helped her get noticed at the outset, but quickly dimmed in the aftermath of her leadership victory as she struggled to find her feet — and a seat in the legislature. Far from the media spotlight, the political veteran appeared rusty and uneven despite her years of experience.

But in the months leading up to the election campaign, Crombie has raised her game, becoming more nimble in campaign settings. In the televised debate, she stood out by standing up to Ford, delivering attack lines that scratched his Teflon coating slightly, even if they didn’t quite singe him.

Yet Crombie consistently gets under his skin and has a knack for eliciting long tirades and highly personal put-downs from Ford, joking that she “lives rent-free in his head.� While that may not be part of the job description for a future premier, it is a useful skill for a future opposition leader if Crombie should fall short on election night and is tasked with keeping Ford accountable for another four years.

Crombie also seems to exasperate Stiles, who kicked off the NDP-Liberal jousting on the campaign’s first day by suggesting the Liberal leader would be a good fit in Ford’s cabinet. In politics, criticism can be the sincerest form of flattery.

“Look, I understand that I’m a threat to her, and to Doug Ford, and that’s why they’re throwing snowballs at me,� she muses. Crombie points to a procession of PC attack ads targeting her as posh and pampered — not to mention “Queen of the carbon tax.�

“They wouldn’t do that if they didn’t feel threatened by my presence in the race,� she says.

As for Ford’s carbon tax attack, it never seemed to stick — perhaps because she was the first prominent Liberal in the country to distance herself from the federal carbon levy. Whatever that says about her environmental credentials — probably not much, since every federal Liberal has since followed suit — it suggests a certain political agility to avoid the trap set by Ford, and the carbon fatigue felt by most voters.

Fatigue, however, is not a Crombie trait. On the morning after the evening debate, the sleep-starved leader who calls herself “the Energizer Bonnie� dives into a photo-op at the Clifford brewery, pouring samples for supporters and posing for photographers from behind the tasting bar.

And then, from Crombie, comes a spontaneous toast for the team:

“To victory!�

Or if not quite victory, to borrowed votes.

On the evidence, the Liberal leader is a work in progress and far from perfect. But she pops, and she persists, and she knows how to play the game of politics against a tough opponent like Ford — who is also, the record suggests, not all that perfect either.

The better question is whether Crombie is good enough. Good enough for the job at hand — and better than the alternative.

But an even bigger question — possibly the ballot question for some voters on Feb. 27 — is whether the Liberal leader is gaining traction. Not to mention momentum.

Bonnie Crombie at a glance

Age: 65

Birthplace: Toronto

Education: MBA from Schulich School of Business, York University

Family: Divorced with two sons and a daughter

Occupation before politics: Manager of government relations for the Insurance Bureau of Canada after working in sales and communication roles at McDonald’s in Boston and Disney in Los Angeles

Political career: Elected Liberal leader in December 2023, Crombie was a three-term mayor of Mississauga and before that served on city council and was a one-term Liberal MP.

Fun fact: She took up rock-climbing in her mid-50s and has scaled the Totem Pole, a spire of rock rising 46 metres in Arizona’s Lower Devil’s canyon.