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“You can count on me” to hold Doug Ford and the PC party accountable, she said to cheers from about 75 supporters gathered at her postelection party. “I’ll say this tonight, Doug, we’ll be watching. We know Ontario can do so much better. 

“I’m not going to slow down, not for one second,” she added. “I commit to you today that I will stay on … so that I can keep fighting for you.”

Crombie acknowledged that “tonight isn’t exactly the result we were looking for, but you should be very proud of what we did,” she said. “People counted us out. They said the Ontario Liberal Party was dead … you proved them wrong.”

Along with official party status — which requires 12 seats, and the Liberals won or were leading in 14 ridings late Thursday night — the party “increased our share of the vote substantially, to 30 per cent … double digits over the NDP,” Crombie said.

This “is a building block for us, a momentum that we can continue to push forward and to grow.”

The Liberals picked up seats from both the Progressive Conservatives and New Democrats in the Greater º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøArea and in Nepean, as results continued to pour in.

Crombie’s two sons, who accompanied her to the Mississauga Convention Centre where she held her postelection party, introduced her as “the next, next premier of Ontario” to the crowd.

Crombie, former mayor of Mississauga, lost in Mississauga East-Cooksville to PC candidate Silvia Gualtieri, the mother-in-law of Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown.

In the past two provincial elections, the Liberals failed to get party status and had just nine seats when Ford called the snap election.

Kathryn McGarry, president of the Ontario Liberal Party, said she was “ecstatic” to have the five extra seats, with “people that just have so much to contribute.”

As well, she added, now that the Liberals have party status, they will be eligible for funds “to help us rebuild, with adequate staff. If you look at our campaign, you look at what we’ve been doing” with volunteers and minimal staff, “this is a real celebratory event tonight.”

Crombie is expected to present her plan to the party this weekend and insiders said could tour ridings around the province so Ontarians have time to get to know her. She could also run in the event a byelection is called. 

Former PC leader John Tory failed to win his seat in the 2007 provincial election but stayed at the helm, ultimately resigning two years later when he lost a byelection. 

From the outset of this campaign, Crombie said she would not “be talking about booze, bike lanes, big spas or my rich buddies. I will be speaking about health care, affordability, education to some degree, and building homes and tax cuts.”

During the campaign, Crombie hammered Ford and his PC party for failing to fix hallway health care and the doctor shortage despite seven years in office. The Liberals’ $3-billion health-care pledge was the only one to promise access to family doctors for 2.5 million Ontarians who need one by 2029.

But with the PCs’ big lead in the polls from the outset, it was a race for second place for the NDP and Liberals.

The Liberals paid for ads during high-profile sports events — the Super Bowl and 4 Nations hockey game — highlighting health-care woes. Crombie also pounced on Ford’s “hot mic” moment when he said he had supported U.S. President Donald Trump, saying Ford could not be trusted.

With a motto of “more for you,” Crombie, 65, also touted mental health coverage for all Ontarians, doubling the amount of payments for those receiving disability supports, while focusing on affordability measures such as cutting income tax rates for middle class families, and doing away with the HST on home heating and hydro bills. 

She also distanced herself from previous Liberal governments, saying she did not agree with all of their decisions, and went hard after Ford in the two debates.

Crombie, a former federal MP who was at the helm in Mississauga for almost a decade, mocked Ford’s proposal to tunnel under Highway 401 to help ease traffic congestion. “How dumb is that?” she said during the second, and final, debate held in º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøon Family Day.

But she didn’t evade controversy herself, coming under attack from the NDP for taking donations from developers as well as private health-care insiders. She also had to defend two candidates for social media posts seemingly making light of intimate partner violence, saying the pair had apologized and the incidents were more than a decade old.

However, she did part ways with a third candidate, in Oshawa, after he posted comments about the killing of a Sikh leader that he later acknowledged were “offensive and wrong.”

Toward the end of the campaign, Crombie also began appealing to NDP voters as the progressive party that could defeat Ford, saying “the wind is in our sails.”