I’m back in Macleans with a new column on the Ontario Liberal Party’s disastrous 2018 election campaign, published on June 5, 2018.

An excerpt:

On Saturday morning, five days before the Ontario election, Premier Kathleen Wynne made an extraordinary gamble. In front of assembled journalists and a group of well-behaved children playing on a jungle gym behind her, Wynne conceded that come Jun. 7, she would no longer be premier, and the Liberals would not form government.

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For the Ontario Liberals, it marked the effective—and unconventional—end of a campaign full of annihilated expectations that have forced them to be on the back foot from the election’s very beginning. But how exactly did the Liberals, the party that’s been in power for 15 years, get to a point where polls suggest historic lows of less than 20 per cent support? And where does it go from here?

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But even though the party has worked over the past several years to eliminate the political centre as a primary feature of its electoral strategy, there is room in Ontario for a truly centrist party. There are cases where democracies have bucked the trend of an electorate split in two, where new centrist parties have found success. France’s Emmanuel Macron, for instance, built a new centrist political party from the ruins of that country’s disgraced and deeply unpopular centre-left government—sound familiar?—taking on a conservative party deeply out of touch with a new generation that had no love for an entrenched political establishment, nor for a rabid far-right promoting a nativism ill-suited to a world that’s more open than ever before.

Ontario is not France, of course. But the Liberals’ dire position after this election provides an opportunity for, and even necessitates, a concentrated effort on building a new voting coalition for the future, rather than just taking the NDP’s. From the embers of the old party can come novel policy priorities and new leadership both at the head of the party and around its decision-making table.