Losing with grace

A response to Jake Landau

UPDATE: Turns out the post Jake referred to was an AI generated fabrication.

Let’s be honest about what happened in Scarborough Southwest.

Ahsanul Hafiz won a democratic nomination contest. He won it on a ranked ballot, with over 1,400 members participating, after a campaign in which his opponent received a personal endorsement from the sitting Prime Minister of Canada. He won anyway. By any reasonable measure, that’s a legitimate result.

What happened next is the story.

The Facebook posts

A video shared on Facebook in 2011 is the centrepiece of Jake Landau’s piece.. Not a policy position. Not a pattern of behaviour. A single share, fifteen years ago, context unknown.

This is worth sitting with: we do not know why Hafiz shared that video. Jake acknowledges this and then proceeds as though he didn’t. In 2011, sharing disturbing content to condemn it was ubiquitous — it was how social media worked before anyone had figured out that it worked badly. Among Bangladeshi diaspora communities watching political violence unfold back home with horror, that practice was even more common.

Maybe the share was indefensible. Maybe it wasn’t. Nobody knows. The Ontario Liberal Party reviewed the candidacy, reviewed the background, and approved it. They made that judgment with full knowledge of these posts — this information has been circulating in Liberal circles for months, as Jake himself reports. The party decided Hafiz met the bar. You can disagree with that decision. You cannot honestly call it negligence.

Jake suggests the party’s greenlighting process should have caught this and asks how Hafiz passed it. It’s a fair question on its face, but it assumes the process is a simple background check that spits out a yes or no. It isn’t. Jake hasn’t worked for the party, isn’t familiar with how the vetting process actually operates, and is in no position to assess whether it failed. What he’s describing as incompetence is better understood as ignorance of the process he’s critiquing. The party knew. They made a judgment. Whether you agree with it is a different conversation. Green light members are lawyers and volunteers who take their jobs very seriously, Jake (And others are being completely disrespectful suggesting otherwise.

The “irregularities”

Here’s what actually happened after the result was announced: the media waited for Nate Erskine-Smith to make good on his promised comment. Instead, they had to chase him outside into the rain. Along the way, they were sworn at by his campaign manager, Andrew Goodridge.

Andrew Goodridge — Nate’s Chief of Staff and longtime political operative — has received eight administrative monetary penalties from Elections Canada totalling $2,300, including violations tied directly to his work on Nate’s own 2019 and 2021 federal campaigns. This is the person Nate sent to deal with the press after losing. This is the person now implying the process lacked integrity.

What the media eventually got, after being cursed at in a parking lot in the rain, was a Trump-style rant — sweeping allegations of impropriety, no specifics, no evidence, no timeline. Nate said his scrutineers witnessed things they’d “never seen before.” He wouldn’t say what. He said half the people at one table had “ID issues.” He said he’d get back to us.

Here’s what we do know. Nate entered the final days of this race with significant momentum — a personal endorsement from Prime Minister Carney. Team Hafiz had internally projected a first-ballot win with a larger margin than the final result. Votes moved. Of course they moved. A Carney endorsement moves votes. That is not evidence of fraud. That is evidence that the race tightened in the final stretch despite Hafiz’s ground operation being superior throughout the campaign. Nate got the biggest possible gift in the closing days and still came up 19 votes short. That’s a loss, not a theft.

A pattern, not an incident

This is not the first time Nate has come close, fallen short, and declined to look inward.

In the 2023 Ontario Liberal leadership race, Nate ran as the grassroots renewal candidate against Bonnie Crombie, positioning himself — as he always does — as the only person in the room with real integrity. In the closing weeks, unexpected support shifted his way. He rode that wave to a closer-than-expected finish. And then he lost — 52 to 48 — and Crombie was the problem, the party establishment was the problem, the elites were the problem. He blamed your truly.

Now, two years later, he loses a nomination contest by 19 votes and once again: it’s not him, it’s not his campaign manager, it’s not the holier-than-thou attitude that has made him more enemies inside this party than friends. It’s the party. The machine. The corrupt insiders. The elites.

At what point does someone in Nate’s circle say the quiet part out loud — that this candidate has now twice run insurgent campaigns against the Ontario Liberal establishment, twice come close, twice fallen short, and twice refused to accept that the problem might be him? He might as well say “stop the steal” and get it over with.

On the civil war that isn’t

Jake calls this a civil war. It isn’t. It is one man, and the media infrastructure around him, who cannot accept losing.

For years now, Nate Erskine-Smith has positioned himself as the only adult in a room full of corrupt, entitled children. His supporters have called party workers corrupt, called the organization weak, treated every unfavourable decision as proof of institutional rot. They’ve made enemies at every level of the party with remarkable efficiency, and then asked, genuinely baffled, why people don’t seem to like them.

The answer is not complicated. You don’t get to spend years telling people they have no integrity and then expect them to hold the door open for you.

Nate had one job after that result was announced. Walk up to Ahsanul Hafiz. Shake his hand. Say congratulations. Pledge to help deliver Scarborough Southwest. Show the members who voted for you — and the ones who didn’t — that you’re capable of being a team player when it actually counts.

Instead, he sent his Elections Canada-fined campaign manager to curse at journalists in the rain, and delivered a grievance speech about a rigged process he still cannot describe in any detail.

That decision, more than any old Facebook post, tells you everything you need to know about why Nate Erskine-Smith keeps falling short — and why the people who actually build this party don’t want him leading it. He told Ontario Liberals that his reputation is not deserved, that they’d be “pleasantly surprised” how much of a team player he truly is, we’re still waiting.