MP Erskine-Smith Contests Ontario Liberal Nomination Defeat in Scarborough Southwest Byelection

Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith is pictured ahead of the announcement of the Ontario Liberal leadership election result in Toronto on Dec. 2, 2023. The Canadian Press/Chris Young

Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith has lodged a notice of appeal with the provincial Liberals, disputing the outcome of a nomination race that he lost last weekend to represent the provincial party in the upcoming Scarborough Southwest byelection.

Erskine-Smith entered the race ahead of an intended bid for party leadership but was narrowly defeated in the May 9 vote, when Ontario Liberal members in the provincial riding chose business owner Ahsanul Hafiz as their candidate.

Erskine-Smith told reporters on May 9 that he lost the nomination race to Hafiz by just 19 votes and has since questioned the integrity of the Liberal vote. He said he has heard reports of “ID issues,” including voters saying they had lost their driver’s licence or had recently moved to the area.  

The party is standing behind the integrity of the race and the vote.

“I know it was fair,” interim leader John Fraser told reporters on May 11. “If somebody’s saying that it’s not fair, then prove it … People say things in the heat of the moment, right? Because no one likes losing.”

Erskine-Smith, who represents the neighbouring federal riding of Beaches-East York, announced in February his intention to move from federal to provincial politics as the candidate for the Ontario Liberal Party in the byelection, and to possibly pursue the leadership of the provincial party.

Several of his fellow candidates for nomination previously expressed their discontent with what they perceived as Erskine-Smith attempting to use their community as a platform for leadership. Hafiz and fellow candidate Qadira Jackson subsequently agreed to put each other second on the nomination race’s ranked ballots.

Jackson, who was the Liberal candidate for the riding in the 2025 provincial election, said that if she wasn’t going to win, she at least wanted a “local” candidate to win and didn’t want her riding to be “used as a tool.”

Erskine-Smith has argued that Hafiz has spent most of his career in London, Ont., where he owned multiple Domino’s Pizza stores. He now has a home in Scarborough, where he landed when he first arrived in Canada nearly 25 years ago

Erskine-Smith has also suggested the party “establishment” was working to prevent him from winning the nomination.

“They were all out for our opponents, and they were working very hard to prevent us from being successful,” he said.

Fraser has said Erskine-Smith’s claims are not true, and that nominations are hard fought.

“People get involved, that’s what happens,” he said. “But no, this party establishment is not against him.”

Hafiz told reporters after his win that he didn’t want to focus too much on Erskine-Smith’s allegations.

“That is the clear evidence of who is the real winner,” Hafiz said, adding that the hallways were filled with people wearing Hafiz badges that showed their support.

He said his new focus is on his byelection campaign in a riding that saw the Liberals come third in the most recent provincial election.

“I am very excited to win a very hard-fought nomination race, and now I’m more concentrated on the byelection, how we can turn that right riding as red,” he said on May 11. “So that is the main concentration right now.”

Federal to Provincial

Erskine-Smith has not yet indicated whether losing the nomination race will dissuade him from pursuing the leadership bid he has been signalling for months, or if he still plans to resign from his federal seat.

He originally said he would quit federal politics once Premier Doug Ford called the byelection. The vote must be held before Sept. 3.

Erskine-Smith originally announced his plan to run as the Liberal candidate in the provincial riding of Scarborough Southwest in a Feb. 3 blog post.  The seat was left vacant when NDP MPP and deputy party leader Doly Begum stepped down in February in a bid to join Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government in the federal riding of the same name. She won the federal seat vacated by former cabinet minister Bill Blair in an April 13 byelection.

Erskine-Smith, who has been an MP for Beaches-East York since 2015, said in his blog post that he had decided to change his focus to provincial matters because he believes “the biggest difference I can make is rebuilding our provincial Liberal party to deliver for Ontarians.”

“We deserve smart, fair, and honest leadership here in Ontario,” he said in his blog post titled: “When it comes to Ontario, I’m all in.”

The longtime MP and former transport minister has had a keen interest in Ontario politics for some time and has voiced discontent with some of Carney’s decisions since the 2025 spring election.

The Toronto-area MP was one of the 10 ministers Carney dropped from cabinet last May and Erskine-Smith said at the time it was “impossible not to feel disrespected” by the prime minister’s choice.

Erskine-Smith announced in January 2024 that he would not seek re-election in the 2025 vote after nearly a decade of representing Beaches-East York, but changed his mind in December of that year after being appointed as the minister of housing by then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Erskine-Smith publicly voiced his disappointment over not retaining his housing portfolio as well as being excluded from cabinet altogether. He also spoke out after the Liberal government released its budget last fall. He posted a video last November labelled, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and spent much of the clip listing what he called the “bad” and the “ugly” aspects of the budget.

The Canadian Press contributed to this report.