Scott Stinson: Nate Erskine-Smith’s race to challenge Doug Ford crashes at the first hurdle. Will he stay on as an MP?

Prime Minister Mark Carney encourages Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith in his plans move to provincial politics. Photo by Nate Erskine-Smith/X

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On Friday evening, just before he had hoped to secure the Liberal nomination for a provincial byelection in Scarborough Southwest, Nate Erskine-Smith posted a video to his social media feeds that did not leave a lot of room for interpretation of his future plans.

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It was an endorsement, of sorts, from Prime Minister Mark Carney.

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Erskine-Smith, the MP for the neighbouring riding of Beaches-East York, captioned the video of him talking to Carney with the words, “leaving federal politics to make a bigger difference.”

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In the clip, Carney heaps praise on the man he punted last year from the federal cabinet and says while it hurts to see him go, he understands that he’ll be doing important work at the provincial level in areas like health care and education, where the guy known for what Carney called his “big ideas” would be “helping the people of Scarborough.”

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Yes, well, about that last part: Erskine-Smith failed to win the nomination in Scarborough Southwest, beaten by Ahsanul Hafiz, a businessman and novice politician who owns more than two dozen Domino’s Pizza franchises in London, Ont.

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Erskine-Smith told a clutch of reporters outside the Scarborough high school where voting took place on Saturday that he had lost by just 19 votes — of more than 1,400 reportedly cast — and that he was concerned by potential irregularities in the contest, saying observers in the room told him “they had never seen anything like it.”

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Pushed on the specifics of potential problems, he raised the possibility that non-residents without proper identification had been allowed to cast ballots.

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But he also told reporters that he would have nothing more formal to say about the result, or his future, until he had a “full debrief with (his) team” to determine if there was a “legitimate” way to challenge the results in Scarborough Southwest.

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That was on Saturday evening. Two days later, there has been nothing further from Erskine-Smith or his camp, but there are reports that he’s considering challenging the result.

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His campaign declined to comment on those reports on Monday evening.

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That leaves open a range of possibilities. First, that a challenge of the results is forthcoming, which would not endear Erskine-Smith to a provincial party that has already accepted them.

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The Ontario Liberals released a statement on Saturday that congratulated Hafiz and quoted interim leader John Fraser as saying “it’s time to get to work and show the people of Scarborough Southwest that we’re here to fight for them.” Protesting the nomination race would decidedly not be that.

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Erskine-Smith could also accept the loss in Scarborough and launch a campaign for the provincial Liberal leadership anyway; he previously lost a leadership bid to Bonnie Crombie, who subsequently lost the 2025 election to Doug Ford and the Progressive Conservatives. But Erskine-Smith had been clear that getting the local nomination, and winning a byelection that is expected to be called this summer, were important first steps in a potential leadership bid, because they would have ensured that he wouldn’t have been on the sidelines of the provincial legislature, as has been the case for both permanent Liberal leaders — Crombie and Steven Del Duca —  since Ford defeated Kathleen Wynne in 2018.