Disrespected. That’s the word that made national headlines this past May, after Nate Erskine-Smith was dropped as a Liberal minister. While the title of Erskine-Smith’s Substack post read, diplomatically, “Congrats to the new cabinet,” media coverage largely zeroed in on a moment in the fourth paragraph: “The way it played out doesn’t sit right and it’s impossible not to feel”—well, you know.
How did it play out? The story starts back in December 2023, when, as the member of Parliament for Beaches—East York, Erskine-Smith had just come second to Bonnie Crombie in the Ontario Liberal leadership race. He later admitted on his Substack, Uncommons, that it was “tough” to lose such a close race, and that he would be “looking for new opportunities to make a difference”—in other words, not seeking re-election as an MP.
But plans changed. Nearly a year later, with the Justin Trudeau Liberals at their lowest point, Erskine-Smith was appointed minister of housing, infrastructure, and communities. Weeks later, Trudeau announced his resignation. Erskine-Smith soon endorsed Mark Carney as the party’s next leader. When Carney took over as prime minister in March, Erskine-Smith kept his post and went on to win re-election in Beaches—East York for the fourth straight time. But after Carney’s victory and the subsequent cabinet shuffle, Erskine-Smith was cut loose.
“Disrespected” is, of course, one way to look at the situation. In a scathing Toronto Star op-ed, Martin Regg Cohn wrote that Erskine-Smith was “playing the victim in his own political game” and accused him of temper tantrums. Cohn notes that of all the ministers dropped, Erskine-Smith was the only one to complain. Users on X and Reddit echoed the sentiment: no one is entitled to a cabinet post, and no one whines when they don’t get it. That’s show business, baby.
At the same time, it’s hard not to see it as betrayal when you hitch your wagon to someone else’s, only for them to unhitch it without warning and watch you plunge downhill. Take Chrystia Freeland. She prioritized staying in lockstep with Trudeau for nearly a decade and, as her reward, found herself booted from the finance portfolio. Trudeau offered her another ministry. She declined and quit.
The relationship between Erskine-Smith and Carney is, of course, by no means comparable to the years-long devotion between Freeland and Trudeau. But loyalty has always played a role in politics; we’re just not supposed to talk about it. Certainly, most politicians wouldn’t use the language found in Erskine-Smith’s Substack—personal language, language that centres his feelings. Most politicians aren’t posting on Substack to begin with. Do most politicians even know what Substack is?
For better or for worse, Erskine-Smith does not seem to be like most politicians.
As of 2023, 85 percent of young Canadians report getting their information from social media or the internet—a media ecosystem that, barely two decades old, has reshaped how politics and public debate unfold. It’s a landscape dominated by content creators, performativity, and warring comment sections, and it is worlds away from the traditional gate-kept news environment that preceded it.
Political groups have struggled to win over this fickle and frequently combative “very online” base. Back in 2015, Trudeau made headlines for his prolific selfie taking—seen as friendly and relatable by some but as substanceless by many others. In the 2019 election, then New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh paired his platform points with viral TikTok sounds (I was in high school at the time, too young to vote but already feeling too old for this communication strategy). Some politicians have leaned into vitriol. Few have weaponized the medium more effectively than Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and his punchy, hyper-shareable videos. But MP Michelle Rempel Garner is another recent example, stirring up anger about immigration on X with the help of emojis and memes.
Others across the political spectrum don’t even seem to be trying. While most MPs have some sort of social media presence, many post on Instagram the way I post on LinkedIn—exceedingly polished and professional, careful not to offer more than the smallest glimpse of personality.
Erskine-Smith, however, is trying—and seems to have avoided the dreaded “cringe” label. The now forty-one-year-old maintains a profile on just about every platform you can think of. His Instagram and X accounts combine family photos with clips of policy commentary, but the crown jewel of his digital brand is Substack, which hosts his podcast. On Uncommons, Erskine-Smith interviews experts and politicians about debates of the day, frequently tossing in his own thoughts. In a recent episode, former environment minister Catherine McKenna lamented the delays to passing the Online Harms Act, meant to protect Canadians from harmful digital content. Erskine-Smith cut in, laughing: “C-5 happened real quick though, don’t worry.”
Erskine-Smith’s joke—a nod to Carney’s signature economic revival bill that sped through Parliament in record time—hit on a hard truth: governments move quickly when power or money is at stake but stall on complex moral issues. It was also the sort of remark that most politicians avoid if they hope to rise.
Erskine-Smith’s unguarded quality carries over everywhere else, as he resists the instinct to flatten himself into slogans and sound bites. Instead, he uses the internet to think out loud; he has a lot on his mind. He’s invested in environmental protections, animal welfare, and affordability. Back in August, he called on Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand to take a stand against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and he’s one of twenty-seven MPs who backed a pro-Palestinian pledge. His support for drug decriminalization has made him a target of Conservative attacks; Poilievre called him a “radical hard drug legalization advocate” earlier this year.
Clearly, outspokenness comes with risks. But Erskine-Smith sees benefits in the strategy; by communicating in full sentences, he earns an audience that listens in kind. Conservative podcasters have not been shy about embracing these benefits, especially in America. You need about an hour to consume a typical episode of The Ben Shapiro Show. Joe Rogan’s conversations can run upward of three hours. Shapiro and Rogan don’t just appeal to casual listeners tuning in from the gym or the subway; in 2019, The Economist described Shapiro as “a hero to many young conservatives.” Their fan bases are overwhelmingly male—men whose financial and social frustrations the two podcasters have learned to channel. The increasing political divergence between young American men and women has been discussed at length, with young males drifting right. “Gen Z is two generations, not one,” wrote John Burn-Murdoch in 2024 for the Financial Times.
And it’s happening here too. Polling from last September found that Canadian women aged eighteen to thirty-four were the least conservative-leaning demographic, while men in the same age group were the most. Those numbers suggest a market for conservative podcasting north of the border, and some are moving to fill it—like Full Comment with Brian Lilley, a Postmedia podcast launched in 2021 that bills itself as a platform for “controversial opinions.” As a Gen Z woman on the left, I worry about my male peers, about them being drawn into a reactionary online world, and I find myself interested in progressive politicians who seem well equipped to reach them.
All of this makes Erskine-Smith particularly intriguing. Seven months ago, he hosted an “Ask Me Anything” session—essentially a Q&A period where Redditors from across Canada could engage. Reddit hosts topic-based discussions and crowdsourced information. The other thing it’s known for? An audience made up largely of young men, as compared to the more female-dominated TikTok and Instagram.
His AMA session garnered over 200 comments, from a progressive Ontarian who voted for him in the Ontario Liberal leadership race to a Prairie resident concerned with Alberta separatism to a “jaded millennial renter in Vancouver.” The freewheeling exchange also showed why such strategies are risky for politicians: they have to surrender control. Users raised pointed questions about housing policy, climate change, and US–Canada relations, unafraid to call out the Liberals for perceived hypocrisy and impracticality.
For the most part, Erskine-Smith didn’t flinch or deflect. On only one point did he display anything like defensiveness. One person asked how Canadians could trust a government to fix the housing crisis when nearly half its MPs, including Erskine-Smith himself, are landlords. His answer—an earnest defence of his wife’s below-market rental—did little to quiet the accusation. Another user quickly pointed out: “That isn’t really answering the original question.”
They were right, of course. But when so much political messaging feels rehearsed and disingenuous, even clumsy honesty can feel radical.
I met Erskine-Smith at his office on the Danforth, anticipating that we would remain there for a tightly timed and highly monitored chat. Instead, he suggested we go for coffee. We left his team behind, chatting about the recent successes of the Toronto Blue Jays. Our one-hour time slot sprawled into an hour and a half. He seemed remarkably content to take the afternoon as it came.
The son of two teachers, Erskine-Smith learned about politics by watching his parents being pulled into the fray. He remembers picketing with them over cuts to education during Mike Harris’s tenure as Ontario premier. It’s not hard to draw a line from those childhood protest lines to the kind of public figure he’s become. He learned early that the decisions made by people in power ripple into ordinary lives, including his own. Perhaps this is why his online projects have offline, community-oriented roots. At the outset of his political career, Erskine-Smith hosted frequent town halls in his riding. His digital presence, he said, largely came out of the COVID-19 pandemic, which made in-person events impossible.
That mix of on-the-ground engagement and online transparency has come together to create something that almost feels like a contradiction: an honest politician. Erskine-Smith embodies both sides of that coin. A lawyer and an Oxford graduate, he understands the game. He projects charm and confidence, wants to win, to govern. At the same time, he is stubbornly committed to speaking candidly—“for better and worse,” he told me, laughing.
When I asked him if Carney was doing a good job as prime minister, he paused for a long time. There are, he said, many things to admire about Carney’s tenure so far: the establishment of Build Canada Homes, the commitment to meeting NATO’s 2 percent defence spending target, the focus on economic issues and on defending Canada from United States president Donald Trump’s aggression. But he also believes that pushing through Bill C-5 created unnecessary tensions with Indigenous communities, as well as raised questions about his commitment to the environment. And, though he didn’t quite say it, he seemed nervous about whether the Carney government—and its drift toward a more business-friendly, centrist agenda—would let down more left-leaning factions of the party. “The Liberal challenge,” he told me, “is how do you chart a new course without abandoning a progressive coalition of voters that got you there?”
His anxiety about Carney’s centrism is palpable in a Substack post responding to the 2025 federal budget. While he had some praise, he also levelled several criticisms—about stalled climate action, insufficient investment in affordable housing, and cuts to international development funding. He concluded the post with a pointed joke: “it’s a pretty good Progressive Conservative budget.”
With Poilievre and Ontario premier Doug Ford, Erskine-Smith minced his words far less. He called Poilievre a sometimes-effective politician who consistently takes things too far. He called Ford “a folksy premier who I would probably welcome around the Thanksgiving dinner table but who I don’t really want running a province of 16 million people.”
Still, Erskine-Smith admitted progressives could learn something from conservative strategy. Poilievre’s team, he said, effectively tapped into generational frustrations and harnessed the power of digital media. And, ironically, he believes the Ford government is winning elections by leaning on the very quality Erskine-Smith is most identified with: authenticity. “The Home Depot thing is a good example,” he said, referring to Ford’s claim that he told a Home Depot shoplifter, “I’m going to kick your ass.” Erskine-Smith called it “a bizarre storyline on the one front. But, on the other hand, it reinforces the persona that he’s going to tell it like it is.”
While Erskine-Smith’s Liberal colleagues agonize over how people might react to any given statement, Ford and Erskine-Smith take a remarkably similar approach to building trust: better to say something real and wrong than calculated and correct.
Erskine-Smith’s willingness to do things differently isn’t just limited to social media. In 2019, journalist Stuart Thomson ran the numbers for the National Post and concluded that Erskine-Smith voted against his party more than any other sitting member of Parliament.
As of 2019, Thomson writes, Erskine-Smith “voted against his party thirty-seven times since 2015, nearly double the tally of the next-closest maverick.” Erskine-Smith’s website includes a page detailing and explaining his dissenting votes dating back to 2021 and earlier. Some were on high-profile issues, such as supporting a motion to let ethics commissioner Mario Dion testify about the SNC-Lavalin affair in 2019, or opposing Bill C-14, the assisted-dying legislation he found too restrictive.
One of his most striking acts of opposition came this year, when he voted against Carney’s Building Canada Act. Bill C-5 allows the Canadian government to “build, baby, build,” but it has been criticized for lowering environmental protections and circumventing the need for consent from Indigenous communities. In a House of Commons speech, later uploaded and transcribed on his Substack, Erskine-Smith stated that C-5 would “make [Stephen] Harper blush” and “gives the government unchecked power.” When it came time to vote, he was the only Liberal MP to break ranks.
Is a dissenting vote brave? It certainly shows Erskine-Smith isn’t afraid to ruffle establishment feathers. But as some have pointed out, one vote rarely changes the outcome. It can just as easily come off as self-serving; every time he clashes with his party, Erskine-Smith creates buzz around his name. He seems to be aware of this tension, stating on his website, “there have been a number of articles in the media covering my voting record and highlighting my independence.” But as he’s quick to acknowledge, defiance can damage a political career as well as define one.
Admirable or self-serving, Erskine-Smith’s voting behaviour is certainly unusual. Party caucus meetings are where MPs typically hash out disagreements in private, to preserve the appearance of party unity. Erskine-Smith doesn’t always seem to get that memo.
So, he’s thinking outside the box. Is it working?
From an online perspective, Erskine-Smith is still a long way away from shaping culture and politics like the Rogans and Shapiros of the world. He admitted that Uncommons does not have “the biggest reach in the world.” His hope is that “it has staying power,” unlike tweets and TikToks that flare up and fade days later. He’s after a more thoughtful kind of civic conversation. He says his work across digital forums isn’t part of a master plan to lure young men into the fold of progressive politics. He just understands the value of meeting people where they are—not just ideologically, but literally. “My brother gets his news from Reddit, so we should be on Reddit.”
As Erskine-Smith tests how far the party can stretch, Crombie embodies the other instinct taking hold among Liberals. In 2023, Crombie, then in her early sixties, told TVO that “the Liberal Party moved much too far to the left. I think traditionally our roots are in the centre. I believe we govern from right of centre.” When she went on to win the Ontario Liberal leadership, it was seen as a signal that the party, and its members, wanted to tack back to the middle.
Losing the leadership didn’t seem to hurt Erskine-Smith federally. In Beaches—East York, his formula keeps working. He has only once failed to win 50 percent of the votes—in 2015, when the Trudeau Liberals were first elected. In the elections that followed, as support for the Liberals dwindled, Erskine-Smith gained ground. In the 2021 election, he received an impressive 56.58 percent of the votes. In the 2025 election, which saw a comeback for the Liberals that resulted in a comfortable minority government, Erskine-Smith garnered 67.75 percent of the votes.
That’s a larger share than any other Toronto MP received. In a city of significant cultural and economic diversity and wide-ranging political beliefs, Erskine-Smith’s constituents are rallying behind him. “This is the only place that made sense,” he said about his decision to run in the riding in 2015. “My whole life has been here.”
The future remains open. In September, Crombie resigned as party leader after losing to Ford in February and securing only 57 percent support in the mandatory leadership review. Erskine-Smith has not announced his intention to run, but that hasn’t stopped media outlets from speculating—and for good reason: Erskine-Smith has been vocal about his criticisms of Crombie. He’s received some heat for this from colleagues (Ajax Liberal MPP Rob Cerjanec posted on X, “I’m tired of this crap”) and from media (the Toronto Star highlighted Erskine-Smith’s track record of “public grumbling”). But he also has fervent supporters. Before Erskine-Smith and I parted ways after our coffee, I watched three young men stop him outside his office, introduce themselves, and encourage him to run.
When I asked Erskine-Smith directly, he said he was interested but stopped short of confirming he’ll enter the race. In a September Substack post, however, he criticized Ford and called for a strong opposition to “highlight the incompetence and corruption of his cartoon politics.” It looks an awful lot like what the kids call a soft launch.
While he was open about his interest in running Canada’s largest province, Erskine-Smith told me that a bid for federal Liberal leadership has never been on his radar. I’m not so sure. It’s true Canada has not elected a former provincial leader as prime minister in the last century. But with Ford reportedly back in French lessons—often the first tell a politician is thinking of Ottawa—that no longer feels far-fetched. Over the past decade, Erskine-Smith has built a loyal base, online and in Beaches—East York. The current moment might not favour stubborn, idealistic progressives, but the next one could.
The question is whether Erskine-Smith has the patience to wait—or whether his habit of saying what he actually thinks will catch up with him first. In the meantime, we might keep an eye on whether Ford’s French teacher takes on any new students.
Marina Black is the Chawkers fellow at The Walrus.
