Bonnie Crombie, Ontario’s Liberal leader, distanced herself from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ahead of the federal party’s byelection loss on Monday.
“I probably speak to the prime minister less than once a year,” she told Global News in an exclusive video interview released Tuesday.
The ruling party lost a seat in the Liberal stronghold of Toronto—St. Paul’s, raising questions over whether the federal party is hampering its provincial cousins.
Crombie, a former Liberal MP, emphasized the relationship between Doug Ford and minimized the perceived closeness of her and Trudeau.
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“I think the bigger friend is Doug Ford, is the closer friend of Justin Trudeau,” Crombie said in the interview, adding: “You see them in photographs and in meetings together.”
Meanwhile, the Progressive Conservatives have previously launched ads that portray Crombie as a Trudeau Liberal.
One ad calls her the “queen of the carbon tax,” a line Ford repeated in a post on X this April, for supporting a federal carbon tax as a Liberal MP from 2008 to 2011.