TORONTO — The interim chief of Ontario’s Liberal party says voters were right to dump the Grits en masse in the spring election.

“They made the right call,” interim Leader John Fraser said during a speech at the party’s first major meeting since the June election.

“The truth is, last June, voters told us, in pretty unequivocal terms, they’d had enough of us,” Fraser said.

“We lost our way and, in turn, we lost the election,” he said about the party’s third-place finish and Doug Ford’s rise to power.

[READ MORE: Ontario Liberals seek Bob Rae’s advice after election defeat]

After winning a 58-seat majority in 2014, the Liberals were reduced to seven seats and lost official party status this year.

Their small numbers are the subject of frequent heckles in the legislature. Ford and his Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod like to remind the Liberals that their caucus only needs a minivan to get around.

It’s a line the Liberals are now trying to own. In his speech, Fraser joked about his temporary status as the leader of the minivan party, and the party was passing around buttons that read, “Start the van! We’ve got work to do.”

The Liberals are owning @MacLeodLisa’s favourite heckle about their minivan-sized caucus #onpoli pic.twitter.com/VE3Q57nrSG — Marieke Walsh (@MariekeWalsh) September 29, 2018

Still, the small number of Liberal MPPs is a bleak reminder of an election campaign in which — as Fraser pointed out a few months ago — the party spent more than $1 million per MPP it elected.

Party members were also briefed on the state of their books. Fraser said the party is more than $9 million in debt. TVO reported this week that some Liberals thought declaring bankruptcy was the best option for the party.

Asked whether that was on the table, Fraser gave a categoric “no.”

A senior Liberal source told iPolitics that many of the 750 people on hand for the event came to grill the campaign managers on how they ran the last election.

That meeting was behind closed doors, but several people said it was tense. Campaign director David Herle walked in on Saturday, already under fresh scrutiny because of comments he made Wednesday about young people not being interested in politics, and about the value of digital advertising.

He’s since apologized for the comments.

[READ MORE: Young Liberals ‘furious’ at Herle’s comment that youth are ‘not interested’ in politics]

In his speech, Fraser said the election loss was the culmination of the party brass, the cabinet, and the Liberal caucus losing “sight of fundamental truths about the Ontario Liberal Party.”

“We lost because we forgot who first elected us and what they sent us to do,” he said.

He called on the party to accept the message from voters with “humility” and “promise to never, ever let it happen again.”

But he and other Liberals are still struggling to articulate what it was the previous government got wrong. In a scrum with reporters, the only mistake Fraser would admit to was the sale of Hydro One.

“They sent us a clear message about selling public assets,” Fraser said, even as he defended the rationale for the move, which was to have more money to invest in transit.

Fraser also said he would always defend the Liberal government’s fiscal record. He said the former government focused its spending on health care and education, but the auditor general also reported misspending and waste.

The province’s debt is $331 billion — more than double the $158 billion the Liberals inherited when they took office in 2003.

Bob Rae, former NDP premier of Ontario and former interim leader of the federal Liberals, also spoke behind closed doors at the daylong event. Speaking to reporters afterward, he said his message was to “get up off the floor” and put the election loss behind them.

“It’s important not to get carried away by recrimination,” he said. “Just start moving on, getting back to basics and doing your work, and things can be turned around.”

The Liberals believe voters haven’t kicked them out of the game, but instead put them in the penalty box. Fraser said voters will let them out after the Progressive Conservatives “cut” and “hack” their way through Ontario.

“My gut tells me that when (Premier) Doug Ford is done ransacking Ontario, there will be even more young Liberals ready to build again,” he said.

To get there, Rae said the party needs to develop innovative policies that will help the Liberals push a clear message and fundraise.

“Money follows message; you need to have a reason why people should support you,” he said.

“We need to really start working on the approaches that we want to take in the next election and move ahead and do that — not fight the last election, just move forward.”

The party is taking comfort in what it calls a record number of attendees at its provincial council meeting.

Follow @MariekeWalsh