Scott Stinson: Meet the outsider Ontario Liberal candidate who says the party has lost its way

Scott Stinson: Meet the outsider Ontario Liberal candidate who says the party has lost its way

'We’re losing the foundation of liberal values ... and I think that there's an appetite for change'

Near the end of an hour-long conversation at a downtown Toronto coffee shop, Eric Lombardi lets slip something that would raise the hackles of many of the people he needs to woo to become the next leader of the Ontario Liberals.

“There are many Conservatives for whom I am their favourite Liberal,” he says.

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Lombardi, a 32-year-old engineer and housing advocate, has never been elected to public office. He’s never run for office before. But he’s running to lead the once-mighty Ontario Liberal Party as a classic outsider candidate, willing to criticize those that have gone before him instead of making his entire campaign about the evils of Doug Ford.

Over the course of our discussion, he mentions topics like merit-based hiring and restoring public order in downtowns that would at least raise some eyebrows in Liberal circles. But he says he thinks the party is ready for such honest talk.

After a third straight defeat to Ford’s Progressive Conservatives, Lombardi says, “I really felt like the Liberal Party had not reconciled enough with its past. We’re losing the foundation of liberal values in the small-L sense, and I think that there’s an appetite for change, something different. I think something a bit more serious. And I personally think that there’s a lot of conservatives in Ontario that are looking for an alternative to Ford as well.”

Born in Oakville and educated at the University of Waterloo, Lombardi worked in financial technology in Silicon Valley after graduation, and had first-hand experience with the lack of housing supply in that part of California. He moved back to Toronto after the pandemic, concerned that the same forces were being felt here.

Wanting to work for housing reform, “I found near-communists on the left, and really ineffective industry lobbying organizations on the right, and it was like, who’s actually making the economic, social, and cultural case for things we actually need to do?” Lombardi says. “Not like banning foreign buyers, but land-use reform, permitting reform, tax reform, municipal finance reform — all these things that are critical parts of why we have so dramatically failed on this issue.”

He started his own organization, More Neighbours Toronto, which led to some Liberal policy work and eventually the decision to try his own hand at politics. Of the leadership field, which includes former federal cabinet minister Navdeep Bains and current MPPs Lee Fairclough and Stephanie Bowman, “I didn’t personally feel like they were going to offer much different than Liberal politics of the last 20 years,” he says. “If I look at this race, everyone’s kind of doing the same kind of cautious, ‘comms up front, ideas behind’ approach to policies in politics that I think has really undermined our ability to talk about the things we need to (talk about).”

If there’s a defining feature of Lombardi’s campaign to this point, it’s that his is very much ideas-in-front. He has a detailed platform that runs to more than 100 pages, which has earned him criticism from party stalwarts who think he should be getting feedback from Liberal members before dictating his would-be policies.

But he says it’s about being transparent with those same people. “My path in this leadership race is not convincing every existing long-time Ontario Liberal to vote for me, but how do I put real things in writing that some people just really want to see happen? And that signals to them that there’s someone that cares about the issues that they do and is willing to champion them.”

And what are some of those issues?

“I believe that we need to have merit-based hiring practices in our public sector and public institutions because the recent trajectory has alienated a lot of people,” he says. “I believe in the role of competitive markets to drive wealth creation, and that we need to tax that efficiently and fairly to provide a level of human welfare befitting an advanced society. I believe in the role of public order and the importance of that in creating public trust — and so when we don’t properly manage security, it’s not just about, for example, the dignity of people who are suffering on so many of the streets in our urban centres. It’s also about our ability to use and appreciate public spaces, regardless of what class or background that you come from.”

Cleaning up public spaces, of course, is the kind of thing Premier Ford would support, and his government is running television ads that say pretty much that. Which will make it interesting to see how the Ontario Liberals take to Lombardi as the leadership race begins in earnest. (The first debate is on Aug. 10; Liberals will choose their next leader in late November.) The contest has already chewed up one perceived outsider, as former MP Nate Erskine-Smith abandoned his leadership bid when he failed to win a byelection nomination in Scarborough. (He said provincial party staff were actively working against him.)

Lombardi says that he has largely felt welcomed by the party and party members, even if caucus endorsements have so far gone to Fairclough and Bowman, the sitting MPPs. As for criticism that he is not “Liberal” enough?

“I don’t take lessons in what liberalism is from the socialists who just want power,” he says. “Many of these voices who are criticizing me are criticizing me from a point of illiberalism, and what they don’t like about me is that I am actually offering liberal solutions to the challenges that we’re facing. So, to these kinds of critics, you don’t get to be the definers of what this party is.”

But can someone who is relatively new to party politics be the person to rebuild a party? Lombardi sees his outsider status as an asset: someone who isn’t used to doing politics in the traditional way. He points, for example, to the trend in which elected office turns otherwise successful, independent people into pliant vessels for the wishes of their leader.

“Then we see their MPP legislation is ‘Let’s celebrate the day of whatever’ and it’s completely demeaning to everyone involved,” he says.

Lombardi is far from alone in taking a close look at politics in this province, and country, and deciding that the system seems almost designed to fail. But not many choose to try to fix it themselves.

“We have an extremely incurious political class in this country,” he says. “I think we sometimes have a media that really fails to ask the next-level question, and we have a very good ordinary person who is basically unrepresented in most of the political discourse that we have today.”

He says he’s in the race to represent those ordinary people. The big question is how many of them will vote in the Ontario Liberal leadership campaign.