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

“I really felt like the Liberal Party had not reconciled enough with its past,” says Eric Lombardi, who is running for the leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party. Photo by John Lappa/Sudbury Star/Postmedia/File

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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Wanting to work for housing reform, “I found New York 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.”

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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).”

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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.

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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.”