Eric Lombardi

So it's healthy.

about Dylan or Eric Lombardi, the other candidate that was in the race.

I mean, God bless them, right? I really have a ton of time.

Anybody can complain, Dave.

Lots of people have been talking about.

And one thing that I was paying attention to is Eric Lombardi dropped out of the race.

I'm not a Doug Ford fan.

And I've been watching Eric Lombardi for a while.

He's a liberal.

But I kind of liked what he was saying.

But at the same time, I don't consider myself a super partisan person.

I'm not like my team no matter what.

She is a partner at Crestview Strategy and a longtime conservative activist who most recently served as the director of communications on Pierre Poilievre's conservative leadership campaign.

You can read the full text of her article on our website, thehub.ca. Our second essay is by Eric Lombardi, writing on why democracy requires political renewal, not just political experience.

Two years ago, I argued Canada's baby boomers had won the generational war.

The trends undermining young Canadians today have made their parents the wealthiest generation in our history.

Others will discover that they and the public are ready.

But if enough do it, young adults exercising their political power will stop being noteworthy.

That was a commentary by Eric Lombardi.

He is the founder and president of More Neighbors Toronto, a volunteer organization committed to ending the housing crisis.

So as I previewed a little bit in our intro, uh, we actually got the drop of a full campaign platform from, uh, Dylan Morando, who is the, you know, one of the candidates, uh, one of the four candidates in this race.

For the record, I'll just say, um, before Eric Lombardi dropped out, he released a fully detailed costed platform.

We've seen significant number of announcements from a few of the campaigns, but I think Dylan is probably the only candidate left in the race who's actually put out a full complete document, and so it probably merits a little bit of discussion here.

Um, just to start, you know, he pitches this obviously as the unapologetically capital L liberal liberalism, and, uh, he calls it The Future Starts Here.

I think, and I'll put my policy hat on here for a second, guys, I, I, you know, when I look at this, I think there's probably five or six commitments that stand out.

Some of them he talked about earlier in the campaign, but this is an opportunity to kind of pull it all together.

The first being, and I think probably the most significant given that I think he is making a play, uh, for younger voters now that Eric Lombardi has dropped out of the race, a youth tax cut.

No provincial income tax on earnings under $50,000 for anyone under 35, which would be worth up to $2,000 a year.

[laughs] We're now down to four candidates as one just dropped out.

Um, we're probably gonna be dropping this episode Thanksgiving weekend, but we're recording it the day after Eric Lombardi has dropped out, a day or two after.

Um, so we are down to less than a handful of candidates now in this race, and we'll see where that ends up.

Who knows? Maybe by the time we actually drop this episode, someone else will have [laughs] dropped out of the race.

Uh, but you're also looking at, how can I get the supporters of the other camps to rank me number two or even number three, uh, on the ballot so that, you know, when those preferential ballots kick in, when all the votes are counted, um, that you can move up through the subsequent rounds? Um, based on the polling that we've seen, I don't think we're gonna have a first ballot victory.

Um, but- The, the polling for an internal race is, uh, I think, uh, illustrative but not hard data necessarily to be relied on.

Um, looking at the piece that Eric Lombardi wrote in The Star about what he learned through the campaign and why he decided to endorse Leigh Fairclough.

Um, what he said was that her openness to feedback and her willingness to, to, to take criticism and agree with some things and leave other things behind was a big part of his decision to support her.

Chris, it happens all the time.

Eric Lombardi just left the Liberal Party race and he endorsed somebody.

Some

of us don't play politics that way.

Like, th- to da- you know, as Andrew said, there, there really hasn't been a defining issue in this campaign.

I mean, if anything, uh, it's been more sporadic as, you know, Eric Lombardi throws, uh, uh, throws some choice words on, on the table to get attention about, uh, Doug Ford spreading cheeks or stuff like that.

But, but there really hasn't been an issue-specific, uh, definition or even an attack from the candidates on each other.

I- I'm just curious, is the lack of sparks that we have seen so far, um, indicative of the party actually agreeing about where it needs to go? Or, uh, is it that, that we've, we've lacked a kind of, uh, uh, a, a, a significant, uh, interest in this race?

But I'm just curious, Kyla, you know, is it something about the party today that maybe s- speaks to the fact that we haven't seen, um, you know, candidates either that we really didn't know before? I mean, obviously there's been-

Mm

... a few folks like, like Dylan Mirando and, and, uh, and Eric Lombardi who've come up out of, uh, you know, from, from, from the back ends of the party and as volunteers into the, you know, into the spotlight.

But, you know, for the most part, at least the three leading candidates that we have, Lee Fairclough, Stephanie Bowman, Navdeep Bains, these are people that have been involved in the party in different ways provincially or federally for a long time.

Today, he discusses the Liberals' rediscovery of capitalism and why conservatives should welcome it.

Eric Lombardi ended his campaign for the Ontario Liberal Party leadership this week.

That's a bit of a disappointment for those of us who appreciated the energy and ideas that he brought to the race.

But the questions that his candidacy raised about liberalism, markets, and economic opportunity will outlast his campaign.

Lombardi withdrew on Wednesday and endorsed Lee Fairclough, citing fundraising challenges and the absence of a credible path to victory.

We shouldn't, however, turn his decision into an ideological verdict on his ideas themselves.

Leadership campaigns are difficult, especially for young candidates without elected experience or an established political organization.

They were central to his understanding of what liberalism ought to offer.