ADAMS: The Ontario Liberal Party needs to draw clearer lines around Eric Lombardi

There is something deeply unsettling about watching a sitting Conservative MP casually walk into another party’s leadership race and declare he is there to install his preferred candidate. Yet that is exactly what Matt Strauss did this week. The member for Kitchener South—Hespeler announced he has taken out an Ontario Liberal membership for one reason only: to vote for Eric Lombardi.

But do not worry, for you see was careful to add that he remains a Conservative and has never voted Liberal a day in his life. How thoughtful of him!

For years, the Conservative Party of Canada has nursed a quiet, and sometimes not so quiet, contempt for Premier Doug Ford. They view the premier as insufficiently pure, too transactional, too willing to play the populist game. The recent collapse of trade talks with the United States only sharpened that resentment.

With Premier Ford digging his heels in and refusing to accept a deal that would have left Ontario's auto sector under permanent tariff pressure, some Conservatives now see opportunity rather than solidarity; if Ford will not bend, perhaps the Ontario Liberals can be reshaped into a more convenient instrument.

Eric has positioned himself as the candidate of ideas, the outsider willing to speak hard truths about high immigration levels, housing supply, and institutional drift. To be clear, I don't think there's anything wrong with challenging political orthodoxy; I'm a guy who thinks politics needs more of it. But when the same candidate begins attracting enthusiastic support from people whose politics sit well outside the Liberal tradition, questions become unavoidable.

Eric has spoken openly about wanting Conservatives and New Democrats to become “Lombardi Liberals.” In practice, this has meant endorsements and amplification from figures who make many long-time Liberals deeply uncomfortable. Gender-critical activists. Tech entrepreneurs with little patience for progressive social policy. Conservative MPs. And, more troubling still, engagement from corners of the far-right, including people associated with groups like the Dominion Society, which traffic in ethno-nationalist ideas.

Granted, Eric has directly stated that he does not support race-based deportations. But that is the bare minimum, and the fact that such groups see him as a useful vehicle at all should set off every alarm bell in the party.

Policing the tent is the difference between a functioning political party and an open microphone where nothing actually gets done. I recall when Derek Sloane and Jim Karahailos were ruthlessly reprimanded by the Conservative Party when similar issues came to light, why should Eric Lombardi receive a free pass simply because some of his most vocal backers so happen to dislike Doug Ford?

A candidate who insists he is simply expanding the tent while carefully refusing to draw bright lines around basic values is rarely expanding the tent in a healthy direction. Eric is testing how much the membership will tolerate, and a federal Conservative MP using a provincial Liberal leadership race to advance an agenda whose primary common ground is hostility to another level of government is interference.

Strauss and those who share his view are entitled to their opinions about Ford, but they are not entitled to treat the Ontario Liberal Party as a delivery system for laundering those opinions. Liberals who care about the integrity of their own house should say so, clearly and without apology.

Ordinary people are not hyper-partisan, that much is true. They vote on trust and the issues of the day. But leaders still have a duty to decide which ideas and which allies they will platform, and Eric Lombardi's refusal to draw clearer boundaries leaves him open to the charge that he is, knowingly or not, serving as a proxy for forces that have little interest in Liberal success beyond the removal of Doug Ford.

The Ontario Liberal Party can choose a leader who broadens the tent while remaining grounded in the party’s core commitments to equality, inclusion, and evidence-based policy. Or it can chase short-term electoral calculation by embracing every critic of the premier, regardless of what else they bring with them. The first path is harder, but it is the only one that leaves the party with a soul worth defending.

This piece was written by an individual contributor and reflects the editorial position of The Provincial Times. Read our Content Policy here.