The Ontario Provincial Liberal Party (OLP) has been without a leader since Bonnie Crombie stepped down on Jan. 14. With candidates gearing up for a leadership race, The Brock Press interviewed potential OLP leadership candidate Eric Lombardi on his campaign.
Lombardi is 31 years old and grew up in the Greater Toronto Area as an Oakville native. He studied engineering at the University of Waterloo around 10 years ago.
Betweenhis graduation and his bid to run for OLP leader, Lombardi spent time working in financial services and technology. He worked as a consultant and spent some time down in San Francisco before moving back to Canada in 2021.
Lombardi stated that he’s since become well known for his “advocacy work both in housing and the economy, and issues facing young people.”
Lombardi founded More Neighbours Toronto and chaired Growth Toronto, two organizations that focus on urban growth policy. Additionally, Lombardi writes for The Hub and The Toronto Star.
For the OLP, Lombardi has served as an advisor, having advised them on their previous housing plan under Bonnie Crombie. Lombardi worked alongside MPP Adil Shamji and Mississauga City Councilor Alvin Tedjo.
Lombardi is no stranger to the Liberal Party. He had been a Young Liberal in high school and had worked to revive the Waterloo Young Liberals when he was a university student.
When asked why he’s planning to run, Lombardi stated, “I believe Ontario has been in decline and it has been for a longer time than many are willing to admit.” Lombardi explained that locally, St Catharines and the Niagara Region have been amongst the slowest growing “in all of the province.”
“Challenges related to deindustrialization have never truly been addressed, and as a young person, I’ve seen the erosion of opportunity in Ontario amongst my peer group, particularly as it relates to getting established with housing. I believe we’ve been deprived of the debate the province needs to change [its] trajectory and to realize its enormous potential in the future,” said Lombardi.
Lombardi asserted that he was running to be the leader of the OLP because he believes an “agenda for young people is important,” and ultimately, the province needs a course correction, and the OLP is an opportunity to correct course.
In addressing the recent changes made to OSAP, Lombardi stated that they need to be reversed and a new proposal should be adopted.
Lombardi proposes that “any student who takes on debt to get their education — particularly as it’s granted by OSAP — if they graduate and they stay and work in Ontario, that debt should actually be forgiven over the next five to 10 years depending on how much debt they’ve taken on.”
Lombardi stated that this model would allow young people in Ontario to focus on building their wealth and savings while progressing their lives. “I believe we need to introduce [this] new part of the social contract,” he added.
Lombardi explained that per student funding provincially in Ontario is at 80 per cent of the level that it was in 2017. He continued by saying that “we actually just need to properly restore that [funding] so that our universities have the resources to provide really excellent programs and education to our young people.”
Lombardi believes that education is a way to create “good people in a society.” While university should enable students to find jobs, education is also “about the ability to think, to build relationships, to build networks and self-discovery into adulthood.”
“When we think about education as only job training, we miss the part of it that’s about building good citizens.” Lombardi stated that this was the mindset he has when thinking about approaches to the higher education system.
When asked about if the province had the money for education spending, Lombardi stated, “well, we have three billion dollars to blow on relocating Ontario Place and building a big new Metro Toronto Convention Centre, we have 100 billion dollars to spend on a new tunnel to nowhere [the highway 401 tunnel project].”
“We are not paupers in this province, we are poorly governed,” said Lombardi.
Switching to housing affordability, Lombardi stated that “I actually believe that in order to end the housing crisis, it means the price of housing has to come down.”
Lombardi explained that there are a few ways that this needs to happen. First, rules that burden the ability to build housing of all kinds needs to be removed.
Second, he believes the relationship between the Province and the Municipalities needs to change. Municipalities have become too dependent on development charges, which creates an immense tax burden on new development.
Third, solutions for non-market housing need to exist, including additional opportunities for co-op housing. “I personally believe anywhere from 10 to 20 per cent of all supply in Ontario should come from non-market means, and that doesn’t mean that the market itself shouldn’t be more effective, it’s just that this [non-market housing] is also important to [add to] the mix,” said Lombardi.
Finally, Lombardi discussed that in bringing down the cost of housing to align with current incomes, we will need to address the fact that young people who saved hard will be caught “out of equity”.
Lombardi stated that “in fixing our system to one where housing is more affordable, we are going to create losers and we need to help them too, because ultimately, what we have is a huge public policy failure and we have to be serious and real about what change means.”
Lombardi explained that in fixing housing policy, we need to acknowledge that there are losers. He continued that the current housing policy is “making losers out of young people” and that this problem has been allowed to spiral.
Lombardi explained that “if we’re going to bring down the cost of housing, which is how you make it more affordable, you’re going to create losers who bought into the old system that was dysfunctional, and that’s not their fault.”
Lombardi proposed a policy of being maximally generous to ensure that this group won’t be ruined financially.
“Some people may bristle at the idea that there should be some sort of bailout for people who bought in at the wrong time,” but as Lombardi put it, a lot of people could not wait on the government to correct the housing market. “If they get trapped because they can’t realize an equity loss or if they were to sell their home, they would have so little equity left they wouldn’t be able to buy a new one,” they may not be able to become more productive citizens or move about as freely.
“I don’t want to trap people,” explained Lombardi, people should be able to realize a long horizon of “wealth and life to create.”
Lombardi said that the province needs to be “real and honest” in the “anxieties this conversation creates in people,” stating that solutions to this problem should be offered to people.
Lombardi introduced a policy called “downpayment mobility insurance,” which he stated would be a temporary program that would “help people through the change in the correction of housing prices in Ontario.” The policy itself will be further explained on his platform once it’s available.
Moving on to transportation. Lombardi stated that as part of his provincial wide transit policy, GO electrification would need to occur immediately and progress faster. Originally, GO electrification was announced in 2015 and was expected to be completed in 2025, “but we’ve just got news that they’re starting GO electrification now and it won’t be completed until 2036.”
Lombardi explained that he would like to see the province build a high-speed rail network in Southern Ontario that would connect the Niagara and Hamilton regions to various parts of Ontario.
Broadly speaking, Lombardi also wants to build excellent local public transit . Lombardi stated that he wasn’t exactly sure what the solution for Niagara-St. Catharines would be, but “we would certainly want to see investment in higher order transportation here too.”
When asked about the province’s previous transit shortcomings, Lombardi stated that “we really just have to do things differently.”
Lombardi explained that he’s been inspired by models in Madrid and Osaka, specifically on how they deliver infrastructure. “We have a challenge in Ontario, number one, the agencies responsible for building infrastructure are often the ones operating it. It’s such a bad structure that we would be ineligible to enter the EU. So, we need to do some major reforms with Metrolinx, Infrastructure Ontario and our Transportation Ontario.”
Lombardi went on to explain that secondly, Ontario needs to stop relying on P3, Private-Public-Partnerships, because they have proven to only extend timelines and raise costs. “We need some domain expertise back in the public sector for design, standards and procurement,” said Lombardi.
Lombardi explained that he’s “not stating that there’s no role for the private sector, but broadly speaking, this model is not working, and we need to be willing to look at different ones”.
Lombardi concluded by saying that politicians need to be removed from infrastructure design. “I’m tired of politicians drawing lines on a map and then every time a government changes, we draw new lines. We need an institution that has a long-term horizon for the infrastructure that its building and that institution needs to be capitalized. That means it’s given money every year to continuously build out and expand infrastructure related to transit.”
Lombardi explained that the current one-off-project-based model “puts all the risk into single projects as opposed to spreading that risk over multiple projects, which is how you would manage risk if you were managing your own wealth.”
For Lombardi, many regions have solved this issue in planning, but “we have this tendency in Ontario and Canada to say ‘we’re unique and we can’t learn from anywhere else.’”
When it comes to infrastructure procurement, Lombardi wants consistent development as opposed to mismatched one-off developments.When asked about healthcare, Lombardi stated that his solution involves more doctors, nurses and technology, but fewer administrators.
In discussing A.I. in the job market, Lombardi stated that he believes “some of the fear is overhyped and that this happens with every major thing from Silicon Valley.” Lombardi believes that the doom and hype is a way to get capital to come invest in technology.
“Whenever new technology comes around that makes us more productive, we’ve always chosen to produce more and raise our living standards. I’d say fear A.I. less and be excited about how much more we can build and create in the future,” said Lombardi.
Lombardi also explained that to prepare Ontario’s economy for A.I., a build out of electricity production needs to occur, especially to take advantage of the native talent in the field in Toronto and Waterloo.
“We’ll need to have solutions in case [A.I. mass unemployment] does happen, but I actually think it’ll be more of an employment driver than loser over the long run,” said Lombardi.
On the job market, Lombardi discussed short-, medium- and long-term effects. For the long term, Lombardi said that Ontario needs a much more competitive economy.
“Our private sector has been stagnant, we have major problems with oligopolies across major industries, we have to confront regulatory capture and simply make our economy more competitive because that will generate jobs.”
In the short term, however, Lombardi proposed that the province work on a new concept of a voluntary national service that would leverage the need to conduct new spending defence to connect young Ontarians with career paths and experiences that expose them to the various regions of the province.
Lombardi stated that “we are also under investing with cooperative learning in universities and colleges as well.”
If Lombardi were premier today, he said that the first three actions he would take would be: fix housing and the provincial-municipal relationship, conduct a spending review to refocus on core government services and make specific reforms in healthcare.
Lombardi noted that healthcare reforms would take a while to come into effect, so he placed emphasis on utilizing the first six months of a mandate to accomplish that goal to allow time for policy to materialize.
Lombardi concluded the interview by addressing Brock students. “You have a great future here in Ontario, we will end the milestone recession, you will have great jobs and you will be able to afford a home. Don’t give up on this place, it has tons of potential, it just takes some time and some generational change and we will get there.”