Even Eric Lombardi’s hypothetical leadership of the Ontario Liberals might not be enough to spare the party from an electoral disappointment

It is a widespread intuition of observers of Canadian and Ontario politics that party leaders are very powerful and thus warrant the most scrutiny of their behaviour.  I have myself witnessed from personal experience how the wrong kind of leader can be difficult in trying to exert strong and self-insecure personal control over the internal machinery of a party, both in my experiences with the Green Party of Canada and in my experiences with the Green Party of Ontario.

So, I take seriously whom the Ontario Liberal Party’s next choice for Leader might be as a variable in the future electoral prospects of this party.  But despite all that, I cannot help but suspect that the next choice for OLP Leader may hardly even make a difference to how the party performs in the next provincial election.  So here I am, highlighting which leadership candidate’s qualities I believe are most likely to overcome an elephant in the room, an elephant which may simply be too much for any of them to overcome.  The next Leader will only have the agency to solve the problem if they have the information to even be aware of it.

The Ontario Liberal Party’s dirty little secret

I start this piece with the assumption that Bonnie Crombie, Steven Del Ducca, and arguably even Kathleen Wynne in her later years did not lose elections primarily because of personal scandals.  Certainly, the Doug Ford era has proven how much scandal the same political party leader can get away with, if the alternatives are of no inspiration.  These Liberal leaders lost their elections, then, because they and the party did not present an electoral platform of adequate appeal to Ontarians, to the point that the majority of Ontarians could not even be bothered to vote.  And the Ontario Liberal Party has frankly proven to be ignorant about public policy because it will not seriously intake policies from the most obvious source to get them: its own members.  And the dirty secret of the OLP is that the party never has policy resolution processes because there are always authorities at the highest levels of the party who are foolish enough to believe that they are going to score themselves high-standing jobs in a would-be government at Queen’s Park, by pandering to the Leader’s worst instincts for policy control and by ensuring that the Leader can never be publicly humbled by an independent policy process.

Wait – is the scheduled 2027 convention not contrary to these accusations?

I know that some friends who are authorities in the party would quarrel with my above allegations, citing recent developments within the party as proving to the contrary.  But let us review what those specific developments are:

1. This year’s meeting of the Provincial Council (a body including all the various Provincial Liberal Associations) passed a motion ordering the Council to feature a policy convention that includes policy resolutions.
2. Subsequently, the party has since sent a message to the whole membership promising a “policy convention” in Ottawa for May 2027.

So, what’s the problem here?  The problem is that the OLP already pulled a bait-and-switch on its membership by announcing a “policy convention” in London for 2024.  The only policy work of any kind at that convention was a bunch of pre-selected panels giving policy lectures to delegates on selected topics.  In fact, OLP Presidents give pathetic excuses just about every year for there being no policy resolutions processes (i.e. it is supposedly  “impossible” during a leadership contest), even as every other major political party effortlessly pulls them off.

I have been personally assured that the Provincial Council has authority that legally cannot be disobeyed.  But this is plainly a party where legal obligations for policy resolutions are worth squat.  The OLP Constitution has always commanded that there be “Annual Policy Development Conferences”, and that has meant nothing to the party’s obtuse Executive Councils since 2012.

But would a development as shocking as the Executive defying its Provincial Council not be the kind of behaviour that voting delegates would correct against when voting in the next round of Executive Council elections in 2027?  No, not really.  The little tidbit that we know in point #1 – what the Provincial Council ordered – is not information that most members are aware of.  Many of the delegates voting in 2027 would plausibly not be aware of any transgression against the Provincial Council’s authority – and those who do, would probably be tempted to vote for an outsider to be the party’s next President.  (None of the OLP Presidents last more than several years; being manipulative is naturally exhausting work.)

Unfortunately, the incoming Presidents always seem to be big wigs without prior experience serving on Executive Council, and yet who perpetuate the exact same bait-and-switch tactics of their predecessors over the past decade.  (OLP delegates do not have a record of being especially supportive of incumbent Council candidates, so much as they are supportive of the candidates with the strongest pre-existing networks, campaign effort, and resume if all else is equal.  That is of negative consequence whenever there are highly motivated non-incumbent ex-government types who believe that there are imminent prospects of party victory to grovel government jobs from.)  That’s setting aside whatever concocted excuse I am expecting to hear from the President in the coming months – after the leadership contest is already concluded and there is no major forum left for organized membership protest, of course.

The evidence for the conspiracy

Most of the evidence that the conspiracy exists as I described, where Ontario Liberal authorities cynically and manipulatively have disempowered members to grovel to the Leader, is unfortunately not publicly available information.  Most of what has driven me to these accusations comes from direct personal experiences that cannot be proven to have occurred in the space of a blog.  However, there are a couple of verifiable episodes that I can point to.

In the 2023 Ontario Liberal Annual General Meeting, the Constitution Committee tabled a constitutional amendment, “Requirement for Proposals to Amend the Constitution”, to plenary to dramatically tighten restrictions on who can submit constitutional amendments for future AGMs.  This amendment was passed without debate, and its text now exists in Section 1.65 (b) in the latest edition of the Constitution.  The amendment eliminated previously unlimited constitutional submission rights for members (which were used in 2023 by Nate Erskine-Smith to pass his amendment), and established requirements for amendments to meet endorsement thresholds such as being endorsed by 20+ members, endorsed by PLAs, or endorsed by Commissions.  Guess which single-person office of the party was the only one granted a unilateral right to submit constitutional provisions without consulting anyone else?  The Leader, of course.

A few Liberals who have been consulted are skeptical of my accusations against the party.  But I can say with confidence that not a single Liberal who knows anything about the perpetual Interim Leader John Fraser would dare suggest that he, as the Leader in 2023, was asking for these constitutional provisions to be included in the Constitution.  No recent Liberal leader has had any involvement whatsoever in the constitutional process, let alone that Interim Leader.  There is not any Liberal, for that matter, who would remember being consulted in the drafting of the above amendment by the Constitution Committee.  The Committee drafted that amendment in the form that it did, then, because it was grovelling not to a sitting Leader, but to the coming Leader-to-be.  Even in years where there is no permanent Leader, the Committee will grovel to the Leader’s Office by seeking to perpetuate the Leader’s power at the expense of the general membership.  These manipulations are only visible to those with the most vigilant eye, as the party does pass significant constitutional changes in plenaries – just never the 3 to 4 amendments that are submitted each year that would take away any power from the Leader, the Constitution Committee, or from the President.

The other episode worthy of mention is my own record of associated public predictions.  During the prior Ontario Liberal leadership contest, I made the mistake of writing an opinion piece singling out Yasir Naqvi for suspicion on his promised commitment to policy resolutions, where I over-read into his association with the then Constitution Committee Chair.  Nonetheless, even in that same piece, I wrote that “anyone hoping that voting for… even other candidates in the leadership contest will be enough to settle the return of Ontario Liberal policy conventions, is likely to be in for a years-long disappointment”.  Even after the experience of multiple Ontario Liberal leaders looking me in the eyes and telling me that they supported the return of policy resolutions – including the Leader-to-be, Bonnie Crombie – I knew by instinct that whatever was wrong that had caused the party to be so intransigent on the return of policy resolutions was not going to change because the next Leader asked nicely for the party to do so.   I knew that any sycophant cynical enough to manipulatively grovel to a Leader would also understand that Leaders do not always mean what they say, and such a sycophant would act accordingly.

In this leadership contest, by contrast, because party insiders are naïvely buying into the assumption that there will in fact be policy resolutions next year, the leadership contestants have been spared from any pressure to promise the return of those resolutions.  So, in this contest, the return of policy resolutions is once again not the pivotal issue that it should be.

So why was Eric Lombardi mentioned in the title of this piece?

Having made the claim that the OLP will be difficult to save from disappointment in the coming campaign, I do at least need to take seriously the possibility that, by communicating these opinions publicly where they can in principle be widely read or read by the right people, that maybe it will in fact be possible to make a difference.  To the extent that none of the Ontario Liberal leadership candidates have any experience with the constitutional processes of the party and therefore will not be confident of my arguments and claims, there is no cause for optimism in the medium-term future of the party.  But if there is a candidate whom I am expecting to be more likely to listen and pay attention, then I am obligated to name and give them attention accordingly.

I happen to have a soft spot for political candidates who make themselves available for questioning and accountability on public digital forums, and Eric Lombardi has proven to be quite the excellent listener to public feedback on Twitter.  One can question the usefulness of Twitter as a forum and whether Eric would be able to maintain such accessibility when given the greater spotlight that would accompany becoming Ontario Liberal Leader, let alone becoming Premier.  But he has at least demonstrated a dedication to publicly discussing with members major developments involving the party itself, and specifically in a digital forum that can in principle be more accessible than the in-person-only events usually organized by Liberal campaigns. 

Whether or not Eric would take seriously my arguments in this piece, we do know that he has been inquisitive enough about policy to develop the most ambitious and detailed policy platform among the candidates, so far at least.  In a different party and in different circumstances, I would be inclined to put more value on one of the more politically experienced candidates, the candidates with more legislative experience, the candidate with inside experience of the past OLP government, or the candidate with more organizing experience.  But if the OLP were to run in the next election with his platform as is, then at least something would be meaningfully different about the party’s campaign compared to past dull campaigns.  Whether that would be enough to meaningfully grow the party, if the party failed to refine and add to his platform with independent processes of its own, I cannot say. 

Concluding mixed thoughts

Although I am publicly expressing a preference for Eric Lombardi to be the next Ontario Liberal Leader months in advance of the vote, I am late in doing so insofar as the deadline for readers who are not members to register to vote is this Monday September 7th.  If you, as a reader, are not a party member but want to support the kind of candidates whom I support, then you can still do so if registering for free by that time.  If my thinking is correct, then assisting Eric can only help and not harm the party.

But then, if I were to express too much enthusiasm for Eric’s campaign and its prospects, I might become guilty of encouraging him to become the next sacrificial lamb to be blamed for what might be the party’s next inevitable defeat.  Maybe someone I respect less should be allowed to take on the role of Leader instead.  If the past is any guide, the Ontario Liberals will keep churning through different Leaders and Executive Councillors, but the character type of authorities outside of the Leader’s Office will never really change.