First debate for Ontario Liberal leadership candidates a low friction affair

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The first leadership debate in the Ontario Liberal leadership race was light on debate.

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Perhaps this is not surprising. A Monday night in the middle of summer, and a livestream-only broadcast, were not exactly a platform for fireworks. Add to that a contest that will conclude with a ranked ballot, where the winner will have to draw votes from supporters of other candidates, and the recipe was for compromise.

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And so it was, with the five Liberal candidates in a Brampton studio largely agreeing with each other on matters of policy — and on criticisms of Doug Ford. The event was streamed on YouTube and over 90 minutes rarely cracked more than 2,100 viewers. By way of comparison, more than 1.5 million voters cast ballots for Liberals in the 2025 election.

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If there was one moment of differentiation on Monday, it came when Lee Fairclough and Stephanie Bowman, both sitting MPPs, argued for the importance of choosing a leader who already has a seat at Queen’s Park.

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“We can’t keep doing the same thing,” Fairclough said, a reference to the last two Liberal leaders, Steven Del Duca and Bonnie Crombie, who guided the party without a seat in the legislature and lost in their first attempts at defeating Ford and the Progressive Conservatives.

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Bowman, who was elected in Don Valley West in the campaigns that Del Duca and Crombie lost, said “it was a real challenge” for those leaders to connect with voters because they struggled to get media coverage from outside the legislature.

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Dylan Marando, a policy adviser who has not held elected office, said that the ballot-box question at the next election will not be whether the Liberal leader has a seat at Queen’s Park. And Navdeep Bains, a former federal cabinet minister who is entering provincial politics for the first time, said that “we all recognize that change is in the air,” but stopped short of saying that being an MPP was a necessity to bring that change.

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Those four candidates, plus financial technology engineer Eric Lombardi, are seeking to become the fourth permanent leader of the provincial Liberals since Doug Ford became leader of the Progressive Conservatives in 2018. Each of the previous three — Kathleen Wynne, Del Duca and Crombie — lost an election to Ford and resigned the leadership.

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Bains, a former minister in the Trudeau government, is leading the fundraising race and is thought to be the favoured candidate of party insiders. Bains retired from politics in 2021 to work in the private sector and was most recently an executive at Rogers Communications.

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Neither Bowman, first elected in her Toronto riding in 2022, or Fairclough, first elected last year in Etobicoke-Lakeshore, are long-time MPPs, but party members will have to weigh whether having a seat at the legislature is a significant asset given the party’s recent electoral struggles.

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On policy areas such as health care, education and the economy, there was little difference between the candidates on display. Most questions about what the candidates would propose instead were turned into complaints about actions the Ford government has taken.