Quite properly, and much to their credit, The Toronto Star is not giving her eely performances an easy ride. Today's editorial, entitled Ontario NDP’s Andrea Horwath keeps ducking hard choices offers this view:
...with the strong possibility of a spring election, Horwath should be talking about her plans for job growth, handling the province’s finances, and a solution to the gridlock that’s costing the Toronto and Hamilton region some $6 billion a year.
Instead, Horwath cobbled together several hundred words over the weekend to tell Premier Kathleen Wynne what she doesn’t want from the government, with nothing at all devoted to the NDP’s own proposals for prosperity – which as far as anyone knows so far don’t exist. Keep this up, and the NDP leader will be exposed as the kind of clichéd politician who seeks power without having any idea what to do with it.
And it is the latter that troubles me most. Howarth is doing nothing to dispel the Star's lacerating assessment of her as one seeking power only for its own sake. We have enough such blights on the political landscape already.
But then again, maybe her problems lie elsewhere. Perhaps it is time to replace what ostensibly passes as her chief source of political wisdom for one with more substance:
Not only do we of the poor and working classes not have electoral presence in the eyes of most ambitious pols, some of us can look kinda icky next to a designer togged prospective premier who may be earning $200K+ a year.
ReplyDeleteOh, she'll most assuredly come a-courting us, kissing babies and showing up at run down schools in the Junction and trying to rally autoworkers and shut out Hamilton steelworkers for support, but then come the invites from the Granite Club, the Chamber of Commerce, and the CCCE to give hour long talks over expensive catered lunches on why the tax burden needs to be lifted from the (upper) middle class, Business, and those poor, downtrodden, misunderstood and under appreciated Job Creators.
She'll harken to the neo-liberal siren song of the Drummond Report (a report written by a wealthy, TD bank economist who drives a nice car and lives in a big, comfy, pricey house that tells poor and disabled people in Ontario how they should live on even less than they do now and be damned grateful they get anything, the lazy bums...), and go ahead with the evisceration of Ontario's social safety net, education, healthcare - Harris the Horrible's Common Sense Revolution with an orange NDP glow.
And when OCAP shows up on her Queen's Park doorstep, pleading for the lessers, she'll see to it that the black BDU'd OPP veterans of the G20 protests give them a respectful bum's rush off of her neatly manicured lawn.
Oh, Tommy, Ed, and Stephen, where are you when we need you?!?
N.
An excellent post, Neil, not a word of which I can disagree with. I hope you don't mind, but I am taking the liberty of posting your insightful and incisive analysis as a separate guest post.
DeleteHappy to oblige...
DeleteThanks, Neil.
DeleteBack when Jack Layton first cut the NDP's anchor line to the Left, the party faithful would lash back in great indignation at the mere suggestion that their glorious party had jettisoned its principle ballast to better drift to the Right. Now you don't hear a peep out of them. I think they get it. They've become what they once supposedly despised and ridiculed.
ReplyDeleteWith the exception of people like Sid Ryan and a few others, the voices of the left do seem muted these days, Mound. i suspect they think that even with its decidedly rightist tilt, the party still represents the least potential damage to their causes. Unquestionably, a very sad state of affairs for a once principled party.
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