I wonder what Robin Sears has to say about Cheri DiNovo. The day Andrea Horwath walked away from the Liberal budget I cancelled my membership in the Ontario NDP. This decision was not taken lightly. I worked in my first election in Grade 9 and was a member of the party for decades. When the famous letter of “the 34” was made public, I felt better. Others were also disappointed at the move away from core NDP values to populist austerity rhetoric.
Then, enter Robin Sears. He dismissed all of us as over-the-hill, negative and anti-party. And now we have Cheri DiNovo saying “we can’t ever give up our core values and principles.” I hope there are more like DiNovo and fewer like Sears in the party. If that proves to be the case I will return to the fold. I voted Liberal and I respect Kathleen Wynne but I am not a Liberal because I don’t share their core values and principles.
But only a little bit. And only because her campaign is being criticized from within.
As I noted in a recent post, Ontario NDP leader Andrea's Horwath's hubris following what almost everyone else would call a failed Ontario election campaign has been both unseemly and wholly unjustified. She initially avowed that she had no regrets about causing the election, terming it a success despite the fact her party lost key Toronto ridings and, more importantly, the balance of power. However, now that she is being publicly taken to task by both Peter Julian and Cheri DiNovo, Horwath seems to be tempering her pridefulness:
After weeks of downplaying the defeat at the hands of Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals on June 12, which saw the New Democrats lose the balance of power in a minority legislature, Horwath on Tuesday conceded “the result of this election campaign was bittersweet.”
“We lost some seats in Toronto, which is very concerning to us. All three of those MPPs were good and it’s troubling that all three lost their seats,” she told reporters at Queen’s Park.
Her admission of error came after DiNovo granted an interview to The Torontoist, in which she described the results for the party as "a debacle from the beginning, from day one”.
DiNovo blamed those results on a wholesale drift from traditional NDP progressive values: poverty, child care, housing, and education.
Pointedly, she observed that "at the end of the day it’s about who we are as a party and what we stand for that we need to look at as New Democrats.”
Showing more understanding of what true leadership entails than Horwath does, DiNovo says the NDP will not regain frustrated supporters by portraying the recent election as progress, which has been the official line—focusing on the fact that the party improved its share of the popular vote by one per cent, and that efforts to attract voters outside of Toronto yielded gains. “It’s important for our voters in Toronto to know that we did not see that campaign as a success” because “I think voters appreciate honesty.”
It appears that, belatedly, Andrea Horwath may be realizing the wisdom of her colleague's insights, but not with any real grace. In today's Star, Martin Regg Cohn says that when the caucus finally met on Tuesday, DiNovo, a United Church minister, was told to take another vow of silence.
Nonetheless, as a response to those criticisms,
... a more contrite Horwath confirmed this week that she is changing her staff — and changed her tone. Where last month she was “proud of the achievements,” this week she scaled back the bravado by acknowledging the “bittersweet” reality in Toronto.
The political reality for all caucus members is sinking in. The spring election they triggered has deprived them of the balance of power, leaving the party destabilized and demoralized.
With the Liberals enjoying a majority for the next four years, the NDP leader has lost her leverage in the legislature. Over the next four months, she must regain her legitimacy within the party.
It is clear that Ms. Horwath has her work cut out for her.
The other day, while watching some reactions to the Ontario Throne Speech, I couldn't help but note a truculent and smug Andrea Horwath, the leader of an NDP party now diminished by her foolish decision not to support a progressive budget, thereby triggering an election that few wanted. She opined that the now-majority Liberal government will have to make massive cuts in order to balance the budget by 2017-18. Indeed, she called the speecha Trojan Horse plan.
Who knows? She may be right, but the fact that she gambled and lost the leverage her party enjoyed in the legislature thanks to her decision to go for the brass ring of power has weakened considerably both her credibility and stature among voters. Perhaps this helps explain these results published in today's Star:
One third of Ontarians think NDP Leader Andrea Horwath should resign in the wake of her recent provincial election defeat, a new poll has found.
The poll, conducted by Forum Research,
found 35 per cent believe Horwath, who triggered the election by announcing her party would no longer prop up the minority Grits, should step down as leader, while 43 per cent felt she should stay on and 21 per cent had no opinion.
In terms of personal approval, Horwath has dropped to 28 per cent compared to 41 per cent for Wynne. Last August, Forum found the NDP leader at 50 per cent and the Liberal premier at 36 per cent.
Lorne Bozinoff, the president of Forum, noted that the party got nothing out of Horwath's ill-considered decision to force the election:
They don’t have any more seats than they had going into the election and they lost control of everything,” the pollster said, referring to the NDP’s loss of the balance of power in a minority legislature.
“She took a real hit with the whole election thing and not supporting the budget. It just didn’t go well and I think she really did alienate some of her own supporters, the progressives”.
The article also notes the mandatory review Horwath faces in November, where tradition demands that she get at least two-thirds support from the delegates.
Will she meet that criterion? The NDP has few bright stars in its stable, and considering the real possibility that the Progressive Conservatives will pick a female leader (Christine Elliot is the early favourite), it is unlikely that the NDP will pick a male replacement. The only viable alternative, it seems to me, would be Cheri DiNovo. Currently the MPP for Toronto's Parkdale-high Park, she is a United Church Minister and much more a traditionalist when it comes to NDP progressive values.
So it would seem that the party has some intensive soul-searching to do leading up to the November review.
