[LINK] Three notes on the problems of the Ontario NDP under Horwath

[rfmcdonald]

Many members of Ontario's NDP are unhappy with what their leader Andrea Horwath has done, both in triggering a provincial election for June and in adopting a more right-leaning platform than they'd like.

In The Globe and Mail, Kaleigh Rogers and Adrian Morrow reported on an internal letter addressed by NDP supporters to the party leadership.

A rift in the Ontario NDP over Andrea Horwath’s leadership deepened Friday as a group of 34 high-profile party members released a letter warning her she risks losing their support.

The group chastises Ms. Horwath for rejecting the Liberal budget – which they call “the most progressive budget in recent Ontario history” – triggering the June 12 election. The missive also attacks her populist policies, saying they go against party principles.

The letter brings to a boil simmering discontent with Ms. Horwath’s leadership among grassroots organizers angry that she has left behind ambitious social democratic policy for small, centrist promises.

“In this election, we are seriously considering not voting NDP,” the letter reads. “From what we can see you are running to the right of the Liberals in an attempt to win Conservative votes. It is not clear whether you have given up on progressive voters or you are taking them for granted.”

The letter, dated May 23, was signed by some of the party’s prominent members. Winnie Ng, a former federal NDP candidate; Janice Gairey, a director with the Ontario Federation of Labour; and Michele Landsberg, wife of former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis, all signed the letter.

It comes mere hours after a similar open letter from long-time organizer Gerald Caplan was published on The Globe and Mail website, arguing the NDP had abandoned its principles.

Adrian Morrow, also in that paper, reported on Horwath's rejection of the idea of a right and defended her decision to force an election.

Andrea Horwath is brushing off a rift in her New Democratic Party as good old fashioned democratic debate.

And she is defending her decision to reject Kathleen Wynne’s left-wing budget, saying she had to force an election to “shut down corruption” in the Liberal government.

“The great thing about our party is that it’s very democratic and people have the right to voice their opinions,” she said after a rally in Windsor Saturday, a day after 34 party members accused her in a letter of abandoning her party’s socialist roots by voting down the budget.

Ms. Wynne’s spending plan would have created a new provincial pension plan and pumped a billion dollars into social programs. But Ms. Horwath said it had to go because of the Grits’ spending scandals, including the costly cancellations of two gas-fired power plants.

“If there’s one straightforward, up-front job that progressives have, it’s to shut down corruption and get rid of the kind of behaviour that we’ve seen from the Liberal government,” she said. “When I made the decision I made, it wasn’t an easy decision to make. But when I heard the feedback from Ontarians, I heard the disgust with the way that the scandals had been rolling out with the waste of their money.”

Writing at the left-wing site Rabble, John Baglow as much as states that there isn't much point to Ontario's NDP now.

It occurs to me that we're looking at the thing all wrong. Some of us are scrambling to make sense of it all by using the dependable old left-right spectrum as a template. But there isn't much of a spectrum visible in this campaign. The needle is stuck at neo-lib, and we're simply being offered red, blue and orange variants. "There is no alternative," thundered one of Augusto Pinochet’s most fervent admirers. All three party leaders in Ontario would more or less agree with that. When the full spread of conceivable political alternatives is looked at, their differences seem merely tactical. No wonder they're all neck and neck.

Now, of course it would be better to have Wynne and/or Horwath in power instead of that thick ideologue Tim Hudak. No progressive could seriously argue otherwise. But step back a little and consider what this means. Have politics become so impoverished, so etiolated, that elections are no longer about substantive politics at all, but about whose style is less bad and who is less likely to inflict damage when elected? Is our only real choice at the polls the flavour and strength of the poison to be administered? These, of course, are rhetorical questions. They've applied to electoral politics ever since I can remember. But in this election they have acquired a certain added poignancy. Our flabby "left" leaders aren’t even trying any more. They've just given up.

"I don’t vote," said some apocryphal old grump. "It just encourages them." I'm not there yet: Hudak is a savage, and can wreak much destruction in a very short time, so I'll likely hold my nose and vote NDP as a superstitious reflex, like spitting to ward off evil. But what am I—or other Ontarians—gaining in the long run by participating in this foolishness? That question isn't rhetorical, and it merits some real discussion. Maybe the time, finally, has come to have it.

What will come on election day, I wonder?