OK, I stand corrected. ;)
Re: WIN - they did quite well in 1989, IIRC. I think they even won a majority of council. They didn't do quite as well in 1992 but that was largely because the Tories had chopped the number of wards in half which forced many WIN councillors to run against other incumbents.
I had never heard of the Civic Reform Coalition. I was always under the impression that prior to WIN, the left ran under the banner of the Civic NDP (or municipal NDP) while the pro-business right ran under the ICEC banner. Guys like Lawrie Cherniak and Magnus Eliason were elected as explicitly NDP candidates in the 1970s, unfortunately they were always distinctly in the minority. IIRC the NDP only managed 7/50 council seats in the first Unicity election, which admittedly was probably the result of a suburban backlash against Unicity itself. The ICEC evolved sometime in the 1980s into the more loosely-organized "Gang of 18", which WIN was formed to oppose. Brian Corrin ran as an explictly NDP candidate for mayor in 1983 (and got thrashed by Norrie) and there was an organized NDP slate of council candidates in 1983 and 1986 (which also fared pretty poorly). The ICEC (and its successor the Gang of 18) succeeded as a broad-based coalition of Tories, Liberals, business and development interests pushing a right-leaning, pro-business, pro-development agenda. I would argue that the 'left' has only matched that success when it organizes itself into a similar broad-based coalition. The problem with the WCC, as I see it, was really one of a lack of organization and direction, as opposed to being a doomed experiment from the start.