DiNovo: ONDP Must Acknowledge Election "Debacle"

Kathleen Wynne on Andrea Horwath NDP platform

"She didn’t have a plan. Frankly, I was surprised at her lack of preparedness."

Toronto Life, August 2014

Rae does say that Ottawa is not doing anything about climate change. I have been harping on the Liberals about the same thing. I have also been ranting about social housing. As Alberta is the heart of the production of hydrocarbons, the GTA is the heart of its consumption. Moving Ontario to sustainability and efficiency would provide a lot of work, as would social housing.

Still, the knife goes in. Rae says we need to move to consumption taxes over income taxes, which would benefit "middle class families". Poppycock. Most of us don't have a lot of money, so what are you going to do, tax food?

The taxation problem isn't at the bottom. It is at the top. Hire a good accountant, and they will write you down to practically nothing. We need some kind of Minimum Tax Rate for high income earners. In the long run it will make it cheaper to pay your taxes than to try to write it off. As Quebec Solidaire found out, prominent Quebec politicians had offshore financial dealings. As these people are not particularly financial bigshots it makes you wonder if the practice is not rampant. The towers on Bay St. are silent and at your service.

terrytowel wrote:

Kathleen Wynne on Andrea Horwath NDP platform

"She didn’t have a plan. Frankly, I was surprised at her lack of preparedness."

Toronto Life, August 2014

The leader of the Ontario Liberal Party attacks the leader of the Ontario NDP.  And this is news because...?

Interestingly Cheri DiNovo has been saying a lot of nice things in public about Andrea Horwath lately and has praised her for having returned to her social justice roots etc...If Horwath has succeeded in getting people like Schein and DiNovo to back her than  i suspect she will get a massive vote of confidence and the "insurrection" against her will end up being a very wet fire cracker.

If Andrea is toppled and replaced by someone who is pretty much the same, what have we gained?  I know it's been discussed before on Rabble, but I don't think we have a definitive answer to the question, if not Andrea, then who? 

Also, as important as a leader is to a political party, there are many others who wield power in the backrooms.  If we change only the leader, how much difference will it make, anyway?  If party members believe change is necessary, then do we not have to make a clean sweep of it?

Poll from Maple Stratgies has been broken down by party voting intentions.

Rob Ford’s coalition is comprised of a base of Conservatives supplemented with a small contingent of NDP’ers who are likely drawn by his populist approach.

In fact those polled who idenitfy as NDP supporters, almost a quarter of them (24%) are supporting Ford!

Andrea must of been on to something when she started going after the Rob Ford/Toronto Sun/Tim Horton's voter with her populist message.

http://mapleleafstrategies.com/below-the-topline-additional-observations...

As Rokossovsky said in another thread as to why Andrea was chasing after the Rob Ford/Toronto Sun/Tim Horton's voter

Rokossovsky wrote:

Ignoring the fact that many of the so called Rob Ford/Toronto Sun/Tim Horton's voters are the actual real working class voters who the NDP has drifted away from over the years in favour of the liberal left intelligentsia. Underlying this characterization of the so called "Conservative" voters is a great deal of class stigmatization, precisely the kind that has made the NDP unelectable and Rob Ford electable, as when he advocates against the "downtown liberal elite".

Horwath got the Rob Ford message, and tuned her message to dealing with the everyday problems that confront ordinary people in Ontario when they are faced with being made to pay for services through increased fees and regressive consumption taxes, when the same services had previously been picked up by the business sector and the rich, through corporate taxes and income taxes.

Since when did addressing the real bread and butter issues of the working class become "right-wing" -- only in the minds of some who are so disconnected from realities of lower class and lower middle class people.

Where the "progressive left" has gone off the rails is allowing the right to maniuplate the genuine anger and opposition of the less well-to-do against fees and regressive taxation. Sure this is just part of the their "small government" mantra, but that does not make opposition to consumption taxes essentially right wing. It is the right that has stolen the position of the left, not Horwath who has taken up a right wing position. She simply reclaimed the terrain.

The progressive left made a grevious strategic error when it abandoned principled opposition to consumption taxes and fees and bought into the neo-Liberal economic plan of downloading of costs by supporting increased fees and taxes in order to compensate for revenue lost to McGuinty's tax cuts.

When it did so, the left in Toronto lost the working class to the right and Rob Ford was elected -- the "rate supported budget" of the Gross City of Toronto operating budget went up astronomically under Miller.

The "traditional" base that you speak of, is actually not so. The traditional base of the NDP is the working class. Removing consumption taxes, and increasing corporate taxes in order to fund public service is to the NDP as apple pie is to America -- it is only some confused advocates of "charity" politics, like Judy Rebick who think that "expenditures" are more important than who is paying for what, and through what tax mechanism that is the key to redistribution of wealth through implementing progressive tax policy.

That left the NDP fighting competing with the rump of the progressive left in the city of Toronto.

Good riddance to them, I say.

Horwath's campaign certainly had many faults, but on the key point of trying to regain the support of the traditional working class through addressing their economic needs was dead on the money.

And in many areas the Horwath approach was extremely successful. Indeed it has been a long time since the ONDP was the alternative vote to the Conservative in Western Ontario -- it is now.

Winning back the support of voters who have drifted to support the right out of disaffection with the status quo Liberal corruption, and an NDP that failed to address those concerns is in fact the only way the NDP can beat "strategic voting" grid lock.

Everyt time the notorious NDP-hater Martin Regg Cohn writes a column attacking Horwath - her support within the NDP INCREASES. I have a hunch that when all the dust settles she will get a solid vote of confidence at the convention - partly because since the election she has done a lot of address the complaints and partly because NO ONE has ever been able to suggest a single solitary name of anyone who would be a credible successor to her. Usually leadership coups succeed when there is an obvious (better) successor waiting in the wings - in the absence of that I suspect delegates will figure, "better the devil we know than the devil we don't" 

Should Olivia Chow run for Ontario NDP leader if she loses to John Tory in October?

Chow would be a higher-profile leader than Horwath, might have appeal to left of center Liberal voters, and might be more competitive in Toronto with Kathleen Wynne than Horwath.

Lets see a Toronto politician who couldn''t win a Mayors race.  Nice suggestion for your rival.

John Tory became Ontario PC leader after losing the Toronto mayoralty. That being said, I don't see Chow as being at all cut out to be a leader at the provincial level...if Horwath goes the next leader would likely be Catherine Fife

However John Tory lost a mayoral race in 2003 that no one ever expected him to win and he exceeded expectations...he started out polling in single digits and ended up losing to Miller 44%-40% - even though Tory lost he was viewed as having run an effective campaign. I don't recall anyone talking up Barbara Hall as a procincial leader after she got 11% in 2003...and for some reason George Smitherman did not try to succeed McGuinty either.

Debater wrote:

Anyway, what about when Jack Layton ran for NDP leader even though he had lost when he ran for Mayor of Toronto?

There was a 12 year gap between Jack Layton losing the Toronto mayoralty and him running to be leader of the federal NDP and during that time he served several terms on council and became President of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities etc...it took him a long time to reinvent himself after the 1991 mayoral contest. The federal NDP leadership was contested in 1995 and the Ontario NDP leadership was contested in 1996 - Layton did not even consider participating in either of those contests