Ontario NDP Leadership VI - the aftermath

I saw how the "critical coverage" jumped on that adjust line. Couldn't resist playing with it a bit here (I think this link works):

 www.globeandmail.com/blogs/Wdouglasbell0909/

One thing that is clear from the comments.  The NDP never seems to back up their leader or have attack dogs  like the Conservatives and Liberals.  Will she be fighting alone?  Tough is one thing, fighting alone is another.

I'd really like to know who Kormos was speaking about.

In the context of the article I think he was talking about party staff rather than MPPs.

Possibly himself.

I hope not - since he does what he does pretty well - but I will say if wasn't referring to himself he lacks a sense of humour.

Brian Topp, nice to see you here on rabble (and in the regional threads!) Very astute punditry. It's too bad they don't give you your own Globe and Mail blog. They've handed space to three Liberals and three Tories already - and you have better analysis than all of them.

I'd like to know the same thing.... at times like these, we do need new faces but we also need the older experienced faces too who have been there to help Andrea lead the way

Who will be deputy leader? Peter Tabuns or Gilles Bisson?

After the last federal election, the federal NDP had two deputy leaders, Tom Mulcair and Libby Davies. Could that be the model? A northern deputy and a Toronto deputy?

But perhaps that's unfair to Tabuns. Just as Jack Layton loved to say "I'm not from Toronto, I'm from Montreal," so Peter Tabuns liked to say "I'm the child of Hamilton immigrants too, just like Andrea." Indeed that's true.

His father was from Latvia. A little googling will find another Peter Tabuns, a parliamentarian for the nationalist party For Fatherland and Freedom, saying that former communists who were against Latvia's independence cannot be allowed to stand for parliament because "those people won't change. They are communists to the bone."

Peter has had trouble with women opponents for years. In 1997 he lost his council seat with about 200 fewer votes than his sister NDP councillor Pam McConnell. In 2004 he lost to Maria Minna. And in 2009 he loses to Andrea Horwath.

He also went head to head with a woman, widely considered to be the party's choice, for his nomination in Toronto-Danforth.

In the last provincial election he took on Joyce Rowlands and a liberal machine desperate to re-establish a presence in the east end.

 So, the suggestion he's had problems with "women opponents for years" is just plain wrong . I'm not sure what your Latvian google search on someone with the same name has to do with the MPP for Toronto-Danforth.

 I do know this; campaign is over and we have a new Leader. Tabuns has made it clear the new Leader will have his full and loyal support. Almost all his supporters have echoed the same sentiment.

Time to move on.

I agree.  It is not like there was an enormous amount of light between what any of the candidates were saying on 99% of the issues.  I look forward, as I am sure Andrea and others do to, to Peter's continued leadership on green economic issues.  It is an important perspective and one I expect we all agree on.

This was Andrea's speech to convention. I have a minor conflict of interest in saying that it was a kickass speech (I was not the primary writer, but I tinkered with it and can recognize some of my lines in the final version). As good as the speech was, her delivery of it was even better. It was a good pitch, and she hit it out of the park.

Sisters and brothers; friends and allies; workers and students, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters; thank you.

There’s no place in the world I’d rather be than here in this room with you.

Because I believe that the people in this room hold the seeds of Ontario’s future.

Great change that shaped our province started in rooms like this.

Rooms filled with people like us decided that every child would have an education, decided that working people would make a living wage, decided that no one would have to choose between health care for their child and a roof over their head.

This is a room filled with real people.

We work in hospitals and nursing homes, factories and pulp mills, office towers and home offices.

We are students and we are retirees and we are people with differing abilities and contributions to make.

But we all came here because we are committed to change.

We may not be rich but we are powerful.

We’re not in this for ourselves.

We’re here because we believe in building a better world.

You can knock us down, you can try and ignore us, you can repeatedly write our political obituary.

But the people in this room, and the people joining us from home, are the kind of people who will keep going. We won’t be ignored, and every time you knock us down we’ll get back up again.

Because we’re New Democrats.

And like every Ontarian, we are experiencing change.

Not one week ago, when my team first prepared the video you just saw, the skyline view of the steel mills from the Harbour, representing Hamilton also represented work. 

Now, less than a week later, the same skyline view represents people out of work. 

Those idled mills represent an economy ripped apart by savage neoliberalism. 

The silent plants represent an Ontario economy with a gutted industrial base.

Those mills represent steel no longer made in Hamilton. 

But they also represent cars and vans no longer made in Oshawa and Windsor. 

They represent pulp mills no longer open for business in Kenora. 

They represent a forestry sector devastated in Timmins, a mining sector grinding to a halt in Sudbury.

We are here in Hamilton – but when we look, we see Ontario.

I was a CAW brat and I went to university because my father had a good job in the auto sector. 

I, Andrea Horwath, would not be here at this podium today, if it wasn’t for that well paid, union job.

This crisis, this economic crisis, this social crisis touches all of us.

When plants close, when good jobs disappear – I ask you, how many children are yanked from their future podiums?

When jobs are scarce, when they don’t have benefits, when they don’t pay well, how many women and men descend into despair?

Lorsque les emplois sont rares, quand ils n'ont pas les avantages, quand ils ne paient pas bien, combien de femmes et les hommes descendent dans le désespoir?

When we lose child care spaces and women lose their wages on the few, expensive child care spaces out there, how many families become working poor?

We used to ask ourselves, do we say “working families” or do we say “middle class” in our literature. 

Well, look at the difference one year makes. 

The middle class is disappearing and the working class is largely unemployed or underemployed.

We could just accept this. 

We could take it as it is and move on. 

We could adjust.

That’s what the Liberals and Conservatives say.  They say – we’ll have to adjust. 

Habituez-vous.

Adjust to what?

Adjust to the growing unemployment lines? 

Adjust to the growing lines at food banks? 

Adjust to welfare and poverty? 

Habituez-vous à l'aide sociale et la pauvreté?

Adjust to this growing discrepancy with a poor working class and a non-existent middle class? 

Adjust so that those that stole our money and closed down our workplaces
can get more of our money with no strings attached?

We can’t adjust.  We won’t adjust.  We refuse to adjust.

I’ll tell you what we will do.

We’ll invest in ourselves, in our workforce. 

Our investment, our public dollars, will come with strings attached. 

Attached to good jobs that remain right here.

We’ll demand an equity stake.

It’s our money and it will be the last time, thieves will run away with it. 

Our money will stay in Ontario and it will make Ontario work.

We’ll re-industrialize our province with smart investments, with targeted investments in the products of the future. 

We will build Light Rail systems and green cars for Ontario and beyond. 

With the iron from Sudbury, we’ll make steel in Hamilton, we’ll build light rail cars in Thunder Bay. 

We will make green cars in Oshawa and Windsor.  We will produce once again.

We’ll buy our own products.   We will buy locally. 

We will buy farm products grown in Ontario, grown less than 3 kms from here.

We will put homemade LRT systems in our cities, in Ottawa, in Toronto, in Hamilton. 

We will invest in our work by making Ontario the transit hub of North America.

We’ll make every job a good job. 

Nous allons assurer que chaque emplois est un bon employs.

We will make sure that minimum wage is a livable wage.  We will get rid of scab labour and return to card based certification in Ontario. 

We will make sure that part-time workers, and temporary workers, cultural workers and migrant workers get treated like the real workers they are. 

We will bring our workforce back to health.

We will stop eating away at our public system.  Instead of privatizing, we will expand our public system. 

I say let’s make child care public and let’s make post-secondary education public.  

Because our economic health and our social health are intertwined.

The neo-liberal experiment has imploded and it has become quite obvious, that there is no invisible hand, that the invisible hand never existed and that we should have never trusted invisible hands to take care of us.

We won’t accept this disaster, we won’t adjust to the growing misery.  We will change.

We’ll think for ourselves and take care of ourselves, and we won’t keep trusting a few, greedy individuals to take care of us.

I am a community organizer and the one true measure of an organizer
is that she trusts people.  And I do.

Make no mistake, it’s not a blind trust…

I have seen what people can accomplish together. 

When we organized the Days of Action, thousands and thousands of Ontarians came together. 

And now, thousands of Ontarians can come together again.

That is why, when I think about our climate crisis and the road ahead,
I think like an organizer.

I believe people want a cleaner environment  and trust that they will make changes in their lives to achieve it. 

We must help them by making environmental solutions affordable.

If we make environmentalism affordable with up front loans for retrofitting houses, for installing solar panels and geo-thermal pumps, we will help every family harness energy.

New Democrats do not believe in making environmental solutions unaffordable. 

That’s for Greens and for Liberals.

We, New Democrats, won’t check our socialism at the door when it comes to building a better future.   Let’s do for the environment today, what we did for the health 50 years ago.  We can make environmentalism universal and affordable.

Two years from now, the people of Ontario will go to the polls.

We owe them a real choice.

We owe them a reason to vote NDP.

If we want to make change in Ontario we have to be ready to change ourselves.

We have to set internal goals that seem impossible and then we have to make them real:

- We must double our party membership by 2011

- We must reflect the face of Ontario – with many more women, young people, and people from the many diverse communities of our province among our ranks.

- Ce n'est pas quelque chose que nous pouvons faire juste avant les elections.

- We must work in communities like organizers, by listening and working together on the issues that are relevant to real people like us. 

- Let’s once and for all get serious about being truly representative.

We must prepare ourselves to win elections
 
- by putting regional organizers on the ground,
 
- by changing the financial relationship between ridings and the central party,
 
- by making riding associations vibrant once again.
 
- I will spend half of my time in those ridings across Ontario

– making sure we give Ontarians a reason to vote NDP

New Democrats – it’s time to believe in ourselves again.

Together, we can make this province a better place, a fairer place, a place where the average working woman gets the childcare she needs and Dalton McGuinty gets the pink slip he deserves.

That’s what we owe the people of Ontario in 2011.

I have been at Queen’s Park long enough to know things at Queen’s Park aren’t working.

It’s time for new voices.

Il est temps pour des voix plus jeunes.

It’s time for different faces.

It’s time for change.

It’s time for New Democrats.

In 2011, New Democrats will bring change to Queen’s Park.

And I am just the woman to do it!

It’s time! 

I've heard some ridiculous things on this forum, but this has to be at the top of my list for the most ridiculous!

 An interesting regional analysis of Ontario politics by Andrew Steele.

Thought I would share it here:

Building blocks and shifting seats

Did the NDP make the right choice? Only time will tell I suppose.

Steele's analysis is pretty spurious.

- First off, he describes Horwath's strategy as targeting "industrial/northern" ridings and then, promptly, contradicts himself by citing, as examples, the ridings of Parkdale/High Park and York South Weston - both located in the 416, urban, with little manufacturing to speak of. 

- Second, he argues that Tabuns strategy was to bring Greens onside and through that alliance win in urban ridings like Etobicoke Lakeshore and Scarborough Southwest. Except, the Greens don't do particularly well in these ridings (in both ridings the Green vote was below their provincial total). Moreover, even if every Green voter switched to the NDP we'd still be 10,000 votes behind the victor in these two ridings. When you look at the urban ridings where we're most likely to grow in the future you can see even more clearly that winning Green support doesn't actually help us all that much. In York South Weston, York West, Etobicoke North, Etobicoke Centre, all of the five Scarborough ridings, London Fanshawe, Windsor West, etc. the Green vote was BELOW the Greens average. In York South Weston they got their lowest vote in the province. In other words, these are ridings where the Green message isn't working. Ottawa Centre and Davenport are noteworthy exceptions - but, contrary to what Steele suggests, these are the "low-hanging fruit".

- Steele's analysis falls apart by its own criteria but it's more deeply flawed because it's so reductive. He assumes that Andrea, because she cares about manufacturing jobs in Hamilton, will have no appeal to a struggling family in downtown Toronto. He assumes that because she beat an environmentalist for the leadership she's now alienated environmentalists. It's simplistic thinking.

Ironically, it's under urbanite Jack Layton that the federal NDP's reaped the most industrial/Northern fruit versus an "urban strategy" falling bittersweet and short.  But what's also being conveniently overlooked by Steele is that Hamilton Centre is something of a dual-identity riding: while it's definitely got the blue-collar Steeltown element, it also contains the heart of Hamilton's "Tabuns/Prue" type constituency--and that's the part where David Christopherson held his provincial base, as well as where Horwath ran federally and sat municipally.  (Maybe call it a triple-identity riding, if you want to factor in the suburbia atop the Mountain--though that's where the NDP does least well.)  So if you want to know how Horwath was able to assemble a "grand coalition" without, in the end, fatally alienating the urbs, there you have it--and as such, when it comes to outreach potential, she's even more blessed than Hampton.

As far as Steele's "united green under Tabuns" theory goes: while the Green vote may be dispersed, the character of said vote isn't, and Tabuns, I feel, would still have come across as too fatally "urban" for the idiosyncratic nature of the rural Green base.  And I'm not knocking said base on "the NDP wouldn't want them anyway" grounds, either; just that it would take a different kind of leadership spirit with more rural populist pull (Charlie Angus?!?) to bring that magic confluence together...

My apologies. I had been wondering for some time what kind of name Tabuns was, and finally found time to find out. In the process of finding out that his father was from Latvia, a fact of no particular significance, I tripped over a reference to a Peter Tabuns MP in Latvia, which I thought was funny, and I thought babblers might find the contrast between the two amusing. If it came out sounding like a slam at our Peter Tabuns, I'm sorry.

A great photo array featuring some of the images and sounds of convention

She will NOT be fighting alone..... that I can guarantee.

http://www.rabble.ca/comment/996291/Lord-Palmerston

I was trying to wade through all of those threads on the Catholic Schools Question when I came across something that Unionist said that I really wanted to address.

In the link I put on the top of this entry, unionist was pointing out the failures of the Ontario NDP when it actually had a chance to govern.  I agree with the criticisms that unionist has leveled here, but I'd like to point out that the Ontario NDP has recently changed it's leader and had some positive turnover on the council.

See, Andrea Horwath does not have any connection to the major sellouts that have tarnished the Ontario NDP's name.  Also, when I compare Andrea Horwath to Bob Rae, I see two completely different people.  When it comes to Horwath, I suppose she's sold out more than a few times in her life, but I don't think she is the same breed of anti-working class, likes to hear the sound of her/his voice type of person like Rae is.  I also tend to think that Horwath will likely not be so easily broken by the intimidation that comes from Bay st. as she steps closer to the halls of power.  I could be dead wrong on that one, but I'm operating on a leap of faith here and I really want to believe that we've made a decent choice in Horwath.  I mean, don't get me wrong, she's a politician and all, it's just that I really don't think that a Horwath led Ontario NDP government would have the same sort of contempt for working people that Bob Rae's government had when he and his government made assault after assault on the working class in order to ensure that Ontario's slow transition to a backwater 3rd world province went swimmingly well for the ruling class.

Also, another thing to consider is that Andrea has inherited a party which is slowly turning over the last reminants from the Rae era and is starting to get younger.  I'm no longer able to be considered youth within the NDP anymore, but I was with the youth for the entire weekend of the convention and if there is one thing that was really obvious, it was that there were a lot of new young faces there.

These new young people are starting to grow into positions of authority in the party and their only connection to the sins of our past are a profound sense of regret and shame.  Being as I now call many of these folks friend, I'm going to take a leap of faith on them and say that they are up for the challenge of rebuilding the public's trust in the social democratic values that we recently voted to hold on to by voting for Andrea Horwath.

So does it concern anyone else that not even half the membership participated in the leadership vote?

If the ONDP got half their membership to cast ballots, they should give themselves a round of applause. 

I doubt the ONDP had 30,000 members demanding a OMOV system. Like other parties, the membership comes interested in an election when its for the big show. Thus if half are there to vote for and support a New leader, then you are 50% in the bag.

Parties which use OMOV create election fatigue. There always seems to be an election going on, and people tune out.

What I find interesting is that people are now "Tuning in" to the New Ontario Leader, and they are not party members.

Makes for interesting coffee shop talk, because most people think McGuinty is useless.  And who are they talking about? The new NDP leader.

That kind of interest is powerful and suggests possible growth for the NDP.

Most everything unionist has to say about our first and only NDP government in Ontario of 1990-95 is anywhere from misleading and only slightly innacurate to completely false. Sometimes people can be off the mark on occasion, but unionist is entirely consistent in this regard. And if you attempt to defend the truth from politically undeclared posters like him, you are automatically labelled an uncompromising dyed in the wool NDP supporter.  He doesnt even live in Ontario.

So who is on the party's new executive?

new exec posted here http://ontariondp.com/executive/