Editor's note: This is the final installment of a four-part rabble.ca series featuring interviews with each of the ONDP leadership candidates. The new leader will be decided in convention this weekend, March 6-8.

Michael Prue's campaign will soar or plummet on the back of the Separate School funding issue. He has made the issue a central component of the campaign - but in a move which can be seen either as nuanced or equivocating, he refused to formally state that he personally supports amalgamating the public and separate systems and only says that the party should debate it at convention.

Gilles Bisson is a centrist social democrat who argues that the NDP should include law and order issues as a main plank and take a collaborative attitude to business, including targeted corporate tax cuts to stimulate research and development and accepting donations from corporations. He would thus drop the NDP's current policy of not accepting donations from big business.

"I think it limits us ... the corporate sector understands as I understand, as a citizen, that democracy costs money and everybody has to participate ... If they're prepared to give me money why not take it?"

Peter Tabuns is widely seen as the favourite to win the Ontario NDP leadership. However, the race has tightened during the long campaign to choose Howard Hampton's successor and Tabuns, as frontrunner, has been the in the crosshairs of the other three candidates.

Tabuns' consistent focus, as the policy wonk of the leadership quartet, has been on party policy with the New Energy Economy as the centrepiece. Tabuns' vision, based on the American "Blue-Green alliance" of labour unions and environmentalists, is to create jobs and reverse the decline of the manufacturing sector through a massive program of investment in the renewable energy sector that would "reshape the economy and reshape our relationship with the environment."

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Editor's Note: This is the first of four feature interviews with the leadership candidates for the Ontario New Democratic Party.

With less than two weeks to go before the March 6-8 Ontario NDP Leadership Convention, Hamilton Centre MPP Andrea Horwath has emerged as having a serious shot at becoming party leader.