The Ontario NDP elected a new leader this past weekend, although one would never know it from most of the Toronto media. The Globe and Mail did not consider the story worthy of news coverage and the only mention today is in an opinion piece by the provincial politics columnist. Andrea Horwath is hardly a household name. I consider myself better versed in provincial affairs than about 99% of the population and I didn't even recall her name as one of the candidates. Today I learn she comes to us from Hamilton and her claim to fame is that she organised some demonstrations against the Mike Harris government back in the last century.
Younger than the others and the only woman in the race, Horwath may have been distinct from the other candidates. The NDP shouldn’t be ordering drapes for the Premier’s Office anytime soon though. All I know about her is from Murray Campbell’s column, but it’s not inspiring. If she thinks the NDP will attract sufficient followers to pay off a $3.0 million debt, fend off a challenge by the Green Party and lift itself above support in the low-teens, she had better come up with a better idea than resurrecting heavy industrial manufacturing in Ontario. In case she didn’t notice, being too preoccupied with her leadership campaign, half of her Hamilton’s steel industry closed last week while the industry’s major customer - the auto sector - is on the verge of bankruptcy. Maybe the Steelworkers and Autoworkers unions think they have a future, but it’s an illusion not shared the vast majority of Ontarians.
The federal and provincial governments will prop-up the auto industry temporarily to help ease Ontario’s way through the current recession and retain a modicum of what was once the engine of the economy, but they are not “betting the future” on manufacturing. Dr Richard Florida, of the University of Toronto, has advised the Ontario government that it’s time to start building a post-industrial economy. North America’s rust-belt/steel-industry/auto-manufacturing cities are the history of the past century. Knowledge, research and environmental sustainability are this century, for those cities and regions which will survive and prosper.
With a leader clinging to the past, the Ontario NDP will continue to slip into oblivion. It’s not just that Horwath is a complete unknown and that the party lacks the resources to introduce and market her to the electorate. Short of a total reversal in what she appears to be advocating, there is nothing that will appeal to the 84% of the electorate that rejected the NDP’s platform in 2007.
