NDP’s Horwath brings party’s message to Ottawa
Ontarians don’t have to answer 15 years of disappointing Liberal government with anger, New Democratic Party Leader Andrea Horwath told party loyalists in Ottawa on Sunday morning.
“People don’t have to keep switching between Liberals and conservatives,” she said, rallying the troops in an overstuffed, sweltering room at the Glebe’s Abbotsford House seniors’ centre. “We have been told to settle for so long. After 25 years of Liberals and Conservatives at the helm, families are not better off, families have not been able to get ahead. Well, we are going to change that, my friends.”
Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne and Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford lightened their schedules for the Victoria Day weekend. Horwath spent Saturday in Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie, then began Sunday in Ottawa before heading to events in Kingston, Napanee and Peterborough.
Mostly, she’s spending time in Liberal ridings she’s hoping her candidates can grab, setting herself up as the warmer, kinder option for voters ready to turf the Liberals but uneasy about Doug Ford’s aggressive populism.
At Abbotsford House, Horwath trumpeted her promises to boost health-care funding by billions of dollars, between budget boosts for hospitals, nursing homes and homecare services, and fired off Ottawa-specific numbers — 400 layoffs over the years at Ottawa hospitals, waiting lists 3,000 names long for personal-support workers to help frail people stay in their homes, 37,000 hours of paramedic time lost to delayed transfers of patients into overcrowded emergency rooms.
“I’m here to say it doesn’t have to be this way,” she said, and her crowd of sign-waving, orangeshirt-wearing supporters cheered.
A newly released poll from Abacus Research Sunday showed her New Democrats just one point behind the Tories, with 34 per cent support to the PCs’ 35. That’s a somewhat closer race than other pollsters have found, but most see support moving in the NDP’s direction.
It’s made Horwath and the New Democrats a big target. The Tories need to keep the NDP down to maintain their own lead; the Liberals need to claw their way past the NDP even to be the official opposition in the next provincial parliament, let alone hope to stay in power. And they’ve committed errors that happen when you’re used to being in third place.
As first reported here, the party’s detailed platform subtracted a $700-million “reserve” from the deficit the NDP expect they’d run when the amount should have been added.
“It was a mistake. It was a mistake. We missed it,” she said in an interview after the rally. “It was just a straight-up mistake.”
The government will spend at least $4 billion more than it takes in this year, if the New Democrats win, not the $3.3 billion the platform says. They already knew they’d have to borrow money, Horwath said, and they’ll borrow more. The plan still includes “a trajectory toward balance,” it’ll just take longer to reach.
They handed out a paper copy of Horwath’s Ottawa material that neglected to substitute “Eastern Ontario” for “Northern Ontario.” Oops.
The New Democrats also had to contend with one candidate who’d once posted to social media that she doesn’t think much of Remembrance Day poppies, and another (Joel Harden of Ottawa Centre, their single best shot at electing an MPP here) saying in a debate last week that he’d like to merge public and Catholic school boards — a personal view, he stressed, not party policy, but enough for the Liberals to accuse the New Democrats of harbouring candidates with secret personal agendas.
The NDP is diverse, Horwath said, and that counts for something. “Our seats of government don’t necessarily reflect the communities that they purport to represent, or have a leadership role with,” she said. They’ve tried to attract candidates who might not be, say, middle-aged white lawyers, who are polished and comfortable with power. “You also need people that have lived experience in other ways, that make the discussion around the caucus table or the cabinet table one that’s taking into consideration the realities that people face, from all kinds of perspectives.”
In some areas, the NDP platform is a lot like the other two major parties’: They all promise better hospital care, more nursing-home spaces, better schools. The details vary but the gist is the same. On other subjects, it’s an outlier.
The New Democrats would make Ontario a “sanctuary province” for people who didn’t come here legally, for instance, so public services would be open to everyone regardless of their citizenship status. Practically, Horwath said, that would mean eliminating the three-month waiting period for public health coverage. Show up at an Ontario hospital and your treatment’s free, she said.
“It’s a basic humanitarian piece,” she said. “It’s a basic value that I think the vast majority of Canadians hold, that human beings are human beings and we shouldn’t withhold the necessities of life from anybody.”
Human beings are human beings and we shouldn’t withhold the necessities of life from anybody.
Less significantly, a Horwathled government would talk to municipal governments about letting non-citizens vote in local elections.
They’d also regulate gasoline prices. Not with government price-fixing, precisely, but by pegging prices once a week, so they’d at least be predictable. The details of how this would work occupied a major percentage of Horwath’s time for reporters’ questions as the Abbotsford House rally wrapped. How would this work, exactly? Would prices be set the same in Schreiber, Smiths Falls and London?
“We’ll look at the results of the other jurisdictions — there’s some in the States, there’s some here in Canada — and take the best practices from their experiences,” she said. The point is that it’s just not fair for people to pay more for gasoline when a long weekend is coming and the government should do something about it.
In this, the New Democrats’ thinking has some things in common with the Tories: Life costs too much, voters want it to cost less, and by gum we’re going to give them what they want. Ford and the PCs’ approach is mostly tax cuts; the NDP promises better government services and stronger regulation of things the government doesn’t do directly.
One on one, Horwath admitted to worries about turning the NDP’s “people-centred” values into working policies.
“I trust the Ontario public service to be non-partisan and do their jobs and all of that, but watching some of the failures of the Liberals in implementation of some of their plans, I worry about that,” she said. “I worry about making sure that the best intentions that we have, that do actually speak to and solve the concerns that families are talking about, that the implementation is such that makes the change that we want to see and that people have voted for.”