Easy win for Horwath at home
Andrea Horwath may have been fighting to gain NDP seats in key ridings across the province — logging some 8,500 kilometres on her bus during the election campaign — but at home in Hamilton Centre it w was one easy battle.
The NDP leader, who has represented the Hamilton area since 2004, won the riding in 2014 with more than half of all votes cast, and Thursday night was ww quickly declared the win- ner with an even higher margin of victory.
Horwath — who repeated her party’s “change for the better” mantra throughout the campaign — said she tried to keep things positive, focusing on her party’s detailed platform that was ww based on what she’d been hearing from Ontarians over the past four years.
“It’s energizing,” meeting with voters, she told the Star about a week ww after hitting the campaign trail, after being approached by ayoung mother in Scarborough who ww has a job but still needs to go to the food bank to feed her children.
“That’s the stuff that keeps you going,” Horwath added. “That when you know your plan is going to help young women ww like that, to build a bet- ter life for her kids.”
Horwath ran a well- organized campaign, and picked up the pace as the NDP’s polling numbers surged. This week, she had 12 events on one day alone, and did another sweep of southwestern ww Ontario and Kitche- ner, where her party hoped to make gains.
Her key messages were ending “hallway medicine,” promising immediate funding for hospitals and front- line workers, universal pharmacare and dental care for those who aren’t already covered with workplace plans, as well as returning Hydro One back to public hands.
Horwath’s first campaign stop was at the Regent Park Community mm Health Clinic in Toron- to’s inner city, and she later visited Brampton twice to announce the NDP pledge for funding for a hospital and expansion of another.
“Our health care is not where it should be,” Horwath said many times, citing examples of patients treated in hallways — even one who spent almost two weeks in a hospital bed crammed into a washroom.
At all of the stops — many during the workday — she was greeting by cheering crowds, and sometimes expressed surprise at the turnout. Her younger brother Michael joined her when she visited his Woodstock- area riding.
The NDP candidate in Waterloo, Catherine Fife, told the Star during a campaign stop in Kitchener that she felt Horwath ww “made a genuine appeal to t the people of Ontario — the Lib- erals who feel disenfranchised, and a the Progressive Conserva- tives who do not identify with ( (( PC Leader) Doug Ford poli- tics.”
Ford repeatedly told his supporters that an NDP government would be a “disaster” for the economy, and that Horwath’s ww team included “radical” candidates.
Horwath was also criticized during dd the campaign for a $ 1.4 billion budget mistake, as well as for saying an NDP government would not use back- towork legislation to end any strikes, including the threemonth old strike at York University.