‘She’s the real deal,’ but this could be her last shot to lead
David Christopherson was a left-wing rookie on Hamilton city council when a young activist spotted him on the street one day. This was in the mid-1980s, and Christopherson had just voted to demolish two low-income housing units to make way for a neighbourhood park. Having grown up in the area, Christopherson knew there was a dearth of green space, and felt the tradeoff was the right call.
The activist disagreed.
“All of a sudden, I hear this woman yelling to get my attention, and — with a full head of steam — making a beeline towards me,” Christopherson recalls.
“She was not pleased at all, saying and letting me know that ‘you’re supposed to be a New Democrat, you’re supposed to care about affordable housing,’ and ‘how dare you?’ and all the things that you should say to an elected person.”
That activist’s name was Andrea Horwath. For Christopherson, his first encounter with the future Ontario NDP leader — and head of the official Opposition at Queen’s Park — was telling in two ways. Her tenacity and passion were obvious, part of the persona that has earned her the moniker the “Steeltown Scrapper,” a nod to her working-class roots in a blue-collar town. But Christopherson also recalls the story because of what happened years later: Horwath remembered the episode, and told him she now understood why he made the decision.
“I’ve been in politics now for three-and-ahalf decades. That doesn’t happen,” he says. “But that’s Andrea; that is exactly what you get with Andrea Horwath. She’s the real deal.”
It’s that combination of fire and experience that New Democrats hope can help finally elevate Horwath into the premier’s office after this spring’s provincial election. At 59, Horwath is spearheading her fourth campaign as Ontario NDP leader, a position she’s held since March 2009. Back then, she predicted it would take at least a decade for the provincial New Democrats to form government again at Queen’s Park, something they’ve only
accomplished once, under Bob Rae in 1990.
Thirteen years later, Horwath and those around her project confidence that — despite lagging behind the Liberals and governing Tories in public opinion polls — the party is primed to make a solid run at power. The New Democrats boast of a well-stocked campaign war chest, thanks to a strong recent stretch of fundraising. They will try to use their official Opposition status, with the second-most seats, to argue that they — not the Liberals — are the true alternative to Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives. And they believe the past two years of pandemic crisis have fostered an appetite for social democracy in the province, setting the table for true-orange policies like expanded health care and increased taxes on the rich.
It all amounts to what Horwath, in a recent interview with the Star, says is a very good chance at — finally — taking power and steering an NDP government.
“Really, I don’t know that the NDP in Ontario has ever been quite in this position before, with quite this strength.”
The last time the provincial New Democrats thought they could win an election was 2018. Polls suggested they had a real shot, but in the end they wound up with 40 seats and Horwath as official Opposition leader — a fair showing by NDP standards, but a loss nonetheless.
Mike Horwath was with his sister on that June evening. He says they watched the early returns in bitter astonishment.
“Our jaws were dropped and it was like, really? Is this the way this is gonna go?” he says. “It was heartbreaking.”
Horwath doesn’t go that far, and says she is proud of the campaign they ran last time around even if she wishes — obviously — that they had won. For her, the last four years as the official Opposition has offered time to gain experience with a relatively large caucus of MPPs — all of whom are also learning on the job and connecting with constituents in a way that could afford them some measure of an incumbent’s advantage.
“We’ve got a lot of things in place for us to really give Ontario the government that they need,” Horwath says.
Horwath was born in Hamilton on Oct. 24, 1962, the daughter of Andrew, an autoworker at the Ford factory in nearby Oakville, and Diane, who cleaned schools at night.
Mike remembers their house in east Hamilton as a hub of neighbourhood activity. Kids would pop in to hang out and Diane would teach them to swim in their backyard pool, an amenity purchased for the family by a relative in the U.S., Mike says.
“It was an open-door policy. We never locked our doors. Everyone was welcome,” says Mike, who took after his father and is an autoworker at the Toyota facility in Woodstock, Ont.
Politics entered Horwath’s world through her father, who dropped union pamphlets on the kitchen table and took the family to the annual United Autoworkers picnics at Crystal Beach in Fort Erie.
“I can remember my father coming home talking about the strike that was possibly coming to his workplace, and what that would mean for our family,” Horwath says.
After graduating in labour studies at McMaster University, Horwath got a job teaching English to immigrant workers, and then worked in a Hamilton legal clinic. The first time her name pops up in the Star archives is in February 1996, when she was quoted as an organizer of a massive protest against Mike Harris’s Progressive Conservative government, which provoked outrage from leftists for program cuts under its so-called “common sense revolution.”
In 1997, Christopherson and other Hamilton New Democrats convinced Horwath to run in the federal election to unseat a local Liberal MP.
While she placed second, the contest set the stage for her to win a city council seat later that year. For the next seven years, she served as a councillor in what Christopherson described as a rough-and-tumble local political scene that once saw councillors fight in the parking lot behind city hall.
“I’m not going to name names, but I watched one councillor lift another one by the throat and lift him off the ground,” he says.
Horwath jumped to provincial politics in 2004, when she won a Hamilton byelection, and arrived at Queen’s Park as one of just eight New Democrat MPPs. Before long, she was one of the most prominent New Democrats at the legislature, and went on to win the leadership on the third ballot in 2009.
We’ve got a lot of things in place for us to really give Ontario the government that they need. ANDREA HORWATH NDP LEADER
Horwath’s roots in working-class Hamilton are an integral part of her political persona, offering her bona fides as an everywoman who loves the Ticats and Blue Jays, and trying new beers, and who understands people who put in long hours to try to make ends meet. It also aligns with the New Democratic trope that it takes courage and grit in the face of hardship to win the progressive policies their party champions.
Top aides — and Horwath herself — say this “fighting” persona stems from Horwath’s genuine sense of outrage over perceived inequities she believes successful governments have failed to address.
“I probably can’t properly communicate to you the level of anger and rage when she sees people being neglected, abused, when the government’s not stepping up,” says Michael Balagus, Horwath’s chief of staff since 2014.
Marie Della Mattia, a veteran New Democratic strategist who is reprising her 2018 role this spring as one of Horwath’s top advisers on the leader’s campaign tour, says this outrage has been most potent with regard to long-term care. Horwath’s mother Diane, who died in 2020, had Alzheimer’s and was cared for in a long-term facility before the COVID-19 tore through such homes in the first and second waves of the pandemic.
“She really felt what a lot of families feel,” Della Mattia says. “It’s just wrong. And we need to fix it.”
In the pursuit of power to make such improvements herself, Horwath has won more seats in every election. But it hasn’t always been a smooth journey. During the 2014 campaign, she was beset with criticism for focusing too much on “populist” pocketbook policies like cuts to small business taxes, which some argued helped the Liberals hoover progressive votes in Kathleen Wynne’s surprise majority government win that year. Horwath had to regain the support of grassroots constituencies that felt she hadn’t campaigned as a true social democrat.
It was notable criticism for someone who is comfortable with the “socialist” label, and Balagus — who joined Horwath’s team as key players departed after that election — says the party is now emphasizing policies that Horwath endorses most enthusiastically, like the creation of a universal pharmacare program and making housing more affordable.
“She wasn’t able to be herself as much as people needed to see,” Balagus says of the 2014 campaign. “If you’re going to ask a party leader to campaign … they better be passionate about what they’re campaigning on.”
A parallel priority is to try and make sure Horwath comes off as unscripted and authentic, a concern the leader raised herself with Balagus about six months ago.
“She says, ‘People tell me sometimes I don’t seem to be myself,’ ” Balagus says, describing how Horwath connects better with voters when she speaks without notes about policies she cares about.
“That is the ticket, when they see ‘Andrea Unplugged,’ ” he says.
But given how long she has been NDP leader, anything short of victory in her fourth campaign will spark questions about Horwath’s future in the job. Asked whether this is her last shot at power, Horwath will only say she is focused on winning votes and that her future is Ontarians’ decision. And that’s really the lot of every politician, she adds with a laugh.
Her father was actually baffled she ever wanted to do it, she says.
“You literally are asking thousands of people not to give you a pink slip … You are actually putting yourself out there to get fired by thousands of people,” she laughs. “That was my dad’s take on it.”
She has one month to convince the province that, after all of these years, she’s still the right person for the job.