Horwath gets green light from fellow NDPers
After leadership review, party unveils its plans to fight climate change
HAMILTON— Ontario New Democrat Leader Andrea Horwath unveiled an “ambitious” plan to fight climate change Saturday as she breezed through a leadership review with 84 per cent support.
The vote at a weekend policy convention followed last June’s election, which saw the NDP jump to second place in the legislature, forming the official opposition to Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives. That was the best showing for New Democrats since the Bob Rae government of the early 1990s and came as the unpopular Liberals were reduced to just seven MPPs, below official party status.
“I’m really thrilled by the response I got,” Horwath told reporters earlier in the day after a well- received speech to about 1,500 delegates outlining her “Green New Democratic Deal” to make Ontario a net-zero emitter of greenhouse gases by 2050.
A28-page discussion paper on the plan borrows the name of the rival Green Party led by Guelph MPP Mike Schreiner, who has been gaining in recent public opinion polls showing the Progressive Conservatives slumping with disenchanted Ford voters moving to his party and the Liberals — not the NDP.
“I’m not going to speculate on specific polls,” Horwath said, maintaining “the mess that Doug Ford is making” in spending cuts and larger class sizes in schools will help her party in the 2022 provincial election.
Horwath told reporters the word “green” was used as “shorthand” for the climate plan, but Schreiner took it as flattery and welcomed the effort, saying it will put increased focus on environmental issues.
“I believe we are seeing the ripple effects of electing just a single Green in Ontario,” he said in a statement.
“I welcome all parties to jump on the green bandwagon so that we have people from across the political spectrum working together … putting planet before politics is what people expect from us.”
The discussion paper sets ambitious goals, such as reducing emissions to at least 50 per cent below 2005 levels by the end of the next decade, with rebates and interest-free loans to homeowners doing retrofits to reduce their carbon dioxide output.
That’s expected to spur the green economy and create an estimated one million jobs.
“The world’s leading climate scientists are telling us that climate change is moving faster than expected,” Horwath told party activists gathered in a downtown convention centre.
“We are feeling the pain of the climate crisis right now. Brutal heat waves, intense wildfires, floodwaters threatening entire communities, tornadoes tearing through neighbourhoods, and hundreds of local species now extinct.”
But there is no costing of the massive program and there are few details on how it would be implemented, aside from mentions of the need for “a combination of new revenue streams, fair carbon pricing, lending and borrowing.”
A 28-page booklet on the plan also notes “action on the climate crisis will require large upfront investments.”
Horwath said that doesn’t necessarily mean taxes on carbon, but added “we are going to have that difficult conversation” as the plan is fine-tuned with input from party members, scientists and industry representatives.
“I’m not going to pick numbers out of the air,” she said on a final cost for the program, which will be laid out before the next election in 2022.
“We are just at the beginning of putting our plan together,” she said. “We have some of the basic tenets in our document.”
Ford’s PCs axed the previous Liberal government’s carbon cap-and-trade program, which Horwath has repeatedly slammed as a “backward” move.
Horwath’s climate change plan also promises “the largest building retrofit program in the world” if New Democrats win the next provincial election.
She urged supporters from across the province to redouble their efforts to grow the party in hopes of taking power in 2022 with Ford sliding in the polls in the wake of his budget cuts and Liberals focused on their own leadership race with a convention to be held March 7.
“The official opposition is parents with children. It’s students. It’s student unions. It’s working people and the great unions of this province,” Horwath said.
“It’s everyone who is under attack by this government. We are all the official opposition. We are the resistance,” she added to cheers from the crowd and chants of “NDP, NDP.” On Sunday, federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh will present his party’s plan for the Oct. 21 federal election before delegates head home to celebrate Father’s Day.