[markbarbera]

As written last week in the Toronto Star:

Remember Andrea Horwath?

She was the woman who would be premier, poised to lead the NDP to power by leapfrogging past the governing Liberals — ideologically and electorally — in June’s provincial vote.

Now, many in Ontario’s New Democratic Party have forgotten that fantasy. And want to purge any memory of the leader who peddled that dream, along with her team.

Next weekend, they will be pushing back against the hardball tactics that allowed Horwath and her henchmen — and henchwomen — to amass unprecedented power in the leader’s office. Ahead of a formal leadership review scheduled for November, Horwath will face the NDP’s provincial council this coming Saturday and Sunday to explain her controversial tactics — before, during and after the election.

“Andrea is fighting for her life,” says one long-time party worker who has sat in on the party’s internal machinations in recent months.
“Among a very large section of the activist base there is little more than contempt for her,” said the NDP loyalist, who requested confidentiality to speak candidly about the manoeuvres.

It’s not just Horwath’s public policy contortions in mid-campaign. Her internal distortions of the party’s procedures before the election will also be debated by the party’s decision makers, many of them still furious over what they call an extra-constitutional manoeuvre by Horwath’s team.

By sidelining the grassroots — and their representatives in the party’s elected council structure — Horwath cobbled together a hodgepodge campaign platform that was unrecognizable to most New Democrats in the last election: More centrist than the Liberals, out-Torying the Tories, she lurched rightward without first securing the support of her own party.

The rebellion is gathering momentum not just in Toronto, where the party was routed, but across Northern Ontario and the rest of the province. Horwath also faces unrest across most of the influential union movement after she ignored pleas to support progressive measures in the last Liberal budget, risked an anti-labour Tory majority, and bizarrely dropped her support for an Ontario pension plan.

Next November, delegates will hear Horwath plead her case. Next weekend, however, the party’s top council will first wrangle over how those delegates will be chosen, limiting the potential for Horwath’s allies to rig the vote by stacking the convention.

See the entire article here