Horwath and fellow ONDP caucus "resistance" fighters to attend event by a real estate lobby group that celebrated the end of rent control

Fresh off of her appearance at an Ontario Chamber of Commerce event mere days after that group had celebrated successfully lobbying the reactionary Ford government to rip up Bill 148, worker's rights and the $15 minimum wage, Andrea Horwath, leader of the opposition and alleged anti-Ford "resistance" is at it again.

This time she joins fellow resistance fighters ONDP Deputy Leader Sara Singh and Parkdale-High Park MPP  Bhutila Karpoche at the Ontario Real Estate Association's (OREA) Political Affairs Conference in Toronto November 26.

OREA is the political lobby group of real estate brokers and the province's real estate boards and their "keynote speakers" at this wonderful event are Doug Ford, Stephen Harper and Canada's Ambassador to the US.

OREA's CEO is also Tim Hudak, the former leader of the Ontario Conservatives, who pledged to fire 100,000 civil servants and introduce vicious austerity in 2014.

Have any doubt about where OREA stands? Well, they like Ford dumping rent control:

The Ford Government committed to increase rental housing supply by exempting new units from rent control. OREA advocated for this change because increased rental supply will be good news for renters looking for more choice in the market as well as mom and pop investors who work with Ontario REALTORS® in achieving financial security for their family.

Is Horwath a "keynote speaker"? Of course not.

But she will be there showing the province's real estate agents and companies just how respectable and managerial the NDP intends to be and making her resistance appearance in front of a group that is celebrating the gutting of tenant protections during a housing crisis.

The ONDP keeps telling people exactly what it is. Perhaps it is time to start listening.

See also: NDP's Horwath appears at Ontario Chamber of Commerce event mere days after the gutting of rights of workers

The Kathleen Wynne catastrophe

As 2016 draws to a close, I think it is safe to say that we are seeing a genuine catastrophe unfolding in Ontario.

Seldom has a province had a government so singularly ineffective, seemingly corrupt, and astoundingly tone deaf and hypocritical. It is almost as if Kathleen Wynne and her cabal are actually intent on handing the reigns of office over to the deeply odious Patrick Brown.

Wynne, as you may recall, was elected to power with a totally unanticipated and unexpected majority government just a couple of short years ago. Pledging to be the "social justice premier" she was greatly aided in her path to victory by staggeringly awful campaigns from both the Conservatives and the NDP.

The Conservatives under former leader and right wing ideologue Tim Hudak launched their campaign by promising to fire 100,000 people (as part of his 'job creation' plan!...seriously) and then rolling out an austerity vision that was an overt assault on students, the middle-class, seniors and many others.

To say that this turned out to be politically unwise would be an understatement.

Meanwhile, the NDP under Horwath went out of their way to alienate their traditional supporters and voters in the crucial Toronto region in a deeply misguided attempt to ape right wing populism. It did not end well for the party and nor did it deserve to.

Their strategy was so bankrupt that they went on to lose a by-election to the Wynne Liberals in Sudbury -- a seat they had actually won in the general --  just a few short months later despite the fact that the Liberal campaign in this case was shown to be deeply ethically challenged prior to election day.

Yet, in spite of this auspicious start, Wynne's now stands, justly, as one of the most unpopular governments in Canadian history.

There are many reasons for this.

Far from being a "social justice premier" Wynne has made the pretension into a sick farce as Ontario's poverty gap continues to grow, as little is being done to confront the cruelty of inhuman social assistance and disability rates, as Ontario's minimum wage remains a poverty wage and as the Liberals try to deflect this grotesque reality by endless committees and consultations and distractions such as the idea of a deeply problematic "basic income" that may come someday once all the "experts" have discussed it for a few years.

Her administration has been undermined by its inability to contain hydro rates and the constant clouds of corruption scandals that hover over it. It is also mired in a deep fatigue flowing from the Liberals having governed since 2003. While there have been a few accomplishments -- such as full day kindergarten -- there have been far more cases where the substance, if not the tone, of the Harris years seems to have simply carried on after having been coated with a supremely thin layer of red gloss.

Even in areas where there was at least rhetorically genuine promise, such as transit, the Liberals have presided over an endless series of dead ends and detours that, at the moment, mean that people in cities like Toronto have seen very little to show for what "progressives" are allegedly supposed to deliver on after well over a decade in office.

Wynne and her crew come off as not simply incompetent, which is bad enough, but also as ultimately indifferent, which is even worse. They are quickly shaping up as perfectly symbolic of the fundamental malaise that is gripping liberalism -- as well as its now uncomfortably close cousin social democracy -- internationally and that is so directly contributing to the rise of the hard right. 

As we are now into the second half of her mandate, Wynne looks near certain to lose the next election, and lose it very badly, to a Progressive Conservative Party led by Patrick Brown that has, at least so far, rather surprisingly tried to learn at least some of the lessons from its 2014 debacle.

Brown, who ran as the right wing candidate for his party's leadership, has done a serious about face and has sought to moderate his party's tone on a range of issues, most especially socially conservative ones.

Whether or not leftists find this convincing (which I most certainly do not) is irrelevant as Brown is not aiming his dog and pony show at us but rather at the soft right flank of the Liberal Party's voters. He seeks to portray himself as a gentler type of Tory who will not change course too much but rather just enough to right the ship fiscally.

Brown, in reality, is an incredible reactionary who leads a coalition of demented neo-libertarian free-market fundamentalists and dangerous religious zealots. But he need only keep the more strident voices at least somewhat in check. In case one thinks this unlikely, Haper did exactly this and ended up as the Canadian Prime Minister for nearly a decade.

Brown's chances are also aided by the utter inanity of the ONDP's ongoing strategy to alienate as much of Toronto as they can on their way to another few years of total irrelevance. One has to assume that their goal must be to simply try to get more seats than the Liberals when Wynne's government collapses, because unlike their Conservative counterparts they have learned nothing from 2014.

Ironically for a party that sneers at leftists and claims that its goal is 'power', the ONDP rewarded Horwath for her fiasco campaign by reaffirming her as their leader after the election (with a higher approval vote no less!) and their overall approach has barely shifted at all.

That this is foolhardy should be obvious to all but the most dim of 'strategists'. That somehow it is not to the ONDP braintrust speaks volumes. This unfortunate confluence of opportunism and idiocy is truly ill-timed.

While two years is an incredibly long time in politics, at present the Conservatives seem to be well on their way to cruise to a massive and perhaps historic majority.

And the empty and amoral cynicism of  bankrupt liberalism and social democracy will deliver yet another reactionary government that will be profoundly harmful to civil society, workers, people living in poverty and racialized and marginalized communities. A government that, in conjunction with the rise of similar administrations continent wide, will push the terms and frames of reference of our political 'debate' and discourse ever further to the right.

See also: Ontario's poverty gap puts the lie to Wynne's 'social justice' pretensions

See also: Obama, Trudeau & Clinton -- Feeling good about the lies of liberalism

Playing the progressive card -- Trudeau's cynical, but clever, "left shift"

Stephen Harper has no plan to grow our economy and no plan to help the middle class, so he's spending your money trying to convince you that I'm not ready. 

Here's what I'm not ready for. 

I’m not ready to stand by as our economy slides into recession. Not ready to watch hard-working Canadians lose their jobs and fall further behind. And I’m certainly not ready to stand by while this government continues to ignore hard-working Canadians, when it should be offering a plan for economic growth. 

I am ready to do what our opponents won’t: Ask the wealthiest 1% of Canadians to pay more tax so our middle class can pay less. And while they propose massive cuts and austerity, I’ll lead our country with a historic investment plan to strengthen the middle class, create jobs and grow our economy.

By now we have all likely heard one variation or another of this pitch being made by federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau -- a pitch that very directly seeks to outflank NDP leader Tom Mulcair from the "left" in progressive terms. This one was taken directly from a Liberal campaign email.

While Mulcair has made a fundamentally misguided, and likely untenable, balanced budget pledge, Trudeau has invoked the language and rhetoric of Occupy ("the 1%", "tax the rich") and sought to inspire with a plan that is interventionist and aims to create jobs and growth via stimulus -- something I suspect is far more appealing to many progressive voters than is Mulcair's rhetoric of austerity.

It will be made all the easier for Trudeau to portray himself as the "true progressive" now that Mulcair, grotesquely, has chosen to frame deficit stimulus spending as "immoral" -- even though both of the existing NDP provincial governments either have run deficits to maintain services, are running deficits, or in Alberta's case plan to do so also to stimulate the economy.

In Alberta Finance Minister Joe Ceci has announced an upcoming deficit stimulus plan very similar to the one proposed by Trudeau and using very similar fiscal and economic logic -- and this despite the fact that Alberta is starting from an already existing deficit:

Despite a deficit that will be the largest in two decades, and that the government has warned could grow to $6.5-billion, Finance Minister Joe Ceci says the province could borrow more to speed an economic recovery and create jobs. 

“Do we have the money? Yes. I think we would have the capacity to borrow some more for investments in infrastructure,” Mr. Ceci told The Globe and Mail on Friday. “We’re forecasting GDP to be on the growth side in 2016, so an investment in transit and other infrastructure would come at the time when it would bolster a brightening GDP. 

In fact, while there is a long way to go, there are some initial indications that Trudeau's pitch is working among the swing voters who actually matter -- progressive voters outside of Quebec (the NDP appears, for now, to be virtually certain to sweep Quebec again).

As the pollster EKOS put it:

Justin Trudeau has helped himself with his proposed deficit-funded infrastructure spending program. Thomas Mulcair, meanwhile, seems to be hurting himself with his promise of a balanced budget, suggesting that Canadians are leery of focusing on fiscal rectitude – rather than kick-starting the economy – when middle class workers have not seen a real wage increase in years. Furthermore, concerns with fiscal discipline are largely concentrated in the Conservative camp, which is largely unavailable to the NDP. At best, Mr. Mulcair may be making himself mildly less objectionable to those who won’t vote for him and ignoring the preferences of his available constituency. While we understand the importance of signalling fiscal prudence, the NDP may want to consider the potential fall-out more carefully.

The key point here being "concerns with fiscal discipline are largely concentrated in the Conservative camp, which is largely unavailable to the NDP" -- a point that NDP strategists of late simply do not seem to understand.

As Fraser Needham pointed out in a piece about the NDP's bizarre decision to campaign from the right, the party seems to be trying to mimic, in the critical NDP-Liberal battleground of Ontario, the tone of the disastrous ONDP campaign of 2014 that sought to appeal to a largely mythical "Rob Ford" swing voter and that resulted in helping to get the Kathleen Wynne Liberals reelected with a majority government in what unfolded as a strategic vote against the Hudak Conservatives.

That ONDP campaign failed for a reason. It alienated progressive voters by sounding very "populist" and right wing, while, in fact, not appealing to right-wingers who in Ontario (and elsewhere) are simply never going to vote NDP in anything close to meaningful numbers. The "Rob Ford" voter is largely fictional as his constituency was a mixture of actual conservatives and reactionaries and the disaffected who turned to or supported him not at all for his "policies" -- such as they were -- but for his grandiose personality and rhetoric. 

In fact Ford's polices were largely irrelevant to this second group of voters and as a result their voting decisions and directions outside of municipal politics were going to be all over the map. This can be demonstrated by the results in the various heartlands of "Ford Nation". All of Etobicoke, York and Scarborough were swept by the Liberals in the provincial election, and swept despite the very vocal calls by the Ford brothers at the time to toss the Liberals out of office!

Wynne, though she has predictably governed more to the right, campaigned from the left and directly and successfully sought to appeal to NDP-Liberal swing voters (the only swing voters who actually matter to the NDP in vote rich Ontario) while the ONDP tried to appeal to a group of "swing voters" that simply did not exist -- and did so in very reactionary terms.

Trudeau is doing what Wynne did while Mulcair echoes ONDP leader Andrea Horwath. Trudeau is clearly targeting the soft progressive vote that the NDP is either taking for granted or do not think they need.

Is this cynical on Trudeau's part? When he brings out austerity hatchet man Paul Martin, who launched the austerity era in Canadian federal politics, and when he praises Martin's disastrous and reactionary deep cuts to transfer payments in the 90's (while saying that he would not do anything similar) it certainly seems cynical.

But it is also clever. With Mulcair almost inexplicably -- given that it was his principled stance on Bill C-51 that shifted him from third to first place in national polls while Trudeau's pandering stance cost him dearly -- adopting a very cautious and even rhetorically reactionary approach, this was the hand that Trudeau had left to play. The Liberals exist to win, and if portraying Mulcair as a right wing austerity wolf in progressive sheep's clothing is the way to win, that is what they will do.

Trudeau can only take this approach and make this appeal to progressive swing voters, though, as it is at least in part true.

Mulcair and his strategists, and they alone, have made this possible and allowed him to be able to do this by taking a series of positions and adopting a tone that are both right-wing and wrong-headed and that will be perceived as such by the very voters that Mulcair needs and that were swinging his way.

There is still plenty of time for Mulcair and the NDP to avoid the trap they so clearly seem to be walking into. The soft progressive constituency that is willing to go either NDP or Liberal to both stop Harper and get what they hope will be progressive governance is still very much up for grabs.

But if the NDP continues down this track federally, there is a very real probability that the result in Ontario will be what came of the strikingly similar campaign strategies of Andrea Horwath and Olivia Chow that sought bizarrely to appeal to right-wing voters and that both failed miserably.

And without winning in most of the key ridings in Ontario no progressive party, Liberal or New Democrat, stands any chance of becoming government.

Mulcair and his strategists seem to need to be reminded of this.

See also: The follies of the NDP running a right wing populist campaign

See also: Game Over -- Turns out Mulcair is simply wrong about even today's NDP and deficits