The Globe and Mail

Andrea Horwath (pronounced hor-vath) is the new Ontario NDP leader, and she was the consensus choice of reporters and politicos as the best choice in a weak field.

Ms. Horwath is bright, hard-working and sincere. She does not have the fifty-foot chip on her shoulder that always kept Howard Hampton from connecting with the public. Her industrial city roots in Hamilton will help her connect with manufacturing workers either laid off or worried.

But what is her big idea?

Michael Prue may have made a mess of his campaign launch when he said the NDP should revisit the religious education question. But at least he got some press for it.

Gilles Bisson and Prue may have stepped outside NDP orthodoxy in saying targeted corporate tax reductions may be needed as part of the tools to combat the recession. Ms. Horwath was among those wagging their fingers at the apostasy.

Peter Tabuns may have been a few years late with his plan to emphasize the green economy, but at least he had a plan.

Tabuns actually put forward the only real growth strategy for the NDP. Clearly, he was proposing to attempt a merger or at least hostile takeover of the Green Party, uniting the third and fourth parties to challenge the Liberals. Six-in-ten New Democrats, and all the other leadership candidates, disagreed and rallied behind Horwath to protect the status quo.

But where is the growth in the status quo?

The NDP is mired in third place, with the more than occassional fourth place finish, including in the recent by-election.

There is some obvious potential for growth in Northern Ontario, where the NDP finished strong seconds in a number of ridings. Running the table on those seats gives them five more MPPs.

The Hamilton area has one more seat that could go NDP and then it gets really tough. A seat like Brant or Burlington just isn't going to vote NDP without an earthquake in public opinion.

Windsor is undergoing a major economic crisis, but Dwight Duncan and Sandra Pupatello aren't exactly pushovers. An NDP pickup there is in the realm of possibility albeit a huge commitment in resources to the trench warfare it would require.

There's London-Fanshawe, but again Khalil Ramal is an excellent retail organizer.

York South-Weston and Davenport in Toronto, and Ottawa Centre are the three urban seats where they have a shot on paper.

So, all in, that's 12 more seats where the NDP can potentially win if things break their way perfectly. (There are also one or two seats they could steal from the Tories like Oshawa, but taking seats from the other opposition party isn't the ticket to government.)

Those 12 bring them to 22, or one less than the Tories have now, at a very low ebb in Progressive Conservative Party's fortunes.

And even winning those 12, that would still leave the Liberals with more than 60 seats and a majority government.

The sad truth is the NDP can only be relevant by taking votes from the Liberals in seats they have no chance of winning and electing more Tory right-wing MPPs. That's the only way a minority government is formed.

And here's the real bad news.

John Tory was the NDP's best weapon to do that.

Tory (in theory) should have prevented the Liberals from playing the strategic voting card. That's where the Liberals say "if you want to defeat the right-wing boogyman, hold your nose and vote for us, progressive voter."

Instead, the Liberals were able to use private religious schools to polarize the electorate and surpress the NDP vote. (And if it wasn't private schools, it would have been Tory's private health-care scheme or his Randy Hillier-inspired environment cuts.)

But since the election, Tory was onto the Liberal strategy and would have run on a bare bones platform that limited those options for Liberals in the next election.

Tory's defeat, and the likely rise of Tim Hudak or another Mike Harris-style neo-conservative, will make the Liberal polarization play even easier this time. After all, they have nine years of Harris-Eves legacy from Ipperwash to Walkerton to the blackout to use against any Harris-era Tory.

Tabuns's strategy was an attempt to get out of that corner by growing toward the Greens instead of the Liberals. If successful, it might have united that vote and made the NDP competitive in the Greens best ridings like Muskoka or Bruce-Grey. It might have made the NDP more relevant in rural Ontario, and given an increasingly tired party brand a sprucing up and a coat of green paint.

In time, it might have even allowed the NDP a legitimate shot at government again. After all, the 1990 election was in many ways won due to the NDP's ownership of the environment issue at the time, as well as their monopoly on third-party status when both the Liberals and PCs were suddenly unpopular. The NDP ceeded ownership of the environment brand over the past decade, and the Greens are now an easier parking space for disgruntled Tories or Grits.

But the type of strategy Tabuns was pushing would have diluted the union influence in the NDP. It would have brought in more fish and enlarged the pond. So the union block vote and party barons turned it down, and that was that.

Now, Andrea Horwath faces a terrible challenge. She has to make the NDP broadly relevant again. And she has no mandate for change.

This is a party that just a few weeks ago blocked getting kids back to school at York University, a move their own elder statesman, Gerry Caplan, said 99 per cent of people disagreed with, just to satisfy a union that has nowhere else to go.

They need a shake up more than James Bond's martini. Pity Ms. Horwath got her victory on an implied pledge to not change a thing.

It's going to be uphill, Ms. Horwath. Good luck.