Steve Ladurantaye

Andrea Horwath may be the leader of Ontario’s traditional party of labour, but she is steering it toward the middle ground, the turf currently occupied by the Liberals.

This shift could leave Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty feeling squeezed from both the left and the right, because Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak has already essentially adopted all of his main rival’s health-care and education policies.

Read the story with Karen Howlett at the Globe and Mail

“Our platform has ideas borrowed from all kinds of different places. …,” Ms. Horwath told The Globe and Mail’s editorial board on Thursday. “We have to be practical and borrow from ideas in other places, regardless of what the ideology is.”

Ms. Horwath, who took the helm in 2009, is essentially refashioning the NDP in her own image, just as its fortunes are on the rise. Her platform contains wallet relief in a bid to reach beyond the party’s base, but very little on core principles such as the environment and social justice. With one week before voting day, the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives are running neck and neck with the NDP a competitive third.

Ms. Horwath is a threat to Mr. McGuinty because her party could siphon off Liberal votes – something Mr. Hudak hopes will happen. She is well-aware that she could play a pivotal role if Ontario elects its first minority government since the mid-1980s, but she said it is premature to talk about forming a coalition.

“I’m not in a position to pick a premier yet,” Ms. Horwath said. “Maybe I’m still in a position to be a premier, and that’s how I’m going to fight the last week of the campaign.”

Ms. Horwath has had to deal with the legacy of two former NDP leaders on the campaign trail. She has engaged in a delicate balance of using the goodwill over Jack Layton’s death to fuel her party’s momentum and trying to get out from under the federal NDP leader’s shadow.

And then there are the reminders of an unhappy chapter in her party’s history: Bob Rae’s term as premier in the early 1990s. He is now interim leader of the federal Liberals. People need to get over the Rae era and stop harkening back to it, Ms. Horwath said. As for her friend Mr. Layton, “he’s a big part of our DNA.”

Asked if she was dealing with two ghosts, the woman who is not known for mincing words joked, “I guess Bob’s not really a ghost if he’s still alive.” Perhaps, she added, he’s a “skeleton.”

For his part, Mr. McGuinty is campaigning as the only leader with the vision to manage the economy in difficult times. That vision includes making Ontario a leader in North America in the fledgling clean-energy sector, using that to spur job creation much the way the auto industry did in previous generations.

“I see an opening,” said Mr. McGuinty, who met with The Globe’s editorial board on Wednesday. “I see an opportunity and I want to drive hard. It’s a place for us to make our mark.”

As his opponents position themselves for a final sprint to election day, Mr. Hudak appears more energized on the campaign trail since his performance during this week’s televised leaders debate.

Mr. Hudak’s campaign took on a positive tone Thursday as he slammed a slew of last-minute announcements by the Liberals.

He also took aim at the NDP, saying, “they’re going to raise taxes just like the Liberals, but at least they have the courtesy to say so.”

He said the Liberal announcements – including stopping work at a gas-fired power plant in Mississauga and moving up the start date for a home renovation tax credit for seniors by 15 months – were signs of panic. At this stage in the campaign, he said, it’s too late to be introducing or enhancing platform planks.

“We’re seven days out and Dalton McGuinty has some brand-new, last-minute, panicked jobs plan,” he said. “Give me a break – you can’t make this stuff up on the fly. We have a plan, and we’re sticking to it.”

After two weeks of covering the Ontario election from the middle seat of the Progressive Conservative tour bus, I was given a week off to write election stories that weren’t restricted to a preset schedule. With the so-called Northern Debate between NDP leader Andrea Horwath and PC leader Tim Hudak a week away, I decided my time would be best spent writing about the north a little bit.

But it didn’t make sense to do it from Toronto (here’s what I ended up writing). And here are all my photos, too.

So I pitched my editor on the idea of renting a car, pointing it north and seeing what I could find to write about. He said yes, and I left on a Monday morning with a vague plan to visit Kirkland Lake and write about some of the things the city was doing right.

But as I pulled over in Deep River I decided the best story to do would be to visit Kenora for a debate between local candidates. Forget the leader debate – the real issues would surely play out in a Super 8 Conference room in a way they wouldn’t at a scripted event.

I’d make it to that debate, but not before learning a whole bunch of stuff. Here are some of the things I’ll remember from the trip.

A northern lake outside of Kenora.

Ontario is big
I knew this already, but it’s easy to forget. The last time I drove across the province I was in a little rock band and we had shows along the way – it took days to do the trip. But I left from Ottawa at 8 a.m. on Monday morning, and arrived in Kenora at 6 p.m. Tuesday. I stopped from 11:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. for a quick nap in Hearst.

Motels are sketchy
Everything in Hearst was booked. Construction workers are constantly moving around the north, I was told, and they book blocks of rooms. That left me in what I thought was a good motel, because it was branded as a Howard Johnson. But it was really dirty, with burn marks in the carpet and an odd smell emanating from each of the double beds. I slept with my boots on – a lesson also learned travelling in a rock band. You never know when you’ll have to chase thieves away from your truck, or run out of the room screaming when they push the door open.

You can still smoke in some hotels
I had no idea. When I arrived at the Super 8 in Kenora, all the rooms were booked but one. It was a smoking room, which I thought would be OK. Then I opened the door, threw up in my mouth a little, developed an instant headache and craved a smoke for the first time in a decade.

There are missing people
I knew this already too, but a poster on a rest stop tree reminded me that there is a disproportionate number of missing persons from small Ontario towns. There was an entire billboard dedicated to shaming someone (anyone) into sharing what they know about Melanie Ethier. The giant billboard face is haunting.

The full photo set can be found at http://bit.ly/nKN3iL

There are degrees of poverty
I’ve written plenty of stories about poor people. But the graveyard at Lake Helen, just outside of Nipigon, was heartbreaking. Most of the markers are handmade, and the more recent ones have flowers and are well tended. Others are marked with stones, while some simply have a wooden cross pressed into the ground. I have a friend who grew up near there, this is what he said: “It’s a First Nations reserve built on a failed mission from the early 1900s; very close to the highway and surrounded by tourism, but still a little pocket of poor. The grave markers are rebuilt regularly because they vanish over winter. You will likely never see poverty in Canada as extreme as northwestern Ontario reserves.”

Mills are huge
Dozens have been closed, but the mill in Kenora is nothing short of breathtaking. The Weyerhaeuser plant takes logs, smashes them up and then presses the wood back together into some kind of superwood. The plant is 11 enclosed acres, the ceilings are 110-feet high. it’s so big, there are tricycles scattered around for the employees to use during their 12-hour shifts. About 140 people work there, though you don’t see many of them as you wander among the giant machinery because they operate most of it from behind computer screens. It’s operating at 60 per cent right now, because most of its wood is exported to the U.S.

Forget minerals and wood
Forget gold and lumber – the No. 1 product of the north is live bait. Surely it accounts for at least 73 per cent of Northern GDP – each small town has at least three bait shops on the main road, with ridiculously huge signs with promises of leeeches, worms and minnows.

A big fish, north of North Bay

There are big things everywhere
Giant lumberjacks, a sasquatch, some moose. Every small town has a novelty giant thing. Moonbeam has a flying saucer that is pretty cool. I’d never been to Moonbeam before, but it was key to my career. Pierre Lebrun killed four OC Transpo workers in the late 1990s after he walked into a depot and opened fire, and I was on the story as an intern. I managed to track down his cousin in Moonbeam, and he sent us a photo of Lebrun sitting on the beach having a drink just days before he walked into the depot for the last time. I asked my editors to send me then, but they wouldn’t. At least now I understand why.

Don’t joke about bears
The sign on the hotel in Kenora warned me not to “approach, admire or photograph” any bears I may see. The restaurant across the street said something similar. I made a few jokes to some locals about how I was disappointed that it was forbidden to flirt with local bears, and each joke was met with a lecture about the seriousness of bears. There are lots of animals up there. I saw a wolf on the side of the road, and got out of the car to take a picture. When it started walking my way, I realized I was probably being stupid and got back in the car and laid on the horn. When I saw an eagle beside a lake, I got back out and tried to sneak up on it. When it started to fly away, I had visions of it tearing my face apart. I didn’t stop for anything else.

As the province’s political leaders plowed for votes in Southern Ontario, a more bare-knuckled version of democracy was breaking out in the North.

For the first time in 12 years, someone other than former NDP leader Howard Hampton will be sent to Queen’s Park to represent the sprawling 250,000-square-kilometre riding of Kenora–Rainy River. And the candidates are desperate to persuade voters they’ll find a way to bring jobs to a region that’s struggled to diversify from a forestry-based economy to one driven by both mining and tourism.

Read the story in the Globe and Mail

In a chalet-like conference room at a Super 8 motel, candidates argued fiercely over the fine details of northern development. But they agreed on one theme – the North and its wealth of natural resources are on the rise, and the south had best not stand in the way.

“There have been great ideas in the past,” said the Green Party’s Jo Jo Holiday, setting the tone in the opening minutes of the debate. “But they are Toronto people who think they know the North and think it goes no further than Sudbury. We are unique and we need to be treated as such.”

With Mr. Hampton out of the picture, NDP candidate (and former Hampton staffer) Sarah Campbell is in a tight fight with Liberal Anthony Leek and Progressive Conservative Rod McKay. The Northern Heritage Party – which dissolved decades ago but was recently resurrected in a bid to raise awareness of northern issues – is running Charmaine Romaniuk, an anthropology student from Lakehead University.

The party’s leaders have made northern development key portions of their platforms so far in the campaign, despite its relatively few legislative seats. Both the Liberals and NDP have visited already on campaign stops, and PC Leader Tim Hudak will face NDP Leader Andrea Horwath in a debate Friday night in Thunder Bay in what is being hailed as the first “northern” debate in recent history. (Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty had previously declined to participate.)

It’s a long way from the plowing matches in Eastern Ontario that the leaders took part in Tuesday, but both the NDP and Conservatives are promising to reduce the cost of electricity – a key issue in the North. And while they are likely to argue about the best way to develop northern resources, the 100 residents who braved the rain in Kenora and the candidates who want to represent them are more focused on local issues.

Campaign managers are working from a single truth: You don’t win over the riding’s 78,000 citizens with platforms, you win them over by campaigning against Toronto.

“It worked for Hampton for years and that’s what you’re seeing here tonight,” one manager said afterward.

While the candidates started out amicably, the debate quickly degenerated into a series of anecdotes and personal attacks the candidates said were borne out of a sense of frustration and a desire to move beyond planning to create jobs for the region.

Mr. McKay, for example, said he knew of specific examples of companies that considered bringing jobs to the region, but didn’t because of the amount of paperwork involved. He didn’t name names.

“Every day I got to work and I sit at an idle sawmill,” said Mr. McKay, who is the mill manager at Kenora Forest Products. “There is a lack of regard by Mr. McGuinty for the people and issues of Northern Ontario. I know our quality of life could be so much better and our economic security could be so much better with the right policies that reflect our northern way of life.”

While the mainstream parties have different policies, the end goals are largely the same – to keep more of the region’s wealth in the area by increasing its processing and refinement capabilities so materials are shipped elsewhere for value-added work.

There are also calls to widen highways and lower the cost of electricity to attract larger companies to set up in the region.

The NDP’s Ms. Campbell name-dropped Mr. Hampton several times during her remarks as she talked about how he tried to get a regional pricing structure introduced to lower hydro prices in the North. She also relied heavily on examples of how Manitoba managed to keep hydro rates low by ensuring the system is kept in public hands.

But her casual references riled Mr. McKay, whose attack against the former NDP leader set the tone for the rest of the night.

“She says how Howard has been talking about this for 12 years,” he said. “Well, that’s what you get when you don’t form a government and sit in opposition. All they can do is talk … we need to fix thing so they make sense instead of sitting down with environmentalists from Southern Ontario who don’t have any stake in our livelihoods in the North.”

As Mr. Hudak and Ms. Horwath prepare for their northern showdown, they may want to read over Ms. Romaniuk’s notes. After the other candidates bickered about each party’s record in office, she took to the lectern and shrugged her shoulders.

“I’m sure glad not to be involved in any of the actual arguments here,” she said. “There’s not a lot to fight with me about – I just want to see more jobs.”