Toronto MPP Marit Stiles first to announce she’s running for Ontario NDP leader

Thestar.com
Sept. 22, 2022

The first candidate is out of the gates in the race to replace Andrea Horwath as NDP leader and set a new path for the party after it lost almost one-quarter of its seats in June’s provincial election.

Four months after Horwath stepped down, MPP Marit Stiles is stepping up, launching her campaign Thursday in her Toronto Davenport riding.

“We need to be ready to win in 2026, and I feel like we can do that,” Stiles told the Star in an exclusive sit-down interview.

“This is the moment, and this is the time … for us to dig deep and defeat Doug Ford” by starting the work now, said Stiles, former president of the federal NDP and Toronto public school board trustee who was first elected as an MPP in 2018 after knocking off the Liberal incumbent.

Stiles, the NDP education’s critic, has spent the last few months talking to people about the party’s losses in June, and what needs to come next.

“A big part of what didn’t happen in the last election was connecting to people about where they’re at,” she said. “This has been a very difficult few years, so a lot of people are very focused on just that, and how they get by.

“I think that is why sometimes this politics of division connects with people sometimes, but I don’t think that’s the way we proceed. We have to find ways to bring people together and not divide each other … We need to bring forward messages, but it’s also the energy and the enthusiasm and inspiration.”

Although Horwath quit on election night June 2, it took the party until July 18 to set the rules for a race that requires $55,000 to enter, starting with a $5,000 initial payment upon registration and the rest in instalments. Candidates have until Dec. 2 to join the contest, which will be decided by ranked preferential ballots submitted online and by mail, and a winner will be announced March 2.

Several New Democrat MPPs rumoured to be interested in running for leader include Catherine Fife (Waterloo), Sol Mamakwa (Kiiwetinoong), Laura Mae Lindo (Kitchener Centre) and Wayne Gates (Niagara Falls). Joel Harden (Ottawa Centre) briefly considered a run, but decided against it for family reasons.

Stiles spent the summer pulling together an organization in the wake of the party’s capture of 31 seats, down from the 40 it won in the 2018 election, when Horwath was vaulted into role of official opposition leader after the collapse of the Liberals.

Horwath acknowledged in late June that the party needed to take a deeper look at why it lost so many seats, handing Ford a bigger majority than four years ago in a campaign that saw him target the labour vote in blue-collar ridings.

The NDP lost three seats in Brampton -- including one held by Gurratan Singh, brother of federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh -- two in the Windsor area, Timmins, Beaches-East York and Hamilton East-Stoney Creek. Kingston and the Islands went to the Liberals.

The only notable NDP gain was in Ottawa West-Nepean, where Chandra Pasma defeated incumbent Conservative MPP Jeremy Roberts, the governing party’s sole loss of the night.

While the New Democrats held a number of ridings like Toronto-St. Paul’s that had been expected to return to the Liberal fold, the Ford sweep of fast-growing Brampton and his victories in several former strongholds deeply stung.

One senior NDP insider told the Star a week after the election that the party “gave up the working class to get the chattering class,” a reference to the metropolitan middle class of progressives who have lost faith in the Liberals.

Stiles credits Horwath with bringing in a strong slate of candidates for the election, and creating the team now at Queen’s Park.

Looking forward, she added, “what we need to do right now is to get into every corner of this province. We can’t take any of that work for granted, and we need to be doing the organizing now. We can’t wait until we’re close to an election to be nominating candidates. There are candidates that ran in the last election who still want to run again -- they’re ready to go now. We need to be ready to help support them.”

Organizing and connecting “at the ground level is going to be a really core piece of this, and that’s what I want to see. The other thing is I want to see us empower our team, our caucus members -- we have an extraordinary team of really smart people with connections to communities across this province, with lots of different backgrounds. We need to empower our whole team to be able to actually connect with people and do that work. And I think that’s one of the things you’ll notice that’s different in the way I run things.”

The Newfoundland-born Stiles, who has been a part of the NDP party for 30 years, said when she came to Ontario, one of her first jobs was working for Gilles Bisson, who lost his Timmins seat to the PCs in the June election, after 32 years in office.

It’s a riding she’d work to regain as leader, while also targeting others in areas around Greater Toronto as well as Ottawa, which she notes Pasma did after years of building ties in her local community.

Stiles won Davenport in 2018 and “it took us a long time to build on the ground, to make the connection campaign after campaign to turn this riding around.”

“We never take it for granted; that work is so important. But that’s what matters to me, the kind of work we do in communities in between elections. We can’t start the moment the writ drops -- the work has to happen now, whether you’ve got an elected, incumbent NDP MPP or not. We serve these communities, we organize, we mobilize people to stand up for each other to do better, and so my approach is very grassroots that way.”