Andrea Horwath’s job is on the line.

The 52-year-old NDP leader will find out Saturday at a leadership review whether her frenetic fence-mending since the New Democrats bungled the spring election campaign has paid off.

More than 1,000 delegates gathering at the party convention in Toronto will decide her fate.

“There will be questions (about her leadership) if it isn’t over two-thirds . . . to be comfortable she’s got to get over the two-thirds (support),” said Henry Jacek, a McMaster University political science professor. He guessed she will weather the storm, in part because there is no obvious heir apparent.

Jacek told the Star in the event Horwath gets under 60 per cent “then the pressure would be pretty tough on her (to go).”

Horwath has been the lightning rod for party discontent ever since she gave up the balance of power to provoke an election that some say she was unprepared to fight. That decision and the collapse of the Tories handed the Liberals a majority government.

On trial is her quixotic move to the right during the election campaign even though Horwath has done a 180 since then. She has acknowledged her populist pocketbook-focused spring campaign did not resonate with some New Democrats, especially in Toronto, where the party lost three of its five seats to Liberals.

“I feel good about the work that I have been able to do over the last number of months,” Horwath told the Star Thursday.

“I have really worked hard to touch base with folks to get their feedback, to get an understanding of their concerns, to look at both the victories and the disappointment of that campaign from a perspective from the folks who were on the ground. It’s been a lot of hard work but it has been valuable,” she said.

Not everything was negative, Horwath said.

“We got more vote this time than we have since 1990. That’s something we can be happy about . . . but on the other hand we lost three fantastic MPPs. We are pretty concerned about that,” she said.

Dave Cooke, a former education minister in Bob Rae’s NDP government, said modernizing the Ontario NDP is not necessarily a bad thing, but noted that an election campaign is not the time to do it.

“If you’ve got a new approach the party should take, then in between elections you spell it out, you define what you mean and then you go across the province and you talk to party members and you seek out their input. But you can’t fundamentally change any political party in a five-week election campaign,” Cooke said.

The level of discontent was at its greatest in Toronto, where the NDP lost three seats — in large part because of Horwath’s swing to the right of the party’s usual stance. That, coupled with the fact Toronto voters feared Tory Leader Tim Hudak could win, had voters rushing to the polls to vote for the scandal-riddled Liberals.

“I thought she was ready (for an election) and we weren’t,” said former NDP veteran MPP Michael Prue, who lost his Beaches-East York riding to the Liberals.

“It took two weeks to unfold any kind of policy at all . . . but nobody wanted to listen because they were just terrified of Hudak, and . . . they didn’t think (Andrea) was left-wing enough for some of them. They thought she sounded like Rob Ford,” he told the Star.

Prue said it is hard to predict the outcome of the leadership review given the opposing views inside and outside of Toronto.

“It’s hard to know. Outside of Toronto there is not much by way of hard feelings. Inside Toronto there is. There is no question. I know my own riding association is split on the issue but those who think that heads have to roll outweigh those who don’t,” he said.

Prue points out that Horwath has gone some way to appeasing her critics by sending the election team packing.

“They were useless,” he said.

Another former veteran NDP MPP, Rosario Marchese, lost his Trinity-Spadina seat after 24 years. But he harbours no ill will toward Horwath.

Marchese figures she will win the day “but it won’t be without a spirited debate and some spirited disagreement about what happened during the election.”

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“But I think all in all she will probably do well in that leadership . . . I think 70 per cent is something that people expect and she would expect. I think that outreach is going to help a great deal,” he said.

Ninety-one-year-old Joy Taylor can’t wait to see end of Horwath’s reign.

Taylor made a name for herself last year when she lambasted the party hierarchy for stacking the deck at a Scarborough-Guildwood nomination meeting for the August 2013 byelection. The hand-picked former Toronto councilor, Adam Giambrone, ended up finishing third. As result Taylor quit the party, but has since been reinstated.

“I will never get over that deceit,” she said.

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