There was no dark night of the soul for Andrea Horwath over whether to support the recent Liberal budget.

Oh, she went through the motions in her Bay Street high rise, pacing the floor in the early hours of Friday, May 2, talking on the phone to colleagues about the provincial budget, drinking cups of chamomile tea and staring out over Lake Ontario. Essentially, though, her mind was made up; it sounds like it had been for some time.

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The NDP leader had skipped the budget lockup that day, a first chance to read the document before it was tabled in the legislature and for weeks had refused to sit down with Premier Kathleen Wynne to discuss what the NDP wanted the budget to include.

What was the point, Horwath asked herself. Barring a huge surprise, she had made her decision.

That day, she announced her party couldn’t support Wynne’s budget. She’d been burned the year before and her anger still flashed, visceral and intensely personal.

“It was clear that I wanted to take a look at the budget this time, but they hadn’t made good before,” she told the Star in an interview at the end of May, well into the election campaign. “Why would they this time? It would be more of the same ... a litany of broken promises.”

In 2013, Horwath (pronounced Horvath) had believed Wynne’s budget promises on auto-insurance rate cuts, help with home-care costs for sick relatives and more oversight and accountability on financial issues — to name just three Grit pledges. There were others she says never materialized.

She’s still angry and says Wynne betrayed people who believed in her in 2013. “The last thing I needed this time was to meet with someone who’d already made up her mind. We’ve seen the same behaviour with the Liberals time and again — and it’s pointless.”

During the last election campaign in 2011, she told me: “Anger is a big motivator for me. It’s part of why I do what I do. If I weren’t angry, I’d be overcome by frustration.”

She’s angry now.

She’s surprised by those who expected her to fall in line and vote with the government. “If they’d listened to me in the legislature, they would have known,” says Horwath, 51. New Democrats and Progressive Conservatives were in a position together to bring down the Wynne government.

Rather than go through that vote, Wynne called on Lieut.-Gov. David Onley that same day and the legislative session was dissolved. Ontarians would go to the polls Thursday, June 12.

There’s a widely held view Horwath isn’t on her game this time, that her performance and release of positions have been jarring and amateurish. In the Globe, longtime NDP stalwart Gerry Caplan excoriated her: “Your election campaign has frankly been a mess,” he wrote. “No coherent theme, no memorable policies, nothing to deal with the great concerns of New Democrats everywhere.”

POW! BAM! BAM! WHAP! Horwath gets it from all sides.

Then, a leaked letter signed by 34 “deeply distressed” New Democrats, with solid party credentials, accused her of having lost her way and taking the party with her. By forcing a spring election, it said she opened the door to a Progressive Conservative government led by Tim Hudak — “the most right wing and vicious leader of the PCs since Mike Harris.”

Lobbyist Robin Sears for Ottawa-based Earnscliffe Strategy Group came to her defence in the Star, with a rousing attack on “the pile-on by embittered NDP pensioners.” They include longtime social justice columnist Michele Landsberg and Cathy Crowe, street nurse and defender of the homeless.

It’s true. These veterans are older now. Off with their heads!

“From what we see, you are running to the right of the Liberals in an effort to win Conservative voters,” the letter said. This isn’t the first attack by NDPers against their leader. A quarter-century ago, party stalwarts attacked then-leader Ed Broadbent in a leaked letter. What is it with a party that likes to eat its own?

Horwath insists everyone is entitled to their views, that the criticism merely rolled off her back. Perhaps.

“I walk in the shoes of Tommy Douglas and it’s a big responsibility to bear,” she says of her larger concerns, referring to the founder of the CCF (later NDP) and an icon to Canadians beyond the party itself.

Still, her campaign has been the antithesis of smooth. The campaign team’s Internet provider went down over an entire critical evening, leaving her team in the communications wilderness, plus there have been countless irritations. What does it say about your team when you help precipitate the election and you don’t have your campaign bus ready to roll?

“Andrea Horwath — Makes Sense.” Says the slogan on the side of the bus.

I expected Horwath to be worn out when we met for a recent interview at an espresso bar on Queen St. E. That was the general line, that she was going through the sophomore slump in this election, barely able to put a foot right.

Instead, I found her more relaxed and more at ease than I’d ever seen her, and certainly more so than during the last campaign. She was in high spirits and the strain she wore on her face in 2011 was no longer there. (I couldn’t resist asking if she is seeing someone. Okay, maybe sexist but it was just that kind of glow. “Oh goodness no, I don’t have time,” she said and laughed.)

As valuable as my own gut feeling, however, I turned to photographer Lucas Oleniuk, who also photographed Horwath for our profile in 2011. On the job again today, he, too, found a huge difference in her body language — relaxed and easy, comfortable in her own skin — and in her face.

I’d take his photographer’s eye and perspective to the bank.

Her face was bright, her hair cut in the same precise bob with pale highlights. Sure, navy eyeliner brightens her eyes and a sleek navy jacket flatters, but it’s more than that. She really is calm and that’s the biggest part of the battle.

This time, she’s kept her team to a few basic rules to guarantee her health and energy. Healthy snacks on the bus and not the fast food that’s “a recipe for disaster.” She insists on not having a constant string of early morning events so that she can get in a weight routine, some cardio, maybe a swim, either at her Bay St. apartment or the Y near her home in Hamilton.

Her brother, Mike, says she struggled with a few extra pounds in high school but had the discipline and energy to drop them. (Thanks, Mike, she must be thinking as she reads this.) It seems like an important point to include because it exemplifies the many times she has taken control of her own life.

Maybe it’s yoga that’s taken her to a better place.

“I just have a calmness I didn’t have before,” she says. “It’s everything.”

She’s sitting in the only booth on one side of the restaurant, her back against the wall (she really is from Steeltown) and a view of the Queen St. bustle.

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While she seems light-hearted that is not the case. Horwath provoked the vote at a time that she’s struggling through the most difficult personal challenge since the death of her father, Andrew, from cancer in January 2004. An ethic Hungarian, he was an autoworker at the Ford Motor Co. in Hamilton and his emphasis on fairness for working people influenced her deeply. This is her first election without her mother beside her — but we’ll get back to that momentarily.

She studied labour relations at McMaster University and worked in community development before being elected to Queen’s Park in a by-election in May 2004 and winning the leadership in 2009.

Her father listened to her and helped her with her politics, even being there for preparations for her first provincial campaign, despite physical frailness. The cancer was advanced and the pain excruciating, she says. He helped shape the issues and values she cares about in her life and she felt lost without him. A part of her still does.

She’s close to her son, Julian, 21. While working as a waitress at Indigo’s restaurant in Hamilton to put herself through university, she met jazz musician Ben Leonetti, a DJ in the club downstairs and the man who would become Julian’s father. They fell in love and lived together for 25 years without marrying, before what she describes as an amicable but very tough split in 2010.

“I’ve always been proud of my mom’s success and I respect her for it,” Julian said in a phone interview during the 2011 campaign. “We have a healthy, connected relationship and I’ve always felt grounded.”

Asked to describe her, he said: “She’s great ... I’d say that what you see is what you get. She’s a very honest person who wants to help people.”

In a phone chat June 5, her brother, Mike, an autoworker in Woodstock, where he lives and works for Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada Inc., also praises his sister. “I wish my dad could be here to see her — he would have been so happy.”

Adds Mike Horwath: “She introduced me once at a rally and I was choking back tears, I was so proud.”

* * *

This time, her mother Diane, 79, is ailing. That’s the source of the pain that sits like a giant yoke across her shoulders. She hides it well. Last year, the four Horwath siblings, younger brother, Mike, older brother Andrew, and sister, Susan, a couple of years older then Andrea, began to notice a decline in their mother. She’d always been an independent woman who lived alone, a rock for her children.

A photo of Andrea and Susan with Diane at the beach, shows their mother in a bright red bathing suit. Likely it’s Lake Erie, where Ford held an annual summer beach picnic for its employees and their families. Says Mike: “We always looked forward to it — so much fun.”

As Christmas 2013 approached, they began to notice their mother’s mistakes were intensifying. “We’d see the same behaviour over and over again,” says Andrea Horwath. “She would say something and then, in the same sentence, say the same thing again, and then again ... it was painful because my mother always had been so sharp and focused.”

At the end of February, Diane Horwath was tested and received a diagnosis of Alzheimer ’s disease.

Crushing — as it is for every family who enters the twilight zone of Alzheimer’s.

Everything moved fast after that.

Diane Horwath dug in her heels. She didn’t want to give up her apartment and go to a home. She was frightened. Her children gently pushed and finally convinced her to move into a home where she could receive the care she needed. To their surprise, she was happy in her new surroundings.

It’s painful for Andrea Horwath to talk about this. While her mother seems carefree, her politician daughter dies a little each time she sees her once powerful mother doing arts and crafts designed for children or playing kiddy games. It’s what she wants to do, though.

She’s fading quickly and nobody knows how much longer she will recognize them. They know she’ll live less and less in their world, perhaps abandoning it entirely one day while continuing to live and breathe.

“She’s such a strong woman who’s been through so much in her life,” says Horwath. She trails off, her eyes filling with tears.

Her mother didn’t exercise or eat well, says Horwath. She smoked for a time and didn’t really take care of herself, the way Horwath says she herself does. Will healthy choices really stave off this terrible disease? Does any of it really make any difference at all? It’s a crap shoot and she knows it.

Alzheimer’s is a vicious disease that can stalk any one of us, stripping our minds and often leaving us to die a heartless, slow death. It’s hateful and hated, taking away Diane Horwath’s love of reading and her pleasure in spoiling her grandchildren.

She knows her mother’s descent into the darkest parts of her mind has just begun. For all her power and political connections, there is nothing Andrea Horwath can do. Except love her.

Correction – June 7, 2014: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly included Stephen Lewis, an international advocate for human rights, among the longtime NDP supporters who had signed a letter criticizing Horwath.

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