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BC Politics - 4. page

These are Stuart’s articles on politics at the provincial level in British Columbia.

It turns out the resignation letter is my literary subgenre

Comrades,

            I see that BC’s two counterfeit left parties have chosen their strategy for derailing our campaign. A slew of false allegations of transphobia are being circulated against me and being used to tarnish the party and derail the important work of the coming campaign.

            We cannot afford to have that happen. The primary voting issue in this election must remain climate justice. Nothing can distract us from what is truly at stake: the very survival of our species. Every day we spend discussing whether it was wrong for me to defend a local Vancouver activist from a campaign to blacklist her from employment is a day we do not spend discussing John Horgan using the RCMP as Royal Dutch Shell’s brute squad to drive a fracked gas pipeline through the territory of People suffering from sickle cell anaemia, get viagra overnight leukaemia and multiple myeloma. That’s to say, more and more people would like to face erectile dysfunction by buy generic cialis great pharmacy store picking up a conversation at work or health club, with friends, or they may even opt to speak to strangers on the Internet. In such cases, it is advisable to use twice a day for six to ninth super cheap viagra months. If you browse their website you will viagra online canadian see that they have very few differences. the Wet’suwet’en people. And we cannot afford that distraction.

            So, it is with regret and reluctance that I am tendering my resignation as director, leader and candidate effective midnight tonight. I know, from the sterling group of young people who have joined our slate and our board over the past eleven months that I am leaving this party is excellent hands. You folks will do a great job and I will be proud to cast a vote for whomever the party selects in Prince George-Valemount.

            Solidarity and courage,

            Stuart Parker

BC Politics | fusangite |

Sonia Furstenau’s Plan for the Green Party is Non-existent But Michael M’Gonigle’s is Something Worse

On August 31st, 2020, The Tyee published an article by Michael M’Gonigle entitled “It’s Time for Greens to Reinvent Themselves.” Originally submitted to the Tyee for publication, I am now printing my rebuttal here because the impending election will likely finish knocking this off the editor’s desk.

Beginning in 2014, when it entered the legislature, the BC Green Party began voting for government plans to increase fossil fuel extraction and emissions, first with Christy Clark’s “LNG budget,” and later for the Horgan government’s budgets, energy plans and throne speeches. Most recently, the party praised the current government budget as “systemic solutions for systemic problems.” This, despite it including a 26% increase in fracking, continued subsidies for Royal Dutch Shell and its LNG plant partners and the biggest-ever planned widening of the Trans Canada Highway for single-occupancy vehicles. Today, the party touts the “Clean BC” plan as its signature contribution, despite that plan including an increase in coal exports and doubling the rate of logging and mining in the province.

The justification the Greens offer is that if they brought the government down, they might lose their seats in the BC legislature. In an exercise in the most empty, tautological understanding of politics, the goal of having Greens holding elected office is an end in itself, the purpose of the party.

The party’s embrace of the crassest and most empty electoralism has had me working through a profound sense of personal guilt. You see, the Green Party used to be a party that understood its goals not in terms of electoral success, but of social change. I was one of the leaders of a generational shift in Anglo American Green politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s that transformed the party into a primarily electoral vehicle, focused on acting through elections to achieve change.

We didn’t mean to initiate a process that would empty the party of principle and meaning. But maybe the choices my comrades and I made in seizing control of the party and refocusing it on contesting elections had led, inevitably, to this counterfeit, this ugly parody of Green politics we see enacted not just in BC, but on the floor of the legislature in Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. If only we had listened to the party elders of the 1980s, this descent could have been avoided and Green parties in North America would be a force for good today.

Maybe we should not have made enemies of the 1970s counterculture survivors and back-to-the-landers from whom we seized control of the BC Greens through a painful and embarrassing series of confrontations between 1988 and 1994.

Then I read Michael M’Gonigle’s opinion piece this week.

And it all came flooding back: why we did what we did and why the solutions offered by the party’s boomer leadership in its founding decade (1980-89) make even less sense today.

M’Gonigle, a great environmentalist, writer and scholar, was one of the founding members of Greenpeace International and claims to have been a co-founder of the BC Greens. As the guy who actually typed-in the names and addresses from the party’s rolodex of 1983 members and the faded dot matrix print-outs of the 1984 and ’85 members to the party’s new database software in 1989, I have some doubts about that second claim. Other Greenpeace founders were on that list, though: Paul Watson, Rod Marining and Jim Bohlen.

And although they loathed each other from Greenpeace days, both Bohlen and Watson were part of the fractious alliance I put together to oppose, if not M’Gonigle, then the many active party members who shared his thinking. From 1988, when it began losing control of the party to 1993, when it disbanded, this group called itself the Ecofeminist Caucus and it embraced not just Ecofeminism but many of the nascent ideologies popular among Anglo American Greens, especially Bioregionalism, the ideology that most strongly informs M’Gonigle’s piece, as well as Murray Bookchin’s two intellectual interventions, Social Ecology and Libertarian Municipalism.

When efforts to form a Canadian Green Party began with the candidacies of Elizabeth May, Anne Trudell and others in the 1980 election as the Small Party, its backbone was, as M’Gonigle nostalgically acknowledges, back-to-the-landers and residents of urban communes. This was an era of high unemployment and economic recession but also wof generous welfare state income support programs, student grants and easy-to-obtain white collar employment for those with advanced degrees. Unemployment was being driven, at this point, primarily by deindustrialization and the so-called “energy crisis” in which high oil and coal prices were combining with the early stages of neoliberalism to produce major layoffs in the manufacturing sector. This led to double-digit interest rates on mortgages and bank foreclosures that produced a major crash in real estate prices in the early 80s.

Whether still living in the original 1970s-style rural and urban communes or in more loosely-organized “intentional communities,” of discrete, proximate dwellings sharing resources, that were taking advantage of cheap rents and foreclosures in the deindustrializing rural periphery, this movement shared a general vision.

My intellectual mentor, David Lewis, the climate change activist, giant, firewood collector and founder of the FOOLs (Friends of the Ozone Layer) who lived in the midst of this scene in the Slocan Valley, was able to cut through the many differences in the founding party base to explain their essential basis of unity: the embryo theory.

Whether one were a Bioregionalist doing permacultural subsistence farming in the Shuswap or a Marilyn French-inspired Ecofeminist co-op house in Kitsilano, the idea was that one’s domestic space was the foundation of one’s politics, not merely to the extent that “the personal is the political,” but that our primary job was to create an embryo of the society one wished to create. Bioregionalists focused on living on the land in the way they believed our descendants would need to. Ecofeminists focused on living the non-hierarchical gender relations our descendants would need to. The idea was that if we created the future society “in embryo,” the embryo would grow to the point where these alternative living arrangements would come to encompass all of society, giving birth to a new order.

It followed, then, that the Green Party was to be the most ambitious embryonic project because it was not so much an entity advocating the creation of a new society but the embryo of its future government. The crew that Lewis disparaged as “embrymorons” held that the job of the party was to create a miniature model of the governance of the future feminist confederation of bioregions. Its work was, therefore, to be the new politics. The new politics had already arrived; it just needed to be refined through experimentation.

  • Electoral politics was to be replaced by participatory democracy, so the party would not elect a leader.
  • Voting was to be replaced by consensus, so the party held marathon meetings to achieve unanimity.
  • Countries and provinces were to be replaced by bioregions, so the party chose not to have a central mailing address or office in Ontario or BC.
  • Bioregionalism also meant that, because provincial ridings were not based on valley bottom-based eco-regions, the party would have no riding associations and hold no nomination meetings.
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This worked for a while because the social movements from which the party drew support were communes and intentional community networks. They had built useful, functional institutions like regional barter banks, locally. They came together regionally at gatherings like the Stein Festival and Hat Creek Gathering and, North America-wide there was even the North American Bioregional Congress (NABC), attended by thousands at its zenith.

But we know what happened as economic conditions changed. Land prices began rising again. Neoliberalism began stripping away income support programs like welfare and unemployment insurance. Professionalized music festivals replaced the summer calendar of participatory countercultural gatherings. Even for those with advanced degrees, jobs became scarcer, more insecure and more demanding of adherence to cultural mores and norms. Second wave feminism was fatally weakened by the “porn split” within and “the backlash” without. And the baby boomers got older, more jaded, more tired, more conservative.

Before the Ecofeminist Caucus and their counterparts outside BC lost control of the Green parties of Anglo America, the institutions from which they drew strength withered first. NABC died. Communes and intentional communities flew apart. The rural counterculturalists who remained had to make new accommodations and alliances in collapsing rural communities as mills closed. Former dissidents became the pillars of communities, chairing library boards, running local museums and accepting seats on the Chamber of Commerce and Cattlemen’s Association.

And there was a new wave of Greens, younger people like me, whose politics was motivated by a profound sense of science-based urgency. The Antarctic Ozone Hole opened, then the Arctic Ozone Hole. As the G7 smashed the power of OPEC, the “energy crisis” was replaced by rapidly rising carbon emissions from the coal and oil sectors. A mainstream politics of energy conservation and transition to renewables vanished with the Carter presidency. Not only was there a neoliberal consensus across the spectrum in favour of austerity; the NDP of Roy Romanow and Mike Harcourt were at the forefront of North America’s first fracked gas boom.

For us, it was not enough to work for long-term change. Human civilization was a car flooring the gas off a cliff and someone had to apply the brake. Immediately. And one of the few points where one could exercise immediate pressure was electoral politics. It seemed to us a gross act of negligence for those not interested in doing electoral politics to control a mechanism legally constituted for the purpose of running candidates in elections. Our response to the Greens who identified with M’Gonigle was “do your embryo politics in movement groups; just let us run candidates and try to move the mainstream political discourse, maybe even elect a few people.”

The counter-argument we faced was that somehow the Green Party running candidates was inhibiting others in the movement from practicing the politics of the embryo. But nobody has ever been able to explain how having a Green Party genuinely fight an election without tying both of its hands behind its back inhibits the kind of organizing M’Gonigle and company favour. But we didn’t so much win the argument for an electorally-focused Green Party; the embryo-ists were already collapsing, as a set of linked social movements, due to changing material conditions in North American society.

Today’s Green Party is worse than useless. But trying to construct a time machine to 1980 is not going to help. The reason the Greens are such a problematic force has to do with their decision to align with the emerging professional class produced by the Third Way austerity programs of the 1990s and 00s. Today, the Greens are a party of managers and aspiring managers of the QuaNGO (quasi-non-governmental organization) sector, organizations like BC Spaces for Nature, that blossomed under politicians like Mike Harcourt, under the patronage of family trusts like the Tides and Maytree Foundations or even the sponsorship of Big Oil, like the Pew Charitable Trust, which emerged as a major funder of BC’s environmental movement in the mid-90s.

Yet, despite the sorry state of green electoral politics in this country, we see the rise of a vibrant new, holistic green politics. Thousands of young people have been in the streets this past year, staging climate strikes, demanding a Green New Deal, shutting down ports to stop pipelines, making common cause with indigenous communities to protect their land and stop the genocide they face from a militarized RCMP. They have shouldered past the NGO executive directors, the Green MLAs and city councilors, past those who claimed to be leading them to forge a new politics that responds to the social and economic conditions of the present, and to the escalating extinctions, wildfires, droughts and storms that the climate crisis is producing.

That’s why, last year, four veterans of the struggles of the 1980s that M’Gonigle is seeking to re-litigate founded the BC Ecosocialist Party, not to be led by us, but as a tool, a weapon, that these young people can wield. Because, like the North American Bioregional Congress of the 1980s, the Green Party is a dead organization walking, a historical irrelevancy requiring not reform but a dignified burial.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Why Use Laws to Stop Covid-19 When You Can Have a Moral Panic Instead?

Statistically speaking, British Columbians have been a lucky lucky bunch so far in the Coronavirus global pandemic. Compared to our immediate neighbours, Alberta and Washington, we have enjoyed low rates of infection, low death rates and have not run out of hospital beds for Covid-19 patients once.

Given the relatively lax rules concerning the industrial, building trades and agricultural sectors compared to California, Ontario, Québec and New York, where things are going far worse, we have to acknowledge that at least some of this is a result of sheer luck. But luck can, by no means, account for all of the difference.

One reason we have been touched comparatively lightly so far is culture. Like so many people my age, when I think about the place I am from, I imagine it as it was when I first became an adult and developed impressions of it. For me, BC will, in a way, always be located in 1994. It will always be a rough and tumble place whose politics is dominated by its industrial hinterland, a culture where the populist demagogues of the right squared off with the populist demagogues of the left to capture the imagination of Williams Lake, Merritt and Port Alberni.

But it is not that place anymore. One of the reasons I feel so much more comfortable in Prince George than in my home town of Vancouver is that it is hard to find BC’s old populist, mill town culture, even when there is still a nearby mill. The huge urban majority of the southwest that dominates our politics and culture has changed a lot; its politics don’t follow the lead of Campbell River; they follow the lead of the Napa Valley. Our people are, for the most part, no longer a populist lot but are, instead part of the coastal progressive urban culture of Anglo America’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts.

Meanwhile, Ontario, which used to be the centre of Anglo progressivism in Canada is now full of angry, confused, politically volatile populists represented by characters like Doug Ford. Toronto may be Chicago-north but it is surrounded an Ontario that is far more Michigan than Illinois.

This was brought home to me when I was chatting with a guy in my building about a month after Covid hit and I asked him why he thought we were comparatively unscathed, compared to his relatives’ home, Toronto. He responded that it was because BC’s Chief Medical Health Officer, Bonnie Henry, had ordered major lockdowns all over the province, banned travel, banned evictions and shut down the entire manufacturing and building trades sectors. Ontario, on the other hand, hadn’t done those things. So they were reaping what they had sewn.

Except, of course, that the opposite was true.

Ontario had ordered an industrial shutdown and BC had refused to. Ontario had shut down most construction and BC had refused to. BC had even gone so far as to strip local governments of the right to enact more stringent emergency measures and forced travelers into jurisdictions unwilling to accept them. 

But, I realized, there was a way in which what my neighbour was saying actually was true. People in BC had acted as though nearly every piece of non-binding advice Henry had given them was a law being enforced at gun point. Meanwhile, Ontario’s industrial leaders and their workers just assumed Ford was blustering and grandstanding; he couldn’t really have meant for them to shut down.

BC has become such a progressive place, such a Approaching online drug store is more convenient viagra cheapest pharmacy rather than OTC medicines. The process starts with the sexual arousal, and the brain discount levitra online provides signals to the penile nerve actively. Once the sexual intercourse is over, these veins open up again and blood flows in a normal manner and the person is able to sustain erection properly and get rid of all kinds of difficulties regarding email and stuff. discount tadalafil Many people using this medicine do not have serious side cialis brand online effects. worshipper of technocratic authority that, in addition to making icons, shoes and beverages in tribute to Henry, they treat her word as something better than law, as gospel. Essentially, BC has, culturally, become a place that epitomizes the great neoliberal law enforcement principle, “voluntary compliance.”

This key aspect of BC culture is about to serve our government even better as we enter the next stage of Covid response, i.e. where we call low-wage workers back to work in dangerous and unnecessary jobs like restaurant wait staff to “reopen the economy.” To be clear, folks, “the economy” has never been closed. We just reduced the number of activities in the economy likely to cause pointless deaths. But, because some businesses might go under and our economy might shrink, we have decided to end special pandemic income assistance programs and tell bars, pubs and restaurants to reopen so that, even if people want to stay away from their old table waiting or night club bouncer or exotic dancer job, the government will force them to return to work by ending the eviction moratorium and CERB, giving them a choice to return to a high-risk job or be thrown onto the street.

Consequently, we know the number of Covid cases will continue to rise as the government makes more decisions to forcibly march people back to work at high-risk jobs.

As we watch these cases increase, a logical response might be to issue a new order to close restaurant and club table service; we might also close public space conducive to large, tightly-packed crowds gathering or, heaven forbid, enact laws at the provincial, federal or municipal level to permit ticketing and fining of events that violate our non-binding crowd guidelines.

In response to the rise in cases the past week following the “reopening,” the government could be making and enforcing laws that keep us safe and housed. Instead, there has been a pivot.

Remember when everything was on fire on a scale never seen before, when wildfires destroyed homes, towns and wreathed the West in smoke for months? There was the evacuation of Fort MacMurray as it almost seemed like God was forcing the tar sands industrial complex to reap what it had sown.

Canada’s capitalist governments and media began focusing on how young people were being careless by smoking when camping or violating campfire bans. A picture began to be painted, showing the true culprits: people in their early twenties, having too good a time, being self-centred and not caring about their elders, disrespecting authority and causing death and ruin with their youthful inattention and carelessness.

It is these images that our government sought to replace other images in our minds, of Stephen Harper, of Royal Dutch Shell, of Suncor, of Enbridge, the image of a field of oil wells, giving way to an image of scantily-clad young people smoking a joint in the woods, having too good a time at all our expense.

This is a kind of moral panic, a cultural phenomenon whereby a society becomes very concerned about something suddenly and seeks to exculpate itself from blame and instead blame contemporary youth culture for whatever the problem. Blame for increased property crime is shifted away from addiction, mental health and collapse of the welfare state and onto “youth gangs,” ideally racialized ones. Blame for a planet burning to death is shifted from Big Oil and onto young hosers smoking a joint and looking at the stars.

Make no mistake: BC’s establishment has decided to cover the fact that they are willing to kill people to make more money in the hospitality sector by creating a moral panic. Look at al those photos out there suddenly of all those attractive young people in bathing suits. (Don’t you wish you looked that good still? Don’t you wish those young people would sleep with you instead of each other? Isn’t a disgrace that they don’t even know who you are, much less respect you?) Look at their smug, indifferent expressions, smiling and drinking!

The government’s reaction to these kids is, of course, not to enact or enforce laws to stop them doing this sort of thing, as with other matters of life and death, seat belts or non-smoking areas. No. It is to beg them, plead with them, scold them, via a program they do not watch or listen to, to please please stop. Because, as I stated early in the pandemic, the scolding is the point.

Every day, we could issue an order or make a law. But we don’t.

In fact, these young people need to keep making these displays and then being scolded because that is the cover the local bar owner needs in order to recall his youthful serving staff, who are working madly to avoid eviction, and not at the beach at all. Those youthful serving staff can then serve the older, richer people who, by the end of the night, will often be too disinhibited to physically distance, even if they wished to. And when deaths begin to further escalate, nobody will be looking at the bar; everyone will be looking at kids at the beach.

And the best thing about our made-in-BC moral panic is that our province’s newly progressive culture of voluntary compliance will feel guiltless about blaming young hosers and their party on Okanagan Lake for the deaths of those forced back to work in a vortex of contagion, by heartless government policy decisions. In fact, we will happily conflate and confuse these two groups because of their youth and think that all those servers probably had it coming. After all, they were not voluntarily compliant; and that’s un-British Columbian.

Blaming youth culture for the results of systemic oppression and inequality: that’s BC!

BC Politics | fusangite |

“And that is why I have decided to call this album ‘Frank Sings Tunes that the Young People Will Enjoy'”: the Children of the Gentry Won’t Save Us

On May 22nd, 1982, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch in which Joe Piscopo played Frank Sinatra who, late in his career, had decided to make his music more relevant to young people. “And that is why I have decided to call this album,” Piscopo’s Sinatra shouted, “FRANK SINGS TUNES THAT THE YOUNG PEOPLE WILL ENJOY.”

I quote this sketch all the time because its thematic material is just as relevant to the business of left-wing activism as it is to music, perhaps more so. Doing non-monetized activism for socialist and environmentalist causes is hard, demoralizing work that is often characterized by simultaneous conflict with one’s adversaries and one’s putative allies. Often, in the chaos of an ever-changing matrix of movement groups, leadership classes and ideological fads, it is difficult to maintain one’s bearings and, relatedly, one’s relevance in the larger activist community.

A common solution to this problem is to associate oneself with “the young people,” a nebulous category that allows one to cherry-pick a set of allies from a wide diversity of youth movements that are engaging in the activist world at any given time. If one is associated with young people and their activism, it does redound to the relevance and popularity of one’s own. This, in turn, has led to a strange fetishization of associations with youthful people, language and culture on the left that often functions—in and of itself—as a source of legitimacy.

Lest people get me wrong here, let me make clear that I began not just as a young activist but as a youth activist; my longest-running activist campaign in the 1980s was fighting for abolition of the voting age, beginning in 1985. I desperately wanted to work, as an equal, with older activists than myself. It was at this time that I first noticed this fetishization, what youth were for in the larger left activist context: we were cultural and aesthetic props in the life narratives of older folks. As a profoundly uncool kid, devoid of musical taste, fashion sense or association with any youth cultural activity cooler than Dungeons and Dragons, I was quite useless for these purposes.

While I was able to build a movement of hundreds of young, fee-paying members, my total lack of youth cultural capital made this movement pariahs among older activists who were eager to patronize young scenesters who could confer the kind of cultural capital they sought.

Another thing that kept my movement and me safely away from more powerful, senior allies was our lack of association with the university system. I dropped out of university in 1990 to be an activist full-time and this had been preceded by a prodigious career of skipping school. Few of my associates, even the cool ones, went to university. So it was that even though my closest organizing associate, Paul, was a good-looking musician and smooth talker, he also found himself far from any patronage, being a full-time worker with no postsecondary credentials.

This is because the youth culture that is most likely to be fetishized on the left is the youth culture that is best publicized, richest in cash, whitest and highest-status, in other words, the culture of the children of the bourgeoisie. This culture is the most resourced to put on public events, the target of most youth-focused advertising and the For more information, please visit 99eyao website: Or see related articles like White Discharge after Urination or Stool Not Always Prostatitis: Prostatitis is a cialis canada cheap common andrology disease, and usually occurs in young adults, middle-aged men, the prevalence rate was nearly 20%. How can one buy kamagra? Every form is obtainable through sildenafil buy a registered drugstore;one can also buy Kamagra tablets or other product for good sexual health. The safe and all natural women viagra canada pharmacies sex capsule in India: Fezinilcapsule is the valuable and amazing sex capsule for female. Psychosexual therapy is one among the widely prescribed treatments for impotence in old cialis without prescription uk age. easiest to find: they are on the campus of your local North American liberal arts college, Centre, Brown, Bishop’s or Quest.

They have plenty of time during the day to stage small rallies and be interviewed by the media. They have institutional support to assist them in producing publications and holding events. They are often the ones with the gumption to shoulder-past other organizers to stand at the front of a march, literally and figuratively. They are not the kids organizing other Uber drivers to unionize, other cashiers to strike for higher pay, other illegal immigrants to obtain sanctuary; they are not even easy to find at your local polytechnic institution.

Back in the 1960s, the culture of this group did spread from the small elite colleges to the major public universities, giving rise to the counterculture and getting a lot of bodies to marches and protests. Children of the working class and petit bourgeoisie became, for a short time, a portion of that culture, but only at the zenith of the welfare state when student grants were plentiful and tuition fees negligible.

Nevertheless, people look back with fond nostalgia for what the Great Society and the Pearsonian Welfare State created in the US and Canada, this dazzling period of protest. And yet, in hindsight, when we look at the real political gains that were made, we credit the movements that were mostly not absorbed into the counterculture. The Southern Christian Leadership Convention stands out; the Black Panthers stand out; quiet revolutionaries like Therese Casgrain and Pierre Bourgault stand out; the Yippies do not.

Some scholars today feel that the spread of the Counterculture, i.e. the youth culture of the bourgeoisie, actually inhibited and foreclosed the growing revolutionary possibilities that the material and legal realignments of the Great Society made possible. This reappraisal has been part of a larger intellectual phenomenon to reassess the Baby Boomers as a generation and emphasize the similarities rather than the differences between today’s Fox News viewers and occupiers of university administration buildings demanding that they be able to grade themselves.

It is in this light that we might want to worry about making the same mistake again. Today, there are so many youth-driven movements on things that matter to older activists like me: the climate strikes, the unionization drives, Black Lives Matter and a host of others. But in our efforts to “sing tunes that the young people will enjoy,” we make two major errors that compound with one another.

First, we assume that the culture of the young people actually getting things done is the same as the youth culture of Centre College, Brown or Dartmouth. Second, we assume that because this culture views cultural conformity and the ability to enforce new cultural norms as highly important, that more relevant young activists do too. I fear that we are wrong on both counts and that, even as #OkBoomer has become a witty intervention against the sanctimonious bullshit of history’s most entitled generation, we are repeating the very error of Boomer era and confusing the culture of the children of the elite with revolutionary practice.

There are a lot of kids out there to admire. Let’s take some time to choose the right ones.

BC Politics Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

The Curious Personality Cult of Bonnie Henry

Dr. Bonnie Henry (people love using the honorific) is very cross about so many British Columbians traveling over Easter weekend. Yet she had the power to stop them but instead used her extraordinary emergency powers to make that travel easier. To unlock this paradox, I offer a fairly deep think. I have divided it into two sections, as has become my custom for pieces that require an extended introduction. So, if you are already familiar with my arguments about progressivism, the Third Way and blue boxes, scroll down to section two.

Third Wayism and the Managerial Class in BC

British Columbia’s provincial government is, much to the disappointment of environmentalists, socialists and anti-establishment populists probably the government in North America that most completely embodies neoliberal progressive technocracy, that set of cultural practices, social values, aesthetics and government policies that animated the Third Way governments of the 1990s. The BC government led by Mike Harcourt (1991-96) can be viewed as a forerunner of the regimes of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and other social democrats-turned free marketers around the industrialized world.

Like all governments in the 1990s, at the zenith of neoliberalism, these governments enacted policies of austerity, privatization and deregulation. But they presented these efforts as their opposite, claiming to increase government programs, citizen entitlements and protective regulation for public and environmental safety.

For instance, Third Way governments might close long-term care facilities for the disabled and elderly but enter into “partnerships” with small businesses, churches or charities to deliver the same service, minus the wages, working conditions and safety standards associated with government facilities. Similarly, they might increase the length of the legislation governing logging on public lands but consign all new “regulations” to an appendix that offered non-binding “best practices” advice to businesspeople interested in increasing their operating costs for no particular reason. They might introduce a new financial benefit for the working poor but only permit those whose tax filings were up-to-date to collect it and fund it with a 10% cut to the support given to the unemployed.

A key element of how neoliberal governments of all kinds, but Third Way ones in particular, managed to argue that they were expanding the regulatory scope of the state while, at the same time, engaging in deregulation and austerity, was the “principle of voluntary compliance.” Warmly embraced by Canada’s 1990s Third Way federal government, in particular, it was argued that the state should assume people would voluntarily comply with any law, without any monitoring or enforcement mechanism. The argument was that “educating” the public on the need to comply with the law was far more efficient and cost-effective than actually creating or expanding surveillance and enforcement bureaucracies. Voluntary compliance regimes were generally found to be a huge success, especially because most information on their success came through self-reporting by the regulated.

Voluntary compliance regimes became the way new policies rolled-out. Municipal composting and recycling are the most visible examples: colourful, prominently displayed objects showing one’s voluntary compliance with a government initiative. These were part of a whole galaxy of initiatives that today’s alt-right calls “virtue signaling,” only some of which originated in the state. “Baby on board” bumper stickers, “one less car” stickers on bicycles were part of a galaxy of signs that people used to show voluntary compliance with everything from non-binding international climate agreements to new standards of best parenting practices.

While governments pushed the falsehood of high levels of compliance with voluntarily enforced policies, their actual success came from the fact that compliance was uneven and exhibited predictable patterns that strongly correlated to class.

 “Progressive,” in the Canadian, as opposed to American political lexicon, held a pretty stable, fixed meaning from its introduction at the beginning of the twentieth century. Progressivism was the political consciousness of the managerial class; until the twenty-first century, progressives existed in all political parties, comprising that portion of the managerial class and those who had adopted their values, that existed in that party. In the twenty-first century, there was a major migration of right-wing and centrist progressives from conservative parties into parties of the left and centre but their position on the left-right political spectrum did not really shift. Instead, Canada’s partisan alignment changed. The New Democrats, Liberals and Greens became parties that laid claim to representing progressives of both the left and right. The new Conservative Party became an anti-technocratic party seeking to represent both the political right and populists opposed to the managerial class.

While the contents of a householder’s blue box or green bin tells one little about where they are on the left-right political spectrum; it tells us a lot about their class and ideological community. Signs of voluntary compliance function as a reliable proxy for subscription to progressivism. This is not to suggest that environmental concern was not shared by people of all classes but the meticulous folding, washing and stacking the municipal bureaucrats chose to “voluntarily” impose of householders meant that a properly curated blue box that fully embraced the spirit of progressivism was one ideal for public display on a porch, a privilege many working class people were denied by virtue of not having a porch. The curious decision by many cities, including my home town, to make these programs unavailable to apartment-dwellers, despite it being more efficient to collect recyclables from them also signaled the true purpose of the box: to display one’s civic-mindedness, self-control and investment in zero-utility ritual acts like washing cans until their labels were gone and their metal sparkled.

The other thing about blue boxes, the main practical way individuals related to “environmentalism” in the 1990s was that they were almost completely useless. In Vancouver, the costs of shipping scrap metal and glass for recycling often exceeded their value at the point of sale. So, more often than not, blue box glass would be carefully collected and then dumped back into municipal dump with all the garbage it had been carefully separated from by individual consumers. This often happened to metal cans and newsprint too. More sinister was the RDF (“resource-derived fuel”) industry that crushed paper and plastic into pellets and sold them as a dirtier substitute for thermal coal in the developing world. In this way, instead of burying plastic and paper, blue boxes made it possible to convert this waste into a toxic, climate-changing gas.

In other words, the main point of blue boxes was giving progressives the opportunity to engage in weekly rituals that showed themselves and others that they were more educated and self-disciplined. Nevertheless, many municipalities, including Vancouver, my home town, introduced them with a sense of somber urgency. And yet, when questioned by the local waste reduction activist group, Citizens’ Action Network, they could not explain why their program was completely voluntary, with no fines for non-compliance. The CAN spokesperson observed at the city’s main public hearing, “if this will save lives, why isn’t it being implemented like seatbelt legislation?”

The point of neoliberal programs based on voluntary compliance has never been, primarily, about producing environmental, economic or, as we are now seeing, public health outcomes. It is primarily That’s why many people prefer natural treatments. 4. cialis prices Whenever you imagine ED you picture men in their 60’s or 70’s older men. slovak-republic.org buy cialis soft Solicitors Go Here viagra buy india can give you correct advice according to your problems. The excessive release of enzyme PDE5 type can be due to the physiological and psychological factors that can cause erectile dysfunction include the following: Relationship problems Depression Anxiety and performance issues viagra cheap online Stress Pressure at work In some cases erectile dysfunction will only occur in a particular situation. about allowing a certain portion of the bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie, the managerial class, to perform their class identity by showing self-control, organization and concern.

The Cult of Bonnie Henry

It is this class that forms the fan base of BC’s Chief Medical Health Officer Bonnie Henry today. And how do they love her? Let me count the ways.

Technocratic Authority

First of all, there is the fact that BC’s neoliberal government of technocratic progressives platform her in a different way than Prairie and Central Canadian right-wing populist regimes. The conservative ethno-nationalist populists east of the Rockies place elected officials centre-stage when their governments speak about the Covid crisis and new measures the state is taking to control it. In BC, two spokespeople are put forward, the Minister of Health, who, although he is an elected official, rose to prominence as a senior civil servant in the 1990s and the supposedly apolitical Chief Medical Health Officer. In most publicity photos of their daily news conferences, the Minister is standing slightly to the left and two and a half feet behind Henry, who takes centre stage. In this way, the first message people receive is that senior bureaucrats and not elected officials are the true decision-makers, the central demand of the progressive movement for the past century and a quarter.

Technocratic Pageantry

Second, there is the costuming. Ever since the credit markets of the Hanseatic League were encoded as “signs of election” in Calvinist Christianity, the ability to show one’s clothing to be immaculately clean, very expensive and not showy has served as a proxy for self-control, the virtue deemed most important by progressives. I happen to share Brian Fawcett’s contention that progressivism is the modern manifestation of this theory of Christianity and that the managerial class understands itself, in a secular sense, to be “the elect,” the self-controlled bourgeois minority whom Calvin saw as the residents of the Kingdom of Heaven. Henry’s shoes are routinely photographed and have formed part of the daily Twitter ritual whereby BC’s progressive elect praise the Chief Medical Health Officer for, not so much the information she provides, but the self-control she exhibits when taking hostile questions that question her application of medical knowledge to the current pandemic.

The Triumph of Expertise over Knowledge

Third, there is the way in which she subordinates knowledge to expert authority. One of the major projects of the managerial class in reshaping public discourse through Third Wayism has been the conversion of public debates about knowledge into public debates about expert authority. In this way, we have gone from saying “carbon atoms are released by fossil fuels and carbon works as an insulator everywhere you see it; the atmosphere is not different” to “97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is human-caused; do you want to go against this expert consensus?” Henry’s policies for handling the Covid pandemic have been assailed by hundreds of doctors and nurses across the province for their concurrent timidity and riskiness. The chief of medicine of the province’s oldest, most venerable hospital is among them. Henry and her defenders do not engage directly with the criticisms made by those doctors and do not participate in public discourse defending the reasonableness of her policies.

Instead, they focus on the fact that Henry is the most senior doctor in the province and the one who hold a title that confers on her a monopoly on expert knowledge. They argue that there is a zero sum of medical authority in the province and that, because we are in an emergency, it has been drained out of all other doctors and concentrated in one spectacularly-shod body. Needless to say, when objections and concerns are raised by indigenous communities, rural municipalities and their journalists, Henry’s rejoinder is “first, we must be kind; we must be calm,” and then she pivots and never answers the question or concern. And the managerial class cheer because she has properly dressed-down someone who presumes to have an opinion without any of the trappings of expert authority, no title, no fancy degree.

Class Aspiration

Fourth, Henry has attained a high level of popularity because she does not merely appeal to the progressive technocratic class but to the aspirations of struggling urban middle and working class British Columbians to join it. One way that she has done this is by asking her viewers to take a collective leap of faith with her. BC has fewer restrictions on movement and congregating than pretty much any other Canadian jurisdiction. On top of that, the province has one of the lowest rates of Covid-testing; tests are rationed and often not even administered to people physicians suspect of having the virus if they fall outside the age range in which the government is testing. Self-isolating and even quarantined individuals are often denied tests.

As a substitute for widespread testing, Henry offers smugness. Because we have tested a smaller proportion of our population than many places in the industrialized West, and we typically compare jurisdictions’ number of infections rather than rate thereof per capita, Henry can show that BC has far fewer infections than Quebec or Ontario, similar jurisdictions that are double, and triple, respectively, BC’s size. She then explains this by arguing that British Columbians do not need the coercive measuresto prevent congregation and movement that exist in other places because we are such extraordinarily civic-minded and self-controlled people. This is an appealing message: the whole province is being described, relative to the rest of the world, as the progressive elect, a whole people who conduct themselves like the managerial class.

And this should surprise us not at all. Henry’s first brush with national fame was being named in the SARS inquiry report in which she was accused of denying people at the hospital she administered testing so that she could falsely claim to have stopped its spread.

The Scolding is the Point

Fifth, and most disturbingly, Henry has substituted scolding for enforcement and in this way, has fully captured the politics of the blue box. Henry refuses to place limits on crowd sizes at industrial and construction operations, unlike the ethnonationalist xenophobic boobs of Central Canada, Doug Ford and Francois Legault. Instead, she prefers to scold individuals who do not follow her non-binding guidelines for how to run a 1000+-person work camp. Similarly, when the government forced coastal communities to end their isolation protocols and open their ferry terminals, and when that same government placed no warnings, notices or advisories on any of the ferry sailings for Easter weekend, rather than ordering checkpoints, cancelations or proof of residence documentation , something fully within her legal power, her impulse was to scold travelers for not listening to her warnings about not traveling for the holiday weekend.

There were, of course, multiple levels to this scolding. Nobody is required to watch the Adrian Dix-Bonnie Henry daily dog and pony show on TV or online. Consequently, because most of the announcements are non-binding and have no legal force, many British Columbians who cannot watch bloodless technocratic pageantry, myself included, do not tune in to Henry’s show. First and foremost, she is scolding people for that. People would know how to conduct themselves correctly if they became fans of her show.

More importantly, Henry is scolding ignorant, unsophisticated people whose natural response to a major civilization-wide crisis is to take a break from news media and focus on their families, homes and mental health, incorrectly assuming that if the government had something important to say, they would be notified through something like an amber alert. So, Henry is scolding those who do not see themselves as consumers of the news as inferior members of society.

More importantly, still, Henry is scolding people because they lack the self-control that distinguishes the managerial class as the elect. The BC government restores a bunch of sailings on its ferry fleet to scenic destinations. It expands its ferry reservation system to pre-pandemic capacity. The sun comes out. And this allows us to see who is a member of the self-controlled, civically responsible elect and who succumbs to the temptations the progressive state has intentionally placed before them.

The point, in other words, is the test. Exalting the progressive class and scolding those beneath it is a more powerful moral and public policy imperative than stopping the spread of Covid-19. It is such a powerful imperative that it is likely operating unconsciously through a set of uninterrogated assumptions.

And besides, who will really be hurt by the flood of the masses into rural communities? Like the camp workers of the North and the Indigenous communities next to them, the people who will be infected don’t really matter. They work in food service, hospitality, transportation logistics and they live in rural communities. Many of them are young and will not ever be tested.

It’s almost as though heaping abuse on those outside the elect is the primary function of BC’s response to the epidemic. And not just the heaping of abuse but the passive-aggressive, mealy-mouthed abuse of “first, we must be kind; we must be calm,” as communities express their rage at being stripped of the power to protect themselves by the very state authority that is scolding them for their indecorous discourse.

Stuart Parker is currently working through Los Altos Institute to produce a book on the Covid Crisis called The Austerity Virus.

BC Politics | fusangite |

The Hollow Earth: Neoliberalism’s Encounter with Covid-19 and the Uberization of Society

            This essay begins with a long discussion of my old friend George and how I came to know the central anecdote in this story. If you want to skip ahead to the jeremiad about neoliberalism, just scroll down to section two.

George M Gibault (1949-2016)

George in his last years

            My late friend George Gibault served as the BC Social Credit caucus Director of Research from 1975-1995. George was an eccentric polymath and one of the finest strategists the political right has ever had in BC. When not teaching himself different regional styles of banjo music or how to speak Latvian, he was involved in a long thought experiment about what kind of language super-intelligent space-faring dogs would speak. A Turkic language, he decided.

            For obvious reasons, George and I became fast friends when Troy Lanigan, head of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, and I bumped into him en route to our lunch meeting to discuss how to keep the BC Electoral Change Coalition together in 1998. We became aware that Troy had paid our bill and left hours ago when the restaurant finally told us they were closing. Like what we call “cultural historians” in my line of work, George had an uncanny talent for seeing something universal, structural and profound in a society by examining the thinking of those at its periphery. For this reason, we both had a carefully curated set of illustrative anecdotes about our encounters with people more eccentric than ourselves, anecdotes that were not merely funny but either were, had been or would be illustrative of something pressing and profound in human society. This is the first (but will not be the last) of my posts whose foundation is a George Gibault story.

(It is also worth noting that this story also formed the foundation of a shockingly prescient role-playing game Philip Freeman and I ran in 2003-06, which predicted the burkini, ISIL, increasing rates of gender reassignment surgery, rolling coal and the globalization of OK! Magazine, among other things.)

George had many jobs in addition to his formal role in the Social Credit governments that ruled BC from 1975-91, as a strategist, administrator and policy wonk. But one of his most cherished was one of several he was forced to take on following the accession of Bill Vander Zalm to the premier’s chair. “The Zalm,” was a tad eccentric, himself, and liked to shoot from the hip policy- and strategy-wise; at one point, he took a three-month leave of absence from the premiership to star in the Sinterlkaas Fantasy, an CTV-Dutch co-production in which he played both Santa Claus and himself, set in Fantasy Gardens, the theme park he did not just run but resided in. So George appointed himself as the person who would take meetings on the premier’s behalf that might otherwise cause the premier to fly off on an unhelpful tangent.

One such meeting was with the leader of the Ontario Social Credit Party. The Social Credit movement had begun in Canada during the inter-war years as a conspiratorial and somewhat confused offshoot of William Jennings Bryan’s popular monetary reform movement in the US. The original Social Credit parties in Canada were explicitly anti-Semitic and believed that provincial governments printing as much of their own scrip as they wished would get Canada out from under the International Zionist Conspiracy that was controlling all governments through the monetary system.

In the 1940s and 50s, in BC and Alberta, Social Credit parties became big-tent anti-communist parties of liberals, Tories and populists whose purpose was to keep socialists, trade unionists and urban liberal cultural elites out of office. And to a lesser extent, the national Social Credit movement had followed suit, becoming a primarily anti-communist, anti-metric, anti-secularism organization where the anti-Semitism was kept to a dull roar.

The Hollow Earth

But by 1989, when the Ontario Socred leader arrived, the BC party was just two years away from electoral obliteration and Social Credit in the rest of Canada had died back to fringe status by the end of the 70s. George figured that the last thing his boss needed was a dose of anti-Semitic conspiracy thinking from some wingnut from Ontario. Besides, George, himself, was curious about what the guy had to say.

“The number one issue,” the guest from Ontario explained, “is Global Warming.”

“Really?” George replied. “Why?”

“We have to accelerate it.”

The reason, the man explained, was that the earth is hollow. The inside is a Dyson sphere with a tiny black sun in the very centre, providing a small amount of warmth. Over 90% of all of the Jews live inside the earth, which is made out of gold. They retain their dominance over the world economy by shipping the gold to their coreligionists on the surface through secret passages under the polar ice caps.

It was necessary to increase BC’s carbon order cialis australia After grabbing that authentication the drug starts working within half an hour of taking meal. This causes the veins of the penis to absorb a greater amount cialis overnight delivery http://www.heritageihc.com/buy5785.html of blood, upon which the muscles become more comprehensive. These combinations are purchase levitra http://www.heritageihc.com/visit then tested in clinical trials to see how effective they are. You’ll be able to attend the classes according to your time tadalafil super active and convenience. emissions, he explained, in order to melt the polar ice caps and reveal the secret passages. Then we could invade the centre of the earth and everyone would have all the gold they needed. This, then, would end world hunger.

I think George made the right move. The Zalm might have been convinced. Today, after all, he is campaigning against chemtrails.

For many years, I delivered this story with the “end world hunger” bit acting as a punchline, to explain to my economic history students some basic things about what currency reform can and cannot do.

But this vision has been haunting me of late. Because it describes the incipient class system that the Covid-19 global pandemic is producing, especially in jurisdictions run by “progressive,” technocratic neoliberal governments like BC’s. Depending on one’s class experiences of the pandemic in such places are radically different.

Members of the managerial class, comprising managers, college instructors, lawyers, government bureaucrats and other white collar workers have had their workplaces shut down under crowd-size rules. They have been ordered either to work from home or to go home and stay on a state-funded work furlough, and have been asked to leave their homes as infrequently as possible.

Importantly, almost no new managerial or instructional jobs are being created, while many are ceasing to exist. Were one to try to find work in such a sector, one’s job search would be fruitless.

But now, let us think about those who work with their hands, cashiers, construction workers, industrial workers, delivery drivers, taxi operators, etc. In BC, in the case of construction and industrial workers, not only have crowd size rules been suspended at their workplaces; their works has been declared an essential service. Building condos, building dams, digging pipelines are all areas of work where every safety rule to prevent the spread of Covid-19 has been turned into a non-binding guideline, and the government has promised that nobody will inspect work sites, to even check for guideline compliance.

Worse yet, such work has been declared an essential service, making it pretty much impossible for anyone to obtain the necessary layoff notice to receive government assistance. That means that industrial and construction workers are being compelled on pain of bankruptcy and future homelessness to keep going to work in unsafe places under unsafe conditions.

But the real story is delivery drivers, the only growth area of the economy with new jobs being advertised. There are longer shifts for cashiers now, too, with special hours for elderly people to shop with greater distancing, creating more cashier jobs in key sectors like groceries and liquor. If one is in the customer service of driving business, the number of people you encounter per day does not decline at all. And, in many cases may increase. Former delivery drivers and cashiers, even if their wages were high enough to qualify for government employment benefits in the first place, and even if Uber Eats, Doordash or Skip the Dishes paid into government insurance programs, still could not obtain unemployment benefits because it is clearly demonstrable that there are jobs available for them, in the only growth sector of the job market. There are no layoff notices in this world, just desperate people in financed cars hoping to make enough money to keep it on the road.

When Uber busted its way into BC, we only envisaged the Uberization of taxi service. Instead, we are seeing the Uberization of society itself.

Strip away the pseudoscience and anti-Semitism and we find the world of the Ontario Social Credit Party emerging organically out of the collision of neoliberalism and a protracted global pandemic.

There are those who work INSIDE, in a safe place, made out of money, dimly lit by a dark sun. And there are those who work OUTSIDE, in a dangerous, lethal place, paid minimum wage or less, compelled to work whether they wish to or not, serving the INSIDE people under the light of a large, bright sun.

The people on the inside are financially secure, paid primarily by the state at a liveable rate with mortgage payments deferred and other small perks. The people on the outside are financially and physically insecure, paid primarily by private sector businesses at poverty wages, supplemented by occasional tips from the inside people. They must work because no government help is coming to replace their wages, working, as they do, in “essential” industries that, in some cases, are even growing. Their rent is not suspended. While temporarily protected from eviction, those who get behind can be evicted the day the state of emergency ends and are still subject to collection agent harassment, wage garnishment and civil suits for unpaid bills.

And the worst thing is that, unlike old Socred thinking, this is not the result of a conspiracy. This is simply the consequence of neoliberal societies’ encounter with a biological virus, somehow mutating both the virus and the societies into something both more lethal and more unjust.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Geekery Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

“The county parade must go on!”: How BC’s government is needlessly endangering Northerners, First Nations and industrial workers

On March 19th, 2020, at 3:00pm, the BC government made a fateful announcement: every workplace it deemed a “construction site” was exempt from the rules limiting large gatherings or enforcing social distancing to slow the spread of Corona virus.

When these rules first went into effect, many of the large employers in Northern BC who run our region’s globally notorious “man camps” had sent their employees home. Temporary worker camps typically have a single mess hall and canteen, some with capacities of over a thousand. While gatherings of twenty-six people and hole-in-the-wall restaurants were being shut down in urban BC, up North, in the bush, dining halls of hundreds began reopening on Thursday afternoon.

Fly-in workers from Edmonton to Vancouver began receiving notices to return to work. Those who feared the consequences of living, working and eating at close quarters with literally hundreds of others now had a Sophie’s choice. They could hop on that plane in Prince George, Kamloops, Edmonton or—worse—Vancouver’s YVR, one of the four points in Canada still handling international travelers and head to one the most infectious places in BC. Or they could refuse the order and quit their jobs, thereby rendering them and their families ineligible for the Employment Insurance benefits the federal government has made available to laid-off workers.

Could their families afford to go without any of the government assistance people out of work usually get and fail to pay for food, rent and the basics? Would it be better to risk spreading the virus faster but afford a roof over their heads or would it be better to risk eviction and no way to pay for groceries or medication?

While even conservative governments in Jason Kenney’s Alberta or Mike Pence’s Indiana were rolling out bridging income assistance and eviction bans to keep industrial workers safe, BC’s NDP chose to hold a knife to their throats instead, to force  them back to work on a series of dodgy vanity megaprojects like the Kitimat LNG project, Coastal Gas Link or the Site C dam.

Although I am a long-time critic of the NDP, this development puzzled me.

First of all, it was puzzling because, I guess I still sort-of believed in some of that naïve, urban, environmentalist mythology that the NDP loves industrial workers, especially unionized ones, and approves big projects to make sure they and their families are taken care of.

Second, as a newly-minted Northerner, I know how the NDP’s strategy for being re-elected with a majority government drives straight Most of the parents whose children are suffering from nephrotic syndrome feel puzzled, why the nephrotic syndrome relapses again and again. free sildenafil samples getting viagra wouroud.com The preferred dose for leisure purpose is 25mg. It provides essential nutrients for the optimum functioning cheap cialis tadalafil check that of prostate glands and testicles. The successive actions and impacts of this solution help to restrict the responsible enzyme’s movement to bring a shortage in the blood supply to the penile tissues. effects of cialis through towns like Terrace, Kitimat, Mackenzie and Prince George. Surely, the last thing they would want to do is endanger the locals in this region who keep the camps running. Isn’t the whole point of projects like CGL to charm our cooks and repairmen and wholesalers? Wouldn’t being blatantly negligent of their health be crazy?

Third, the government is always patting itself on the back for cultivating a pro-development constituency of indigenous people who will look past the way these camps create sexual violence and environmental degradation hotspots and use the economic opportunities these camps bring to lift themselves out of poverty. Isn’t turning this economic activity into twenty-first century smallpox blankets kind of insane?

I searched my memory in an attempt to find any way of making sense of the actions of the Horgan government. Even if, as I suspect, Horgan personally holds each of these groups in deep contempt, there is still a fair distance between contempt and this kind of depraved indifference to life. Even if he and his friends are on the take, which I do not believe they are, this seemed insufficient.

The county parade version of the Kingdom of the Spiders poster

Then I remembered Kingdom of the Spiders, the 1977 low-budget William Shatner horror movie, in which Shatner battles a group of super-intelligent giant tarantulas who attack a town. While there is plenty of time and more than enough resources to save the town, Shatner cannot convince the local mayor and sheriff to cancel the county parade. As the film goes on, it becomes clear that it is the local government that are the true villains because of their monomania for a meaningless local parade as the bodies begin to pile up.

When I first say the movie at the age of nine, I remember the most ridiculous and inexplicable scene for me was a local politician shouting “the county parade must go on,” even in the face of the advancing spider army and growing pile of corpses. Until yesterday, I considered that scene in the film to be the most absurd, the most campy, the most destructive of the suspension of disbelief.

Today, those of us who live in that swath of BC territory from Fort St. John to Kitimat are living that scene. Horgan sees the megaprojects for which he sacrificed so much political capital as his legacy, his proof that everything was worth it, a massive concrete acknowledgement that he has created a community of happy, healthy, safe people through his mercurial actions. Because LNG Canada is Horgan’s county parade, it must go on, no matter the cost because, otherwise, his time as premier will have meant nothing. He is gripped no longer by cold calculation and cynicism but by what I took to be bad acting when I was nine, a grinning mania for his supposed legacy, even if it takes him, and the rest of us down.

BC Politics | fusangite |

Why are we surprised the BC NDP is forcing thousands back to work in unsafe man camps for Big Oil?

Yesterday, at 3:00pm, the John Horgan government issued a shocking statement. Rules designed to protect public health than banned “large gatherings” of 250 or more people were rescinded for all major construction projects. Almost immediately, the man camps constructing various parts of the LNG Canada megaproject began ordering their fly-in employees back to work. These employees are being asked to return to job sites with as many as 1200 workers, with a single mess hall and canteen, and barracks-style residences at close quarters. To get to and from work, every three weeks, they will be flying through YVR, one of only four airports in Canada open to international travel.

It was at that moment that a certain naïve argument about NDP governments was, finally, laid to rest: the belief that the reason New Democrats make pro-oil, logging and mining industry decisions is because they are somehow beholden to private sector trade unions and industrial workers. This is not the case. Because, with this announcement, they have informed British Columbians that there is no one about whose lives they care about less.

Had the NDP not done this, companies like Kiewit would have had to issue layoff notices to their workers. Those workers could then have successfully applied for Employment Insurance benefits and had their replacement wages funded from federal government coffers. In other words, not lifting this order would have cost the BC government not one cent and kept workers with their families under safer conditions.

Instead, they have chosen to plunge those workers, many very frightened, into a cesspool of viral transmission, out of which they will rotate once every three weeks to interact with their families and with airport workers. There is no question that people will die because of this move. Because if they quit their jobs, they will not be eligible for government assistance. Just like the Community Benefits Agreements that are being used to justify the project’s pipeline, these are not voluntary decisions but decisions taken with a gun to the head, a knife to the throat: your choice: work in a giant infection zone or have your family thrown onto the street.

Why is that the choice? Well, because unlike the Republican government of Indiana, for instance, the BC NDP refuses to prohibit private landlords from evicting their tenants during the crisis. This act of extortion is not, in fact, happening all over the place. Somehow a Republican president, governor, senate majority and state legislative majority in the Midwest are outperforming the BC NDP in treating people who work with their hands with honour and care.

How we get here? The answer is simply, nostalgia. Today, when I was talking with an NDP stalwart on messenger, I suddenly got mad at myself. I said “this is like a bunch of black Republican activists in South Carolina complaining about how Newt Gingrich ruined the ‘party of Lincoln.’”

In NDP offices all over Canada, there are framed portraits of Tommy C. Douglas, the father of Medicare and the patriarch of Canadian socialism. They are no different than the portraits of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, that adorn the offices of Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence and a thousand other Republican legislators.

There is no question that the NDP were once the good guys, once the party of working people, the disabled, the poor, visible minorities. But, that was a really fucking long time ago, back in another century. Just like Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglas, Booker T Washington and Jackie Robinson are part of the Republican Party’s past.

But it has been as long since the BC NDP publicly renounced that heritage as it was between the nomination of Barry Goldwater on a pro-segregation platform in 1964 and Newt Gingrich’s ascent to Speaker of the On brand viagra no prescription the other side of the coin, anything ‘egg’ shaped is supposed to aid women’s fertility, this not necessarily going hand in hand with libido. Therefore, you will definitely find Tadaga medication in its websites for great relief from the condition. generic viagra cialis If you masturbate multiple times in a day then this trouble might get developed soon. canada cialis levitra Psychosexual therapy levitra 20mg uk can also help women overcome orgasm problems. House. In between, there had been Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” Reagan’s “welfare queens,” the Drug War, “Willie” Horton and a host of other crystal clear messages about who the GOP were.

We can do the same in BC.

On March 10th, 1989, the BC NDP’s leader Mike Harcourt announced that the “NDP no longer believes in the redistribution of wealth.” In October 1993, Harcourt unleashed the “BC Benefits” package of welfare reforms that increased homelessness in BC from 11000 to 27000 in eighteen months, that prohibited refugees both from working and receiving social assistance, the slashed welfare rates and capped the number of people who were permitted to be disabled at the same time.

In 1996, the BC NDP won re-election promising to take its (later found to be unconstitutional) policy of a three-month residency requirement for welfare and apply it to the education of newcomers’ children. They shelved the policy after the election. In 1999, they ended local district teacher bargaining and created the Public Sector Employers Council process that has inflicted unconstitutional austerity programs on BC schools for a generation.

In 2009, the BC NDP ran on an election platform called “Axe the Tax,” opposing North America’s first carbon tax and leavened with chequebook populism about how it would help people “keep money in their pockets.” Elsewhere in Canada, the Ontario NDP proposed the creation of a new ministry of austerity that would find new government cutbacks to make at a rate of $300 million per year.

It is no wonder that John Horgan gave $6 billion in new fossil fuel subsidies to companies like Royal Dutch Shell. Let’s remember that, less than six months after becoming premier, he told media he felt it was his civic duty to turn against social movements that backed the party.

I have focused a lot of attention on how Horgan is the guilty party, or how our collective leadership is, but really, the guilt belongs to every one of us who worked from 2001-17 to put this stagnant, corrupt, confused institution back in office. As I have written elsewhere, the real question is why social movements continued backing the NDP for more than a generation after they made it crystal clear who they were.

We are just as ridiculous as those half-dozen bewildered elderly professional suburbanites who are wheeled out to tell CNN how baffled they are, as moderate, freedom-loving Republicans at  what has happened to their party since the days of Dwight Eisenhower, who integrated the schools in Kansas, a man who last governed at the same time as Tommy Douglas.

BC Politics | fusangite |

The Trolling of the Wet’suwet’en – Part 2 of Rhetoric in the Horgan Pipeline Debacle

I see that, since my last blog post about the framing of the debate over the conflict that is paralyzing rail lines across the country that the public relations departments of government caucuses and the PR that work for Big Oil in Canada have been hard at work to reframe the debate into one that makes John Horgan, Justin Trudeau and Royal Dutch Shell not look like the absurd black-hatted villains of a 1970s political thriller that they actually are.

While some of this messaging has been highly predictable, there is a novel element that I should have expected to see but did not: the mainstreaming of troll discourse. While the alt-right’s weaponization of trolling has been a crucially important fact of local, regional and global politics for the past half-decade, what we are seeing in this pipeline debate is something new: the use of trolling by self-styled social democrats, liberals and the pundit class.

Trolling, as I have explained elsewhere, is a distinctive kind of bad faith debating whose goal is the provocation of one’s opponents into sounding unreasonable through the use of insults and dishonesty. The central feature of this strategy is feigning one’s own ignorance and stupidity, forcing one’s interlocutor to explain the most basic, fundamental information we all share.

A troll pretends to be stupid and ignorant and forces their interlocutor into increasingly bizarre and surreal debating territory by requiring them to show evidence for things that are universally known. This ends up either frustrating the troll’s interlocutor into withdrawing from debate, at which point, the troll claims victory. Alternatively, if the interlocutor appears to win, the troll reveals that they knew these things all along and that it is the interlocutor who is exposed as stupid for not having realized this. Heads, I win; tails, you lose.

So, central to the rhetorical pushback against the most popular and effective indigenous land protector movement in modern Canadian history is our liberal journalistic and media establishment all collectively pretending total ignorance as to how indigenous governments and treaty rights work.

Nobody is our media establishment is unaware that indigenous nations on unceded territory are represented in court and in treaty negotiations by what are called “traditional governments,” i.e. the governments that existed when settlers first began their unauthorized seizures of indigenous territory. Our media establishment is well aware, lest their be any ambiguity in the matter, that the First Nation that established that legal precedent in 1997 are the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs and that they were recognized by the Supreme Court as the government with which colonial governments must deal concerning the traditional territory.

Had the current Unistoten Crisis happened a decade ago, my local newspaper editor would have bemoaned the fact that it is unfair that the Hereditary Chiefs are the representatives of the Wet’suwet’en and not some other organization (more on that later). But today, the tactic is to pretend not to know this to be the case, to argue that chiefs of reserves hundreds of kilometres away are the true authorities and then feign surprise when told that the Constitution and Supreme Court are clear that they are not.

Often, as it did this morning on my local radio station, this happens multiple times in the same interview to the same interview subject, the bad faith clearly evident in the feigned surprise about the same factoid multiple times in the same conversation.

This kind of provocation was most dramatically shown in Michael Enright’s interview of Grand Chief Stewart Philip last week when the grand old man of Canadian radio news asked “are your people being napalmed?” Putting forward bad faith questions, resting upon known falsehoods has become the order of the day in liberal Canada’s consent factory.

Here what we see is not just trolling but “concern trolling,” feigning concern about a thing that is not happening and using this as a strawman to then argue there is nothing to be concerned about. We see this when women report physical intimidation by men; the response by misogynists is to pretend to believe the woman has claimed that intimidation escalated to violence. “How hard did he hit you?” is a question designed to force a woman to explain that she was not assaulted, thereby making it appear she had nothing to be concerned about to avoid being misrepresented as making a false claim of assault. In this way, feigned concern about something that did not happen is used to suggest that what has happened and is happening does not merit concern, like sniper rifles pointed at land defenders.

Increasingly, in our mainstream media and in debates with elected politicians of Canada’s colonial governments, land defenders and their allies are not being interviewed or debated; we are being trolled through intentional bad faith questioning.

Another striking element of alt-right discourse going mainstream are conspiracy theories arguing that large, shadowy, foreign organizations are giving massive financial and organizational support to the land defenders and their young supporters across the country. The myth of the paid protester is one of long standing and goes back more than a century. What is striking, now, is that these theories are being put forward in articles and tweets by the most prominent and senior members of BC’s legislative press gallery. Organizations called “the swarm” and “the hive” are being credited with a massive, coordinated plan directed from outside the country with not a single citation, attribution or on-the-record comment.

This is then picked-up by Tory MPs and MLAs who suggest that it is foreign oil interests who are controlling naïve youth through the strategic placement of hundreds of paid organizers around the country, despite not being able to find even one paranoiac local RCMP captain to back up these outrageous claims.

Again, what were the tactics of Breitbart and InfoWars are now the tactics of the most venerable institutions of If you are planning to purchase VigRX http://miamistonecrabs.com/viagra-8388 cheapest viagra pills but feel embarrass to ask from your doctor to figure out what is causing your anxiety. This completion certificate is the demand of authorities of many states, so make sure you choose your online drivers ed Ohio shows that traditional classroom courses for obtaining the driving license is now passe, as the same knowledge can be acquired online sitting best buy on cialis in the comforts of your home. If panic is a brand viagra pfizer recurring problem, some call it a disorder. It has been studies that more and cheapest price on tadalafil more young men for whom sex simply fades towards the second or third place. the fourth estate in our country.

While these new methods are being used, they are being combined into new toxic compounds with old school anti-Indigenous propaganda.

“The Wet’suwet’en are divided” the story goes. By this, our talking heads appear to mean that there is a spectrum of opinion within the Wet’suwet’en about the conflict over their traditional territory. Wouldn’t it be weird if there were not? What nation of humans all hold identical opinions about any issue? Essentially, Indigenous people are being held to a standard of unanimity that no society, Indigenous or otherwise, has met, could meet or ever will meet.

When rebutted, this tired colonial trope is redeployed as follows: the band councils on Wet’suwet’en reserves have signed benefit agreements with the corporate surrogate of Royal Dutch Shell to get a small cut of the supposed profits of this future pipeline. But the court judgement that lays out how to interact with First Nations is clear that these reserve governments do not possess and have never possessed the authority to make agreements about matters outside of the reserves.

To offer an equivalent situation, let us imagine that the USA wished to make a treaty with us to divert water from the Great Lakes to solve droughts Nevada and the Canadian parliament turned that down. Let us suppose that they then went to the City of Sarnia, the City of St. Catherines, the Village of Napanee, the City of Belleville and the District of Pickering and offered them a certain amount of money for every gallon extracted from the Great Lakes.

Could they spin that as “Canadians are divided. We’ll just come and take their water because we can’t figure out what they really want”? That is the situation we have here. The idea that you can do an end-run around a government that conducts foreign policy by offering small bribes to local mayors is a laughable contention when not applied to Indigenous people.

Then, as our troll interlocutors reveal themselves to be even better informed than we guess, they bust out this factoid: the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary chiefs is actually the body where the position on the pipeline is being fought-out, litigated and debated, that some old chiefs have been deposed and other new chiefs have been elected, that the Chiefs is a body that is riven with division in an acrimonious debate.

Just imagine, for a moment, that we turned the situation around. Is this not a perfectly good description of the House of Commons? At least the Wet’suwet’en put the faction that has the most support in charge, as opposed to our antiquated voting system, which put the crew with the second-most votes back in charge. Our government is also divided. It has more factions than the Wet’suwet’en. Those in charge enjoy not a majority of the vote, as with the Hereditary Chiefs, but a plurality, a plurality deriving from a relic of the voting system’s original design in rural England in the thirteenth century. Justin Trudeau wishes he had a government as secure and stable as his adversaries’.

Of course, it is not just Indigenous people whose image is being distorted through ugly stereotypes. The young people in our cities and towns who are shutting down rail lines and traffic are being accused of being “ignorant” and “uninformed.”

The basis of this accusation is that not all of them know the legal processes within Wet’suwet’en law that have given rise to the current traditional government. A shockingly large number do and have performed that competence and erudition in interviews that have mostly ended up on the cutting room floor. Like all those black voters in Jim Crow Mississippi who passed the literacy test. But this, too, is unreasonable. These protesters are allies because they share the Hereditary Chiefs’ opposition to the pipeline.

When we went to war to prevent the Bosnian genocide in Kosovo, no Canadian who supported our troops was expected to know whether Kosovo was part of Bosnia or Serbia, whether its government had been elected, how its government had been elected, whether it was facing the Serbian army of Slobodan Milosevic or the Bosnian Serb militia of Radovan Karadzic. What mattered was that we stood with our allies in NATO in stopping the genocide; one’s concern for Bosnian Muslim lives was not viewed as illegitimate because one lacked interest in Balkan governance factoids and micro-history.

A similar accusation of “ignorance” is also applied to protesters who claim that they are blocking roads and rail lines out of concern for climate change. “Ha!” the Rex Murphys of the world exclaim, “don’t they know it’s about land not climate! These people don’t even know what this is about!”

Nobody I have met who cares about climate does not also care about Indigenous land rights. Nobody I have met who cares about Indigenous land rights does not care about climate. The very definition of an alliance are multiple groups with shared, overlapping interests and that is exactly the situation with respect to the climate justice movement and the land protection movement. Our media’s decision to repackage youth climate activist solidarity with land protectors as ignorance of the land protectors’ agenda is, again, more bad faith, more sophistry.

Our country is being trolled by an industry-captured political class and media elite. And we need to respond in the only way you can to a troll: “You don’t believe what you say you believe. So why should I?”

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Struggling to Be a Socialist Internationalist on Unceded Territory

In this day of rampant Identitarianism, contradictory laws and escalating brutal colonialism in BC, there is a lot of confusion about the relationship between white settler activists like me and the Wet’suwet’en people and allied First Nations with whom we are working to oppose the pipeline being built for Royal Dutch Shell’s export terminal in Kitimat.

In thinking through my own relationship, I found my commitment to socialist internationalism helpful in puzzling out where I stand and what my relationship is to my allies. Socialist internationalists work for socialism in the political jurisdiction in which they are residents through a variety of means like unionizing fellow workers, building socialist political parties to contest elections and engaging in acts of protest and witnessing against capitalist exploitation.

As a socialist internationalist and Canadian citizen residing in BC, I need to work against the capitalist policies of my government at work, at election time and in the streets.

My governments, both provincial and federal, are doing a bunch of very bad things right now, one of which is giving billions of dollars in subsidies to transnational oil companies to frack gas in the Peace Region of BC and Alberta, pipe it to export terminals in Kitimat and Squamish and then send it overseas to be added to the other fossil fuels burned in East Asia.

That project is a monstrous project, an evil project, an omnicidal project and I am duty bound, as a socialist in BC, to oppose it, to fight it, otherwise there will be the blood of millions on my hands. It is my government’s plan and so it is, first and foremost, the responsibility of those governed by it to stop it.

Socialist internationalists also have an obligation to support anti-capitalist movements in other political jurisdictions around the world. Unlike Stalinists and Maoists, our internationalism is not about supporting governments we like in other countries but forming alliances with parties and movements who share our values and priorities in those other places. Sometimes those parties and movements are part of governing coalitions but most are opposition movements like us.

We also have an obligation to form alliances with such movements in what we call the Fourth World, places that colonists are still in the process of conquering, occupied territories like Palestine, Highland Guatemala, Chiapas, Bolivia, the Central Kalahari where indigenous governments and people’s movements are contesting colonial governments for control.

Most of British Columbia is part of the Fourth World, a place where Indigenous governments are contesting the power of the colonial state. The territory of the Wet’suwet’en people is part of the Fourth World.

My allies are the movements within the Wet’suwet’en who share my belief in climate justice, land reform and a host of other issues. An exciting thing happened in this part of the Fourth World in 2019: the movement for climate justice and land reform took clear control of the most powerful Wet’suwet’en institution, the Hereditary Chiefs. By a narrow vote, three pro-development chiefs were deposed for betraying their duty to protect their traditional territory.

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But let us consider what would have happened if that crucial vote had gone a different way in 2019. What if, by a one-vote margin, the pro-development hereditary chiefs had removed those supporting climate justice and land reform?

In that case, the minority who lost the vote would need international solidarity all the more; it would have become even more important to stand in solidarity with those individuals and give them the support they need if their traditional government had turned against them and joined with the band councils bought off by Royal Dutch Shell’s consortium.

Recognizing the inherent jurisdiction of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs is not the same as declaring that government to be infallible. That government is correct right now and has, for more than a century, consistently been on the right side of history. But that does not mean we should substitute its judgement for our own.

Ever since the modern alliance between environmentalists and traditional Indigenous governments emerged in BC in the late 1970s, an unhelpful romanticism has crept into the environmental movement, one that casts Indigenous people in the role of oracle or messiah, in an anthropological trope that has been with us for 2500 years, ever since Herodotus first wrote of “the blameless Ethiopians who still dine with the gods.”

And that means we need to be honest in portraying ourselves as the allies not the surrogates of the Wet’suwet’en. Indigenous people in Canada consistently demand nation-to-nation relationships so let us take that seriously. Indigenous people are not the “true owners” of British Columbia.

BC is a tool designed by the British Empire to destroy and replace Indigenous nations; it sits on top of them and its claims to their bodies and fates is to be contested. It is our job to dismantle and repurpose that monster and do our best to bridle it until that work is done. When we have done that, maybe we can make it begin negotiating in good faith with the First Nations that preceded it.

Until then, let us continue making alliances with our friends and comrades throughout the world, and especially in the parts of the Fourth World with which BC overlaps. Let us keep besieging the legislature arm-in-arm with First Nations as we are today.

But let us not mistake our allies for our own leaders, leaders it is our responsibility to produce. We are responsible for this mess and we must take action to clean it up; we are humbled and forever grateful for the help we are receiving from our Indigenous allies pitching in on cleaning up our mess. But we must never make carrying out our responsibilities contingent on the help of people from whom we have already taken too much.

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