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BC Politics - 4. page

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

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.

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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?”

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

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.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Time to Tear off the Masks in the Media’s Framing of the Horgan Pipeline Debacle

Names are important. Terms are important. We need to use them more carefully and precisely than ever in this current era of spin, obfuscation, fake news and outright lies that comprise a larger and larger proportion of both our social and mainstream media.

Since having policy analyst Adam Finch on my show two weeks ago to talk about some of this, I have noticed bigger and bigger dangers ahead of those of us opposing the construction of a new pipeline from the Peace Region to Kitimat. If we are not careful, the justice, popularity and relevance of our cause could be compromised through a carefully crafted agenda of de-politicization and obfuscation that Big Oil and its servant governments are engaged in already.

In the grand tradition of rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke, I will try to show how our language is being crafted to achieve the political objectives of our enemies. Let us begin by looking at whom media coverage identifies as the protagonists and antagonists in this pipeline battle.

Coastal Gas Link: The primary antagonist, from the perspective of our side, is portrayed as a company nobody has ever heard of, Coastal Gas Link (CGL). CGL also has the benefit of having no consumer-level customers; not only does it have a negligible media profile but, because of its remoteness from the consumer, it cannot be subject to boycott campaigns; it has no storefronts so no sales can be disrupted by picketing; the only people on whose good opinion CGL depends for its profits are oil companies. So, rather than portraying the villain in our story as the companies whose gas will go through the pipe or the companies building the LNG terminal in Kitimat for whose use the pipe is being built, we keep hearing about a smaller company whom nobody can boycott or picket. And there is a reason for that.

The RCMP: The secondary antagonist in this narrative is the main police force in BC. Many of our cities do not have municipal police forces, including our second-largest city, Surrey. This means that more than a million British Columbians identify the RCMP as the police force that polices their streets, guards their homes and answers 911 calls. But, of course, the RCMP did not just decide out of the blue to head up to Unist’ot’en and start cracking heads. That is because a sacrosanct element of our social contract is the civilian oversight of the police. Since 2001, BC’s system of government has placed those oversight duties in the hands of a provincial cabinet minister called the Solicitor-General.

You may remember that our last Solicitor-General, Rich Coleman, is facing a probe by a special prosecutor because he used his power as the commander of the RCMP in our province to shut down criminal investigations of money laundering. Many NDP politicians have noted that Coleman’s direct oversight of the RCMP makes him the person primarily responsible for the law enforcement decisions by the RCMP about whom and what to investigate. So, the decisions about what to enforce and how to enforce it are made by a real person, democratically elected and accountable, John Horgan’s Solicitor General, Mike Farnworth.

It is worth noting that Mike Farnworth is the only member of the BC legislature who was also an elected government MLA during the last NDP government’s intentional escalation of the Gustafsen Lake siege, which involved the deployment of land mines and the firing of over 14,000 rounds of ammunition at indigenous land protectors, decisions that court documents later exposed as intentional, political decisions made by NDP cabinet ministers.

The Injunction: Some apologists for Farnworth make an argument similar to one made by NDP supporters during the Clayoquot Sound mass arrests and trials of 1993 in which I was incarcerated. They argue that the RCMP and Solicitor-General’s hands are tied because people are being arrested for violating a court order obtained by the pipeline company from the BC Supreme Court. This is true. But here are some things that are also true:

  • The injunction’s existence is contingent upon a set of permits already awarded by the province for constructing the pipeline; the BC government is free, at any time, to revoke those permits and the injunction would cease to exist.
  • The injunction’s existence is also contingent upon a final unissued permit not being denied; the BC government can, at any time, evaluate this final permit and deny it and the injunction would cease to exist.
  • The Solicitor-General might well be over-reaching if he singled out a lone injunction and told his employees not to enforce it. But he is well within his rights to put forward general policing policies that all members of his police force must abide by. These might include not interrupting traditional indigenous activities on unceded land whose status is before the BC Treaty Commission, or not conducting military-style assaults against racialized populations, or not destroying valuables like vehicles, healing centres, works of art, trap lines, etc. in the course of carrying out their business. He could even go with something really basic, like “don’t beat up journalists and stop them filing stories by detaining them.” But he has not. He could, at any time. But he has not.
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So while the injunction’s existence is not the Mike Farnworth’s doing, its enforcement is. And while its creation is not the doing of George Heyman, the Minister of Environment, its continued existence is.

The Rule of Law: The term “the rule of law” is often deployed to refer to times when governments are constrained by the constitutional order from impinging on the rights of citizens. “We are bound by the rule of law,” has been used in the past by governments to explain why they were no longer entitled to jail women for seeking reproductive healthcare or why they officers were no longer allowed to engage in carding or “stop and frisk” practices. Here, the meaning has been turned on its head to de-politicize political decisions, to distance the decisions to build a pipeline, to force it through unceded, contested territory from the people who made those decisions, the elected BC and Canadian governments.

Now, let us turn this around and think about the words that are not being used, beginning with whom and for what the pipeline is being built. Coastal Gas Link is building the pipeline for:

Royal Dutch Shell: Shell Canada is a subsidiary of a transnational oil company called Royal Dutch Shell. It is Royal Dutch Shell the transnational corporation that is the biggest private sector investor in the Kitimat LNG project for which the pipeline is being built. It is also the biggest recipient of the $6 billion in subsidies by the Horgan government that caused the project to be launched. So, unlike CGL, there are literally hundreds of gas stations, convenience stores and offices all over Canada that people can easily picket. There is a company that that one can boycott.

In fact, Shell has been subject to a number of boycotts because this is not the first time it has made a deal with a government to extract and process oil and gas and then used that government’s police as company goons to intimidate racialized people opposing the project. In the 1980s, Shell was the subject of an international boycott because of its close association with South Africa, a white supremacist pariah state hated the world over for its system of racial segregation, violence and torture called “apartheid.” Shell was the main target of boycott efforts to bring down the white supremacist regime it funded.

Royal Dutch Shell settled out of court for Ken Saro Wiwa’s execution in 2009 for $15 million

In the 1990s, Shell used a combination of its hired goons and Nigeria’s military police to systematically murder the leadership of the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta. People like Ken Saro Wiwa were brutalized and eventually killed for standing up to Shell’s pipelines and refineries on their traditional territory.

Also note how when you say “Royal Dutch Shell,” all that Jason Kenney-Rachel Notley bullshit about “foreign money” backing Canadian environmentalists vanishes as a talking point. Shell is jointly incorporated in the Netherlands and UK.

Mike Farnworth, Solicitor-General & commander of BC’s RCMP

Mike Farnworth: While people have been pretty good at keeping the names “Justin Trudeau” and “John Horgan” in circulation, we have struggled to remind people that when they talk about how the RCMP are behaving, how they are doing their job, whom they are targeting for arrest, how many resources they are using, nobody mentions that those decisions are being made by a man with a name, address and phone number.

The BC NDP, the Green Party of BC and the Liberal Party of Canada: Let us remember that these are the parties that form the governments that issued the permits, that doled out the subsidies, whose MPs and MLAs all have to keep voting in favour of the permits, the subsidies and the continuation of the government every few weeks.

While there is real value in holding bad leaders accountable, we also have to remember that these parties’ caucuses could fire their leaders at any time and choose leaders who support climate justice. While there is real value in talking about a Trudeau government or a Horgan government, let us remember that the votes to keep these governments in power are cast by a minimum of 213 parliamentarians in Victoria and Ottawa.

Furthermore, these parties also have members who, in the case of John Horgan, returned him to the leadership of the party just three months ago with a 97% approval vote, ten months after the militarization of Wet’suwet’en territory began. That vote was given by hundreds of delegates to the party’s convention. Thousands of members of the BC Green Party will have a chance to vote for the party’s next leader this spring; if they vote for a leader who votes, once again, for fossil fuel subsidies next week, who refuses to say “pull the permits” or “cancel the pipelines” but instead continues in the party’s disingenuous “both sides” nonsense, they are complicit too. They are part of the machine that is committing this omnicide, this act of climate villainy and brutal, racist oppression.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

How I Helped Destroy Canadian Democracy: Part III: It Is Vetting Not Whipping That Destroys Our MPs

The story of my association with “candidate vetting,” is likely better known and simpler. In 2008, I supported an old friend’s campaign to become an NDP MP on Vancouver Island. But he and two other BC NDP candidates were forced to drop out of their respective races because news media and opposition researchers for their competitors dug up past scandals for which the NDP was ill-prepared. To avoid this process in future, New Democrats adopted a “candidate vetting” process.

Previously, any person could seek an NDP nomination at the riding level, obtain a nomination and then present the party leader with a choice to either sign the candidate’s papers, or risk local members not nominating an alternative. Now, the party took advantage of the 2003 Elections Act and created a new system. First, a candidate had to be ruled eligible to seek a nomination by a group of party staffers in head office who would administer a questionnaire and conduct research on the candidate to determine if they were “qualified.” The names of committee members, the contents of their deliberations, and the reasons for their decisions were all secret. Once a candidate was approved by this committee, they could then go about seeking a nomination at the riding level. In 2010, I was the first person in the party this committee ruled unqualified to seek a nomination, largely because of a Facebook post about the Gustafsen Lake siege of 1995.

Over time, this process has spread to all major Canadian parties, and now usually includes the payment of a non-refundable fee. What this means with respect to democracy is pretty clear: power does not primarily flow into a candidate from below, but from above. Whereas local members do not have the power to undo a candidates’ nomination, the vetting committee can at any time. The Liberal Party of Canada has taken this furthest by de-vetting an incumbent MP seeking re-nomination, simply because she was insufficiently full-throated in heaping false praise on her leader.

In this way, even an incumbent parliamentarian owes more to the party staffers above them than to the literally tens of thousands of voters who carry them across the line on election day. Given that over 80% of Canadians vote based on national leader or brand, rather than the identity of their local candidate, those who control a person’s access to the party name are the people on whom they are primarily dependent for their presence in the House of Commons.

To an even greater extent than citizens’ assemblies, practices of vetting are about undermining democratic representation. In a “vetted” nomination system, a candidate primarily serves the party staffers who have permitted them to run, and local party activists only secondarily, especially because the Elections Act specifically empowers party leaders to directly appoint candidates without oversight by local members. In this way, the act of representation that takes place is that the candidate or legislator’s job is to represent the interests of head office party staffers to local party activists and unaffiliated voters, because it is to them that they are primarily accountable.

Still, even with vetting in place, many Canadian parliamentarians still draw a considerable amount of power from building a base of local voters who are prepared pay to attend a local nominating meeting for a party to choose its candidate. This, again, is where demographic representation has been mobilized to shut down democratic representation.

As with vetting, it has been the party of Canada’s progressive technocrats that has led the way. Over the past decade, the BC NDP has enacted a Byzantine system of what might be mistaken for affirmative action, were it being practiced at a non-elite level. Over half of the provincial ridings not occupied by incumbents had to be represented by people from “equity-seeking” groups. What this means is that if a person did not come from an identity group that the party deemed “equity-seeking,” they were not eligible to seek a nomination.

In the piece I wrote about the Columbia River-Revelstoke NDP nomination race, I noted that this, in no way, precludes straight white patriarchs from contesting and winning local nomination races. Claim, without ever having taken a man on a date that anyone has witnessed, that you’ve sucked one dick, and you’re fine if the party brass likes you and need to you defeat a woman in a wheelchair.

On the other hand, if you’re a troublesome white man who is working class, on social assistance, with a history of conflict with the law, you’re triple-disqualified by a fee, the vetting committee’s search for trouble in your past, and the fact that poor people are not on the list of “equity seeking” groups who need more representation in our legislatures, according to the NDP.

But the adverse effects of these disqualifications are not just limited to the individuals and classes of people the disqualify. Their main effect is to change whom candidates and legislators represent. Every time a combination of vetting, fees, and this counterfeit affirmative action succeed in turning a contested nomination meeting into an acclamation because the party’s office has ruled only one candidate is eligible to seek a nomination, it fundamentally changes whom that person “represents.”
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If no local voters or party members are involved in selecting one as a candidate, those voters and members are owed nothing by the candidate. All of the candidate’s debts point upwards to the party staffers who disqualified every other candidate in order to anoint them. They do not represent local members of their party, the identity groups of which they are members or anyone else below them – their debts all point towards the party leader and the technocrats who run the party on their behalf.

If a member of an equity-seeking group seeks a party nomination and is subject to a contest, they are accountable to the local party members who voted for them and owe them representation in order to maintain their position. But if a member of such a group is acclaimed, their debts only point upwards. Instead of representing both local members and party brass, they represent only the latter. Their ability to represent members of the equity-seeking group(s) they purport to represent is contingent on grassroots members of that group mobilizing to win a local nominating contest, something purported efforts to empower minority groups now increasingly prevent.

 

As exemplified in the Green Party of Canada’s national campaign, many people have associated the steady decline in grassroots democracy and the vanishing of dissident or maverick MPs with the office of the party whip, the caucus member charged with ensuring other caucus members vote with the caucus majority. But if the office of whip were causing these changes, something about the office itself would have changed. But it has not; no legislative or constitutional changes have taken place to extend the office’s power. It is as powerful as it was three hundred years ago when it came into being.

If anything, the office of party whip has become less powerful as less and less authority is vested in a party leader’s caucus, while more and more is vested in their head office staff. While a whip can threaten, on behalf of a caucus, to remove a member, they cannot prevent that legislator from being re-nominated under the party banner. On the other hand, the leader’s core staffers cannot remove a member from caucus but they can prevent their renominattion, a far more powerful and serious threat.

The problem with the parliamentary and legislative caucuses of Canada’s major parties is not that the caucus has too much power and subjects its members to its consensus excessively. The problem with these caucuses is that they are almost powerless. The office of party whip could be abolished tomorrow, every vote in parliament declared a free vote and MPs in each party would all still act in lock step—because the powers controlling them are outside parliament. Faceless bureaucrats, not flamboyant and belligerent party whips, wield the power now.

But like so many white men, especially those of us who are newly white or nearly white, I have held back on putting this analysis together because I know that its full articulation will damage my reputation and upset my friends who care about it. I am making a complex argument that is easily misinterpreted. I feel considerable pressure to go along with the use of a false idea of demographic representation to smash democratic representation so I will not be called racist, homophobic, transphobic or misogynist.

But here’s how I see it: if I have been dealt into this absurd patriarchy as a culturally bourgeois white man who grew up in a rich neighbourhood and has a blue chip education, it is kind of my responsibility to call out a system designed to empower people like me at the expense of others. If I am safer and can lose less, is it not my responsibility to denounce this anti-democratic nonsense for what it is: a scheme to intensify white supremacy, male supremacy and bourgeois supremacy. Because, despite all the colourful optics, that is exactly what it is for and what it is doing right now.

At least in Canada, “progressives” are the problem, not the solution. If we want to actually democratize and emancipate ordinary, decent people so they can help save the planet, we have to stop toadying to our faction’s technocratic elite and head back into the streets—that’s the only place we will find the power and moral authority to turn this thing around.

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How I Helped Destroy Canadian Democracy: Part II: Citizens’ Assemblies Are an Elitist Cancer

Citizens’ assemblies are an idea that was introduced into Canadian politics as a direct consequence of decisions of which I was part and a movement I helped to build; their pernicious effects on Canadian democracy have only increased in the generation since these fateful decisions. In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Social Credit coalition, two groups that had been most involved in maintaining BC’s big tent centre-right party felt that their decades in the coalition had delivered little or nothing for them: the Christian Right and the “taxpayer” movement, organized under the aegis of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, a group with few formal members but many supporters, pushing what one might call a “neo-Jeffersonian” ideology.

Both of these groups, now exiled from the provincial government for the first time in sixteen years, went about organizing and members became involved in various projects: organizing more actively at the municipal level, working to build the modern electoral reform movement, working to build smaller boutique right-wing parties, working to re-create Social Credit under a new brand name, building the Reform Party of Canada in BC and participating in processes of intellectual and organizational renewal in right-wing civil society organizations.

Following the first-ever re-election of an NDP government in BC, this work intensified. A consequence of this was the creation of two voting reform organizations: Fair Voting BC, headed by former MLA and anti-abortion activist Nick Loenen, and the Electoral Change Coalition of BC, headed initially by Sonja Sanguinetti, president of the BC Liberal Party. However, Sanguinetti soon stepped down from this role and was replaced by Troy Lanigan, the BC spokesperson for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

This happened because while Lanigan’s (and, it happens, my) organization favoured a two-stage referendum process as was used in New Zealand, Loenen’s backed a citizens’ assembly, something that had never previously been used in Canada. Loenen’s argument was that politicians elected under first-past-the-post were in a conflict of interest in choosing a new voting system, as their material interests aligned with the current one. Therefore, the process of choosing a new system had to be de-politicized. During his MA studies at UBC and continued political activity in Richmond following his defeat, he, like the CTF crew, had become aware of a new approach to political decision-making that had been pioneered by the Republican Party in Orange County.

The Orange County GOP had, since the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign of 1964, been the intellectual vanguard of American conservatism producing what is called “Sunbelt populism” and the “Reagan Revolution,” developing language to popularize such ideas as “supply side economics.”

The Orange County GOP had found, as Christian, white and conservative demographic and electoral hegemony had been collapsing with major influxes of Jewish, liberal and LatinX voters, both elections and public consultation processes had been producing non and anti-conservative mobilization and representation. The old solution to maintain elite white power, the idea of “commission government” was not an option because the technocratic, professional class, from which city managers were drawn was also increasingly liberal and non-Christian, even if nearly just as white.

Whereas the process of mobilizing LatinX, low-income or non-white voters tended to move the opinions of those voters to the left, because of the inherent nature of movement-building and mass mobilization, what if voters could be “represented” or “consulted,” through a process that was inherently conservative, individualistic and elite-focused? And so, the citizens’ assembly was born. The technical name was “deliberative polling” but the aptly-named Jefferson Centre trademarked the term Citizens’ Assembly in 1971.

This system of replacing democratically representative bodies with demographically representative bodies was soon tested in other conservative bastions like Richmond, BC. Finally, the neighbourhood busybodies could be cut out of the equation, and the people directly “represented.” This idea had a certain appeal for those on the left too, who resented the over-representation of property-owning, conservative “NIMBYs” in both local government and consultation processes.

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In this way, the permanent government employees who “support” the assembly are the most influential upon it. In fact, the criteria for being part of deliberative polling is often a requirement to be disconnected from the social movements working on the issue before the group. In this way, those involved in deliberative polling serve no one and represent no one, in the democratic sense.

Yet, beginning in 1997, the voting reform movement chose to back-burner the idea of a two-stage referendum process and instead support the BC Liberal idea of a one-stage process, of an assembly followed by an up or down vote on its conclusions. While, in the case of the BC assembly, this was not a disaster for the voting reform movement—the assembly, for reasons that are still debated, gave us a highly saleable system. The problem was the discourse and theory of politics that it popularized, especially following the progressive take-over of the voting reform movement 2005-07.

Progressives began arguing that being politically mobilized about and committed to an issue was a conflict of interest and tainted the democratic process. Furthermore, because the permanent bureaucratic class, rather than elected representatives did the facilitation, research, etc. and essentially set the table for assemblies, including de facto writing the multiple choice question they were answering, progressives loved the idea of these focus groups because the professional class they typically comprised were running them. A focus group of random people disconnected from social movements, assisted by selfless bureaucrats simply seeking to use their education to create an ordered society was exactly the body that should be making political decisions. In fact, they began to argue that citizens’ assemblies were more politically legitimate than legislatures, that being demographically representative rather than being democratically representative was what gave a body the right to govern.

And it did not matter that, following the lucky strike in BC in 2004, citizens’ assemblies began recommending garbage, unsaleable voting systems in Prince Edward Island and Ontario. An important characteristic of these systems was their use of “closed lists.” In most systems of proportional representation, voters choose which individuals will benefit from their support for a political party. Whether open list, single transferable vote, single non-transferable vote, cumulative vote or whatever, in most PR systems, parties end up with the same share of the vote as their share of the seats, and their caucuses are composed of the party members who are most popular with the electorate and, consequently, bag the most individual votes.

In the majority of Canada’s citizens’ assemblies, guided by technocrats, populated by disconnected people, the consensus was to choose closed-list systems, the only proportional systems that share first-past-the-post’s defect that if a voter wishes to vote for a party, the party and not the voter chooses which of their candidates benefits from that vote. To be fair, this was not just a response to top-down leadership and disconnection from social movements. It was also the result of many progressive Canadians telling assemblies that, given a choice, Canadian voters would not choose female or non-white candidates to be beneficiaries of their votes, and therefore needed elites to direct their votes to the women and minorities whom voters were not wise enough to choose.

Because focus groups being guided by selfless technocrats to come up with more efficient means of imposing political order and social control is essentially the utopia imagined by the progressive managerial class, the orderly assembly and not the chaotic and diverse legislature has become the fetish object of the electoral reform movement. In this election, Fair Vote Canada is not endorsing, as it has in the past, legislation to immediately enact proportional representation. Instead, it is calling for a National Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform; it is not even demanding that its terms of reference restrict it to examining kinds of proportional representation. The goal of FVC, today, is no longer the enactment of PR, on which it was founded in 2001. The goal is to achieve whatever kind of voting system technocrats can facilitate a focus group consensus on, irrespective of whether it is even proportional.

This fetishization of neo-Jeffersonian, anti-democratic decision-making is not limited to voting reform anymore. Now, progressives are proposing it to solve all kinds of political deadlocks and disappointments that should be solved through citizen mobilization.

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How I Helped Destroy Canadian Democracy: Part I: Demographic vs. Democratic Representation

I have been trying to explain, for some time, how the rise of autocratic government and the collapse of democracy in Canada has taken a different route than in most of the world, and how the ways we nominate and legitimate candidates for elected office are the most top-down, elite-serving and anti-democratic in the Global North.

I have put this in various articles in various terms over the years, beginning with my warnings about the consequences of embedding a process called “vetting” in our nomination processes, following my own experience running afoul of this in 2010 (March 2010) and my return to this theme (May 2018). I have put this in terms of a labour systems problem and looking at the relationship between money, power and work in Canadian progressive civil society and parties (August 2016). I tried explaining the “russification” of Canadian political process and how, through a set of ad hoc, largely unprogrammatic decisions, between 1992 and 2009, political power was drained out of most institutions and people and into the offices of political party leaders (April 2015). I tried explaining this phenomenon from another perspective, looking at the political culture that led most Liberals and New Democrats to side with Stephen Harper and against their parties during the prorogation crisis of 2008, and how Canadians’ understanding of what it means to be a diverse country drove this (December 2008). I have also commented on how “progressive” measures supposedly serving “diversity” are absolutely contrary to efforts by working class, racialized people and women to install representatives who will serve their material concerns in the US (February 2019). And I have commented on how these ideas have been enacted within Canada’s New Democratic Party (May 2019).

But I still routinely talk to people with whom I otherwise agree, who are aware of my writing, at least in passing, who see “citizens’ assemblies” as an unqualified social and political good that should be more prevalent and powerful and who see candidate “vetting” as a thing to do right instead of wrong, rather than as anathema to the democratic process. So, clearly, I have done something wrong in my efforts to explain and sell my ideas. Consequently, I am going to write up as clearly and unambiguously as I can why these things are dangerous and bad and are wrecking Canada, and, as I go, explain how they are partly my fault and apologize for them.

To begin, I want to define some terms to refer to opposite concepts that people see as the same thing and use interchangeably:

Demographically representative: A body of people is demographically representative when it is composed of identity groups reflecting a microcosm of society at large. If a particular group or place is 51% female, the small group should be as close to 51% female as possible. If the particular group is 12% gay and lesbian, the smaller group should be as close as possible to 12% gay or lesbian. If the group or place is 40% liberal, the smaller group should be close to 40% liberal. If the group or place is 40% Liberal, the smaller group should be too. A demographically representative group is a microcosm of society and it is “representative” in the sense that it has the closest possible superficial resemblance to the larger group from which it was extracted. Until the 1990s, demographically representative samples were used in two places: market research/polling i.e. focus groups, and academic research in the health and social sciences i.e. focus groups and test cohorts.

Demographically representative groups were used to discover certain kinds of knowledge. The knowledge they were designed to discover was this: assuming the continuation of the status quo and with no significant change in the social order, how might individuals and groups react to a product, policy, event or health hazard? In other words, the premise of a focus group is to forecast outcomes provided the social order remains fundamentally unchanged. When focus groups were conceived of during the Cold War, nobody thought of the people in these groups as representing the interests of their identity group(s) as a whole. The information one might gain from a college-educated, working class, gay Filipino in a focus group would be how an individual typical of this set of groups might react to something. No one understood an individual focus group member to be a representative of or advocate for the interests of the groups they “represented” because that is not the sense in which the word “represent” was to be understood. Representation referred to resemblance, not to a position of advocacy for shared interests.

Democratically representative: This is a much older idea. The idea of democratic representation is that a group of people organize and come together for the purpose of concentrating their power in the hands of a representative individual in order to exercise political power. The more people participate in this act of upward delegation through voting or some other process, the more democratic the process is and the more power is concentrated in the representative.

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Often when people on the political left talk about representation, they talk past one another. Some people believe that Julian Castro is the 2020 Democratic primary contender who is most representative of LatinX people. That is true. He is clearly the most demographically representative. Some people believe that Bernie Sanders is the contender who is most representative of LatinX people. That is true too. He is the most democratically representative.

But I am not merely saying that these things are equally good and just different. My point is that making your elite demographically representative of the majority whom it oppresses makes that elite more secure and undermines democracy. In his book, City Trenches, Ira Katznelson lays this out. He explains that whom a representative serves is determined not by the identity groups the person is identified with, but rather who gives that person power and on whom they rely to maintain that power.

On more than one occasion, I have used the example of the Ottoman Empire to illustrate this. An Ottoman caliph (emperor) would choose a court demographically representative of the empire because the court’s job was to maintain the empire’s hierarchical order. If the caliph appointed a Greek Orthodox vizier (prime minister), the vizier served the interests of the caliph because the caliph could hire or fire him at will. But a vizier also had a larger interest: the continued domination of Greek orthodox people into the empire, because were Greeks to leave and form their own country, his appointment would no longer be demographically representative. Because a caliph’s court was a rhetorical project to show the empire as harmonious and diverse, even unrest among Greek orthodox Ottomans was contrary to a vizier’s interests. When an elite group of representatives is selected based on demographic representation, but is chosen from above and not through democratic representation, its interests and actions are not just unconnected to those; they are typically contrary to the interests of those in their identity groups.

This is something human beings have long understood. But modern liberals and progressives use etiquette and affect politics to prevent discussion of how this is shaking out, and instead attempt to impose a collective amnesia with respect to this foundational sociological knowledge.

This collective amnesia and failure of analysis has resulted in progressives hornswoggling other parts of the left into supporting two terrible ideas that contribute directly to the continuing decline of democracy in Canada and the centralization of power in a small group: citizens’ assemblies and candidate vetting.

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