BC Politics - 5. page

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

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.

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.

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: 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.

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.

In my last post I suggested that the New Democratic Party of Canada and its ilk are not unprincipled as many on the left suggest but instead have ideologically changed over the past generation and a half. For some, the knowledge that former social democratic parties, Third Way parties like the NDP are no longer socialist in character is sufficient. But I think that we need to go further to understand our present predicament. As we can now understand that these parties are here to actively stymie efforts to redistribute wealth or arrest the extinction event, it is important to comprehend and anticipate their actions, not so that we can work in concert with them but so as to prepare ourselves for their next move against us.

In my previous entry, I noted that we could adduce some of their priorities from their policy decisions. For instance, unlike twentieth-century social democrats who liked to socialize areas of the economy vulnerable to monopolization, modern Third Wayers believe that regulated monopolies and oligopolies are good ways to deliver things like railways and mass transit.

Another principle we can adduce from observation is a strong belief in meritocracy; we see this both within organizations supportive of these parties, in these parties themselves and encouraged within the state whenever these parties form government. This is because Third Way parties and their allies are not just vehicles for ideology or personal ambition; they are a larger project of class formation and class representation. And the specific meritocratic ideology they express and meritocratic practices they enact are of a piece with this.

A significant labour trend in small-p politics over the past generation and a half has been the increasing professionalization of the top tier of the non-profit activist sector. Today, most activism is directed not through democratic, volunteer-run locally-based cells of large organizations or through local independent activist organizations but instead through large, professionalized organizations managed and run by an emerging managerial class. The complex and strategic tasks of activism are not carried out in the non-monetized time of volunteers but in the monetized time of this emerging class. Similar to the original theory behind the post-Independence US military in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, part of this professional class’s skill set is the effective management of non- and partly-monetized labour so as to integrate or at least distract individuals wishing to engage as volunteers or members.

A similar trend has been taking place at universities as classroom teaching has shifted from a task primarily carried out by tenured and tenure-track faculty to one carried out primarily by temporary workers operating on four-month “hire at will” contracts without seniority rights or benefits. Because of the lack of continuity or stability in this growing part of the precariat, the work of producing a coherent curriculum or learning experience still falls to tenured faculty except that they are now expected to carry this task out not as instructors but as managers of instructors. The tenured professoriate has transformed from high-wage frontline workers into a new managerial class.

These two emerging groups are increasingly seamless with older professional formations, namely, what Vladimir Lenin termed “the labour aristocracy,” a permanent professional class of white collar managers running trade union pension funds, real estate portfolios, professionalized negotiating teams and a host of other duties. These individuals typically monopolize elected offices in unions, using the resources of incumbency in tandem with biased voting systems; or they occupy permanent unelected positions alongside elected ones, in which their position is understood to have been derived not from the democratic will of the members but from one’s professional qualifications to manage pensions, run real estate portfolios, etc.

The fourth group that intersects with these is the largest and most venerable, career civil servants, especially those working in the policy field. It is important to remember that in states like Canada, public policy is developed in two entirely separate streams: (a) inside political parties that choose leaders, field candidates, run on platforms and appoint cabinet ministers if they win and (b) inside the “policy” branches of the civil service in which a nominally non-partisan group of civil servants design policies based on a loose liberal utilitarian ideology. Many on the front lines in the civil service are engaged in micro-policy construction and many imagine their career as an ascent towards increasingly policy-oriented jobs walled-off from the direct delivery of government services.

These professional groups have increasingly converged to the point where one may move among them fairly effortlessly. In academic administration, professors increasingly work alongside individuals with MBAs and graduate “leadership” degrees or some go on to obtain similar credentials through Executive MBA programs. Once one has entered this class formation, one might find oneself the executive director of a Third Way party one year, an academic administrator the next, managing a trade union’s membership consultation process the next and then taking on a chief of staff, director of communications or deputy minister position for a Third Way government in the event of an election win. Perhaps, after the government’s defeat, one might take on a position at a management consulting, communications or government relations firm and then be hired as a contractor by one’s former colleagues at the university or union.

As Irene Silverblatt and Michel Foucault explain, one of the important features of modernity is the rise of a bureaucratic class, a portion of the bourgeoisie who understand that their right to make and enforce the rules of our society comes not from popular acclaim or heredity but instead of specialized knowledge. In this way, Silverblatt argues that the Spanish Inquisition was the first modern bureaucratic institution because the inquisitors understood their power and legitimacy as arising from their possession of knowledge, not from episcopacy or the throne. Inquisitors were policy-makers, analysts and investigators; torture was to be used sparingly, rationally and privately to produce the information necessary to legitimate punishment.

I want to suggest that those who think the NDP is not class-based or class-conscious party are dead wrong. It is simply that the NDP, like other Third Way parties, has changed which class it primarily represents. Today, the party is the class consciousness, i.e. the culture, ethics and interests of the bureaucratic class. This class rotates effortlessly among the private, non-profit and public sectors, technocrats who justify their power by constantly claiming to be producing new knowledge.
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With this understanding, all kinds of peculiar things about the BC NDP suddenly become explicable. Despite nomination meetings and leadership races being the main source of a party’s new members, the NDP has found them increasingly threatening and sought to shut them down by charging exorbitant fees to seek a nomination and then disqualifying large portions of candidates during a completely opaque process called “vetting” where head office staff determine whether a candidate would be a liability during a general election. Essentially, seeking an NDP candidate nomination is increasingly indistinguishable from a job interview for a technocratic position. This does not arise from some kind of internal corruption.

The reverse is true. The old NDP, the party that saw itself as representing the working class believed that the more working people who showed up to support a candidate, the more legitimate said candidate would be. But in progressive, technocratic thought, choosing someone who is more popular over someone who is more qualified is corruption, an affront to one’s values that esteem professional achievement and mastery of bureaucratic processes over simple popularity. It is out of a desire for purity, not expediency that becoming an NDP candidate has become about exhibiting success in a bureaucratic system and then demonstrating those skills by navigating the party’s own bureaucracy.

And, of course it goes without saying that any person of the appropriate class, provided they exhibit that class’s values of restraint and sobriety in their personal life, should have the requisite four- or five-figure vetting fee handily available at their financial institution.

Many were baffled that, when the party took power, it conducted no purge of the senior civil service to remove supporters of the BC Liberal Party and replace them with New Democrats. But from the perspective of those controlling the party, the ranks of the senior civil service more closely resembled them than did the members of their own party because despite the NDP’s best efforts, party membership rolls remain full of working people, grassroots activists, the un- and under-employed. In other words, the BC Liberal Party’s civil service seemed far more comprehensible and trustworthy than the party’s rank-and-file members.

And one must imagine the reverse was also true, that the senior civil service recognized and welcomed a new set of bosses who acted and felt more like equals than superiors, who embodied the cultural values of their class more precisely. No more being subordinated by indecorous rubes cum mob bosses like Rich Coleman or greasy hucksters like Mark Marissen, this new crew of putative bosses could be collaborators, allies and peers. Now, they would be treated with equality, with respect.

That is why the safest thing to do with a government decision is to create an “authority,” an unelected body of technocrats who make policy and govern at longer and longer arm’s length from the state. The health authorities and transportation authorities of BC were not created by Gordon Campbell’s BC Liberals; they were created by Mike Harcourt’s NDP. And why bring our ferries and our railroads back under public ownership? As regulated monopolies, they too can operate at a safe remove from democratic authority, guided by the same bureaucratic class.

This is why one must be so very careful in mitigating the savagery of the housing crisis without harming one’s artisanal landlording or intergenerational wealth transfer. That is why the province’s climate change plan is simply the declaration that, in the future, everyone will be made to have the kind of car members of this class already possess or aspire to own, either that or relinquish their class position by ceasing to drive.

The dream, then, of this class, expressed through its party, is the total convergence of the two branches of policy-making I set out above. Policy is not to be made by the rabble at conventions. And it is not in the party platform, which is simply a tool to obtain votes. Policy is the zeitgeist of the bureaucratic class, expressed in meetings of Harvard School of Business Executive MBAs at meetings of the board of the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, commissioned in reports by KPMG, emanating from elite off-the-books “brainstorming sessions” at the Progress Summit, arising from playful speculation, soaking in the Hollyhock Institute hot tub or expressed in a UBC political science PhD thesis on “innovation in government.” It is immanent, throughout the system.

The former Marxists of the NDP envisage not “the withering of the state,” but the withering of the party. There is no confrontation between our government and the bureaucratic capitalist state. There is only a much-anticipated and tearful reunion.

There is a common story among my sort of folk, socialists and environmentalists who have been helping the NDP for all or most of the past generation, even after the disappointments and betrayals of the 90s and Canada’s proto-Blairite governments of Harcourt, Clark, Romanow and Calvert.

And the story is this, “The NDP has abandoned its principles. It has sold out. Its leadership are craven approval-seekers who won’t stand up for their principles.” I have to admit that I have been guilty of reinforcing that narrative. But I have come to believe that not only is that story false; it is detrimental because it causes people to make irrational and inefficient political decisions that cost lives.

When we assail BC’s NDP government for handing out $6 billion in subsidies to Royal Dutch Shell and other villainous, genocidal transnational corporations while telling us that we cannot afford their promised $10/day childcare for at least another decade, we talk about how the NDP has “abandoned its principles.” When Rachel Notley demanded that the federal government ignore and openly defy Supreme Court decisions protecting the rights of First Nations, we used the same language, talking about how the NDP had lost its way.

But let us consider for a moment that John Horgan, Notley and their cabinets, caucuses and political staffs are acting in accordance with their principles, that they are doing exactly what they believe in. As I stated when I quit the NDP, the simplest explanation for the decisions New Democrats make when they are in government is that they are doing what they believe in. Given the fact that NDP politicians tend to be far less personally corrupt than Liberals or Tories, we should take this seriously. When Liberals or Conservatives hand big cheques to the corporate sector, when they refuse to provide services in an essential area of the economy and turn it over to market forces, we can usually expect to see someone associated with that decision getting rich soon, usually through a lucrative corporate board appointment after leaving office, rather than old school kickbacks.

But when the NDP announces that it will not provide interurban government bus service south of Prince George when Greyhound pulls out and will let a patchwork of deregulated private fares and grey market ride sharing take its place, nobody thinks Claire Trevena is getting a board appointment or a bag of cash. When Horgan vetoes a public inquiry into money laundering, nobody expects him to join Liberal senator Larry Campbell on the board of the province’s largest casino after he retires. When Notley rigs the Alberta oil royalty review and gets the federal government to spend $4.5 billion on a leaky oil pipeline, nobody expects her to take a seat on the Suncor board when she tires of leading Alberta’s opposition. And when Michelle Mungall creates a fracking review panel that is required to recommend continued fracking, nobody thinks she will be getting one of those seats either.

Should this not suggest to us that the NDP believes more not less strongly in oligopolies and corporate welfare than Liberals and Conservatives do?

The reasons we recoil from this thinking are multiple:

First, we easily succumb to “essence in origins” ideas about politics, especially as we get older. Our theory of who or what a political movement is is linked not to that movement’s actions in the present but instead to its own origin myth, typically located in an idealized past outside of profane space-time. The NDP’s myth is like this. It is the story of how Tommy Douglas, the CCF premier of Saskatchewan created Canada’s biggest, most successful buyers’ club, Medicare, the linchpin of Canada’s liberal social contract. The NDP brought socialism to Canada, if one buys the idea that eleven networked government health insurance schemes purchasing services from small private companies is “socialism.” Medicare is certainly a good thing but, right away, one can see that it may be a tad over-described.

But essence in origins arguments are silly when discussing permeable organizations of any longevity. One need only look south to the United States. The US Democratic Party was created by America’s one caudillo president, and Donald Trump’s favourite, Andrew Jackson, who abolished the secret ballot, deregulated the medical profession, destroyed the national bank, had his own private army, owned more slaves than any other president, defied the Supreme Court and committed a series of successful and attempted genocides against indigenous people in violation of signed treaties from Florida to Louisiana to Georgia to Tennessee. Beginning in 1848, when US politics began to reorient around the slavery issue, the Democrats became the party of slavery, which they remained until the end of the Civil War, after which time they became the party of the Ku Klux Klan, a mantle they did not finish casting off until the 1980s.

Yet today, the front-runner in their presidential race is an anti-racist, democratic socialist backed by a coalition of trade unions and anti-racist groups. That is because subscription-based big tent political organizations change with their environment; they are a place invaded and abandoned by a succession of social movements based on the needs of the moment.

Why should Canada’s New Democratic Party be any different? It is not like any other political movement’s essence is preserved in amber. A century ago, the Canadian Prairies were a red Liberal wall from Lake of the Woods to the Rockies, with huge liberal legislative majorities and a deep bench of Liberal MPs who outnumbered Tories four to one. That’s because the Liberals were against the very Central Canadian manufacturing interests who form the backbone of the party today. The Tories, meanwhile, were hated on the Prairies because of their vociferous opposition to free trade with the US.

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Some people who suggest the party has fundamentally changed believe that these changes have been grounded in a secretive, elite-level hijacking of the party that has taken place behind closed doors, a conspiracy of staffers, cabinet ministers and powerful causus members stealing the party’s agenda from under the noses of a naïve socialist membership. I do not think this is helpful for two reasons.

First, I think it is simply inaccurate. I see no deceptions or conspiracies when I interact with the party at high levels. Second, it absolves people like me of responsibility for our willful blindness, rose-coloured glasses and lazy, naïve political praxis.

What if we took the radical step of deducing the NDP’s principles not by way of nostalgic or conspiratorial thinking but instead by listening to the party’s spokespeople and believing them?

The reality is that, in the post-Cold War era, the NDP’s public rhetoric and their actions in government have not been divergent at all. Prior to his election as BC premier, Mike Harcourt told the Vancouver Board of Trade that “the NDP no longer believes in the redistribution of wealth.” Later when his government made its major austerity course correction and brought in a set of punitive and draconian welfare reforms, Harcourt explained that their purpose was to crack down on “welfare cheats, deadbeats and varmints.” What if the reason the NDP attacked BC’s underclass and used government policy to increase the number of homeless from 11,000 to 27,000 was because they really did think that the very poor were subhuman animals and that redistributing wealth was wrong? Why did the party’s left-wing supporters need to concoct a narrative in which the NDP was having to strategically abandon its principles so it could live to fight another day? Why not just believe the party when it told us its principles had changed?

In fact, let me go further: what if the NDP actually makes major sacrifices to avoid telling baldfaced lies to its supporters? The NDP might have got more votes if John Horgan had promised to cancel the Site C dam rather than putting forward a confusing policy whereby he equivocated and suggested a government regulatory commission would make the decision—voters like simple, direct promises, not process-oriented double-talk, even when they disagree. But Horgan chose to make a promise that would permit him to more honestly proceed with the megaproject. Let us consider proportional representation in the same light; rather than promise PR, the NDP promised a process that they could then rig to defeat the system, so as to avoid breaking a promise.

When asked what her biggest regret in government was, Notley stated it was her opposition to the Enbridge Pipeline through Northern BC. What if we take seriously Notley’s claimed conversion to the need to build as many pipelines as possible to as many places as possible? Does this not make it easier to explain her government’s lawsuits, boycotts and ad campaigns attacking the BC government, activists and First Nations?

What if, when Claire Trevana tells residents of the Cariboo Plateau and Highland Valley that the do not deserve bus service unless the free market can support it, she actually means it, that the NDP genuinely believes in the justice meted out by the invisible-handed god? What if, when Michelle Mungall, states that fracking must continue at all costs because no party that wants to win elections would allow it to stop, we consider the possibility that she believes that a party that does not support fracking does not deserve to win? When Carole James says we “cannot afford” $10/day childcare for the next decade but we can afford $6 billion in subsidies to Royal Dutch Shell and other profitable petro giants, we have to consider the possibility that she believes that working parents deserve government help less than these transnational corporations do. When Notley says Canada cannot afford Pharmacare without more pipelines and that she opposes building a national Pharmacare program until they are built, consider the possibility that this is not just information about her being in the tank for the oil industry but about how the party feels about national social programs, austerity and poor people’s access to medication.

We go to great lengths to perform a folk exegesis on the pronouncements of NDP officials so that we can understand them to be statements of practicality, unrelated to values and principles. We do that work. Nobody asks us to. We just do it for ourselves. The idea that the NDP wants to do something different than its actions in government and election platforms say has no evidentiary basis. This belief is derived not from evidence but from wishful thinking by social movement activists who do not want to face the work of creating new electoral political strategies and organizations.

And one need not simply look to NDP officials. Look at the people who have joined the party since the early 1990s. Go to a riding association meeting in a swing seat and listen to individual members. They will tell you they like what the party stands for and what it does. They will justify the $2000 entry fee people have to pay to seek the party’s nomination in their riding. They might even quote party president Craig Keating and suggest that people who do not have $2000 handy in their bank account are not “serious people,” that cash on hand is a far better indication of candidate suitability than the ability to recruit new members and turn them out to a meeting.

If you want to understand what Canada’s New Democratic Party stands for, I urge you to Believe New Democrats. They are trying to tell us what they believe in and we are refusing to listen.