BC Politics - 5. page

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

A little over two years ago, on May 10^th, 2017, Dr. Andrew G. Weaver, the leader of the Green Party of British Columbia, issued a threat: he might use his three-person caucus to keep the criminal enterprise known as the BC Liberal Party in office if the BC New Democratic Party did not give him what he wanted. The BC Liberals had held power in the province for sixteen years. During that time, they had conducted a fire sale of public assets, selling, for instance, a railroad valued at $1.1 billion for $99 million. That sale was so egregious, some of the party’s underlings had to do some time for it in exchange for their families being looked-after.

The one decent thing the BC Liberals had done was to introduce a carbon tax in 2008, a tax that was capped by the party’s second leader, Christy Clark, in 2011. Clark’s government had been focused on vastly expanding fracking and petroleum extraction in the province and selling the “natural gas” to unspecified buyers in East Asia. The BC Liberals had also sold off public forest land, allowed mining companies to break the law with impunity and vastly expanded casino gambling in the province, which had become a haven for those wishing to use an inflated real estate market and an insufficiently supervised set of casinos to launder billions of dollars.

Nevertheless, Weaver threatened BC’s New Democratic Party with the possibility that he would keep this crew of kleptocratic money-laundering climate villains in office if the party did not do all it could to woo him to their side.

To make all of this work, the BC Green Party leader, who was still a member of the Liberal Party of Canada and not of the Canadian Greens, hired Norman Spector as his chief negotiator to deal with the competing NDP and Liberal demands to support their legislative minorities. Spector had been the deputy minister to Thatcherite BC premier Bill Bennett and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. And he had been instrumental in the Restraint Program and the efforts to shut down Operation Solidarity, which opposed it, making BC a laboratory for unfettered Thatcherism, with its austerity and privatization, in 1983.

Spector flitted back and forth between Clark and NDP leader John Horgan, trying to make a deal Weaver found favourable, for nearly a month. In the end, in exchange for agreeing to vote “no confidence” against Clark, Weaver obtained what we call the “confidence and supply agreement.”

The agreement was pretty problematic as it was based on what we might call “process promises” – promises in which someone commits to do what some future consultation or evaluative process tells them to do. The BC NDP secured an agreement from Weaver and his caucus that they would support the government until 2021 in exchange for a promised minimum wage increase being referred to a commission, the decision on whether to build the Site C hydro megaproject being referred to the BC Utilities Commission and ditching first-past-the-post and bringing in proportional representation referred to a postal referendum.

This stood in pretty dramatic contrast to similar agreements at the federal level like Jack Layton’s 2004 agreement to support Paul Martin’s government for nine months in exchange for $4 billion in new social spending, or Tommy Douglas’s 1965 agreement to support Lester Pearson’s government in exchange for creating Medicare. This was especially underlined, contemporaneously, in 2017, by the Democratic Unionist Party propping up Theresa May’s regime in London in exchange for billions of dollars in new spending and a hard border being re-created in Northern Ireland in contravention of the Good Friday Agreement. Whereas the DUP had secured not just a fortune in government spending but the dismantling of a multi-decade international peace process, Weaver secured an agreement to listen to civil servants.

But, when the BC Utilities Commission found that there was neither an energy, economic nor environmental case for Site C, the NDP went ahead with it. When the NDP appointed a fake YES committee for proportional representation, run by the historical enemies of electoral reform, who looted the government’s funds and presided over a historic defeat for PR, the Greens did not bat an eye. They were more concerned with three issues:

1. inviting Uber, the American Ponzi scheme dressed up as a taxi company, seeking to abolish public transportation, into BC and pay drivers less than minimum wage while doing it;
2. preventing “card certification” of unions in non-union workplaces, forcing workers to vote twice to be unionized, the second vote under the supervision of their bosses and subject to intimidation and coercion; and
3. preventing the minimum wage from rising to $15 before 2021, keeping it under that of Jason Kenney’s Alberta until the end of the government’s mandate

During their time working with the NDP, Weaver’s Greens developed a fourth major concern: preventing British Columbians who own two homes from paying a surtax on their second home in places where homeless people were desperate for shelter.
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The Greens have not been shy in threatening to bring the government down over the latter three issues, threatening to vote with the BC Liberals in the next confidence vote if the government did not scale back its support for workers unionizing or earning a decent wage.

Before going on, I should clarify what a confidence vote is: it is a vote before the legislature that falls into one of two categories: (a) it pertains to appropriations/money or (b) it is declared to be a “confidence vote” by a majority of members of the legislature. Any time there is a “confidence vote” before the legislature, the government must win this vote. Otherwise, the Lieutenant-Governor will either choose a new premier from among the assembly’s members or a call a new elections. Sometimes a confidence vote is a budget. Sometimes it is a tax bill. Sometimes it as an innocuous bill that has had the following phrase added to it as an amendment, “and this house has no confidence in the government.” That’s how Joe Clark’s government fell in 1980.

I am writing this piece because of recent events in which Dr. Weaver has offered us a second-rate Pontius Pilate impression around some provincial legislation that served to massively increase fracking in the Peace Region, build a pipeline from the Peace to Kitimat, and construct the highest-emission, most climate-changing megaproject in BC’s 162-year history by giving a billion dollars in tax breaks to Royal Dutch Shell. Royal Dutch Shell, for those with a shorter memory, was the petroleum company of apartheid South Africa and a key actor in the genocide against the Ogoni people in Nigeria.

According to Weaver and his apologists, there is nothing the BC Green Party can do to stop the package of $6 billion in tax breaks for transnational oil companies to develop liquified “natural gas” export facilities in Squamish and Kitimat, based on fracking and pipeline-building, with the “product” destined to be burned in the USA or East Asia to fire inefficient industrial production. They argue that there is nothing they can do because the BC Liberals and BC NDP both support these LNG projects and, between them these parties control the vast majority of votes in the legislature.

This seems strange because the concessions Layton demanded in 2004 were opposed by the Liberals and Conservatives who comprised the vast majority of MPs; this was also true of the Medicare reforms the NDP demanded in the 1960s; they too were opposed by most of the MPs in the house. Similarly, a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland is opposed by the vast majority of MPs in Westminster. The reason that Layton and Douglas got their way is because they did not just threaten to vote against the government on the specific issue; they threatened to vote against the government on everything unless they got what they wanted.

The Tories, being implacable enemies of the Liberals, put all kinds of confidence matters before the house, just as the BC Liberals do against the BC NDP. There is a wealth of opportunities for Weaver and his confederates to defeat the government if the Horgan regime does not do what they want. But they only threaten to do this when they want to reduce wages and undermine the rights of workers. Whenever there is an environmental matter on the table, they claim their hands are tied because they must vote with the government on all confidence matters in the interests of “stability,” a nebulous concept they refuse to define.

So, let us be clear: when it comes to sticking up for property and business owners, the BC Greens threaten to bring the government down all the time and obtain major concessions from the NDP but when it comes to the environment, their supposed raison d’être, they state that they cannot threaten to change their vote on a confidence vote unless it specifically mentions LNG. According to the Greens “if you don’t do what we want, we will vote to defeat you at the next opportunity” is a threat that is both impossible and unethical, even though Medicare, the putative bedrock of our social contract was obtained by that very threat.

In response to this reasoning, some Greens have stated, “but what if the NDP won’t back down and we do have to bring down the government?” “What if they win a majority or the Liberals do?” The argument seems to be that unless the threat of defeating the government over the biggest carbon bomb BC has ever built has a 100% chance of succeeding, it should never be issued. The reasoning appears to be that a 100% chance of two huge LNG plants, fueled by fracked gas in the Peace, carried by pipeline through Unist’ot’en territory, to Squamish and Kitimat, is somehow not as risky as whatever a majority NDP or Liberal government would do. So it is better vote for that rather than take a risk and try to stop it, even though this involves signing off on the most omnicidal legislative act in BC history.

Let’s be clear: if the world increases carbon emissions at the rate the BC NDP-Green government proposes to, we are all dead and so is most of everything else, except maybe a rat every four miles. There is a good chance we’re dead anyway, but at least we have a shot if we try to stop governments accelerating the extinction event that grips our planet.

The BC Green Party is right. There is a chance that if they actually tried to stop Kitimat and Squamish LNG they might fail. But we are out of time. If we take no risks in attempting to save the planet, it’s over. We’re done. And we will have deserved to die.

Stuartparker.ca is going weekly and making other changes for 2019. As a gesture of good faith, we are returning to all of our suspended/abandoned article series and updating them.

People make deals out of desperation. That is just how it is. In 1999, my leadership of the BC Green Party was every bit as imperiled as Glen Clark’s leadership of the NDP but for different reasons. That’s what I was talking about in part one, when I said we were running out of time.

Despite their full-throated support of the first-past-the-post system today, conservative British Columbians were deeply disillusioned with the system in the second half of the 1990s and casting about for alternatives. This was because parties to the right of the NDP had won 58% of the popular vote in the 1996 election but the NDP had won 52% of the seats with just 39%. Not only that, the main centre-right party, the BC Liberals had, by itself, bested the NDP by 3%, producing a classic first-past-the-post “wrong winner” election in which the BC Liberals won the popular vote 42% to 39% but lost the seat count thirty-three seats to thirty-nine.

Consequently, much of the province’s corporate and media elite had never really accepted Glen Clark’s NDP as the legitimate government as they had the Harcourt government that preceded it. But despite this, most of the NDP base remained secure at an organizational level. The province’s trade union movement, environmental movement and feminist movement remained firmly in the NDP camp. Only anti-poverty organizations in Vancouver and on the Island moved away from the big orange tent during this period and this was largely because the NDP had made BC’s underclass the target of public scorn and brutal fiscal austerity between 1993 and 1995. But the same was not true of public opinion. While every major environmental group continued to stand with the premier, even after he called them “enemies of British Columbia,” environmentally and socially concerned voters were drifting away in record numbers, irrespective of what movement leaders had to say.

The Clark government, for its part, had a constrained ability to deliver for its base. The government was under constant attack in the press and faced ongoing legal harassment, that it later turned out was facilitated by Clark’s own Attorney-General, Ujjal Dosanjh. It also concurrently faced a capital strike by the mining sector, a concurrent European boycott campaigns, one by Greenpeace, the other by the BC Chamber of Mines and a major downturn in the Japanese and South Korean economies, the most reliable consumers of BC coal.

Consequently, the Clark government focused their efforts in three main areas: reinvigorating the economy of the Northeast with increased natural gas and petroleum exploration and extraction, reinvigorating the private sector trade union movement through the introduction of sectoral bargaining in the construction sector and the “fast ferries” project, an import substitution industrialization (ISI) scheme to spur creation of an aluminum-hulled ship-building sector. The first endeavour was an unqualified success; the second was abandoned before completion; the third was the focus of much of the ire of BC’s establishment against the government.

The BC Green Party faced diametrically opposite circumstances. Between 1996 and 2000, the party rose in public opinion polls from 2% to 11% of the popular vote. Our byelection performances, were generally positive; we won a number of polls in the Surrey-White Rock byelection, where we were noticed by the Legislative Press Gallery and, thereafter, began to appear in Mike Smyth, Les Leyne and Vaughn Palmer columns. We won Lasqueti Island in the otherwise-disastrous Parksville byelection of 1998 and we placed third, ahead, of the NDP in the Delta-South byelection of 2000.

We also gained prominence as co-founders and spokespeople for the Electoral Change Coalition (ECCO), a broad alliance of groups campaigning for proportional representation, led by Troy Lanigan of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation.

But while we posted modest increases in our annual party budget and membership, the reality was that the BC Greens were basically a $80,000 per year, 1000-member organization and remained so throughout this period. That was a sight better than the 100-member, $25,000 per year organization whose leadership I won in 1993 but the absence of commensurate growth in membership or donations to match our poll standing and gains in media credibility was concerning.

Much of our popularity rested on a handful of extraordinarily talented and hard-working individuals. Julian West, an MIT Applied Mathematics PhD, was, likely, the second- or third-best political strategist in BC at the time and he was giving us twenty hours per week for free. It was he who had cunningly persuaded the original Angus Reid polling form to begin prompting voters with our name because he demonstrated that failing to prompt was producing underpolling. In this way, our sudden poll breakout, from which gains in popularity and media coverage cascaded, was likely as statistically erroneous as the 0% we had previously been polling. West was also the author of ECCO, following his brilliant display of erudition and humour to Lanigan at an otherwise nightmarishly boring Social Credit convention. The Coalition’s founding president, Sonja Sanguinetti, the president of the BC Liberal Party at the time, also lent an unwarranted credibility to the enterprise given that my closest advisor, folk singer Geoff Berner, and I had been her eldest son’s closest friends in elementary school.

Furthermore, incredible as it might be to present-day readers, the ECCO, while getting us plenty of media coverage and respect from people on the right actually tainted the Greens. First, the founder of BC’s proportional representation movement was former Social Credit MLA Nick Loenen, a Dutch reformed conservative former seat-mate of premier Bill Vander Zalm, whose book on PR suggests that it is the best way to successfully de-fund abortion in Canada. With support from no left-wing organizations except Western Canada Wilderness Committee and the David Suzuki Foundation, ECCO, which included anti-abortion activists Kathleen Toth and Heather Stillwell, the leaders of the BC Family Coalition Party and the Christian Heritage Party of Canada, respectively, looked to many on the left like a right-wing group, its president being Lanigan, head of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation.

“Proportional representation is just a scheme to ensure a permanent right-wing majority in Victoria,” was the feeling of most on BC’s left at the time. ECCO, in this way, marked the Greens as a dangerous, alien force, fake leftists making common cause with the right.

Before one steps into any kind of relation or cheapest price for viagra involvement such as marriage or living in. Although, most of the people cope with baldness and move ahead, the rest find it miserable without hair. levitra 20mg australia On the off chance that you can ever accomplish any erection, then price of levitra the physiological methodologies at work in the making of the amino acids L-glutamate, L-proline and creatine. rx tadalafil These stamps are moistened and allow a formation of rings around male penile body. At the same time, this period also featured a hardening of opposition to the Greens by environmental organizations. During the 1996 election, I had worked with the Georgia Straight’s Charlie Smith and Western Canada Wilderness Committee’s Adriane Carr to expose a corrupt election funding shell game that was helping the NDP win environmentalists’ votes.

BC’s largest, blue chip environmental organizations, like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and World Wildlife Fund, had, during the NDP’s first term, become part of a consortium called BC Wild, an entity formed at the behest of the Pew Charitable Trust, the charitable arm of Sunoco, the Sun Oil Company of Pennsylvania. In early 1996, in the run-up to the election, BC Wild members had been approached by individuals close to the heart of the BC government to create another consortium, this one called British Columbians for a Better Environment (BCBE).

BCBE, which purported to speak for all BC environmentalists, ran a campaign specifically focused on driving down the Green Party vote in the election, using the slogan “Don’t make your vote a toxic political waste.” Because of limits on third-party election spending and on election spending by charities, complex financing arrangements had to be made, with certain coalition members paying for different parts of the campaign. The necessary transparency of the financing permitted Smith to correlate each organization’s BCBE spending with its receipt of recent, unexpected and, in some cases, unsolicited provincial government grants for either almost exactly the same amount of money. According to Smith’s accounting, BCBE was being funded not by Sunoco, not by its member organizations but by the BC Ministry of Environment.

Already disconnected from and unpopular with all of the province’s environmental groups, except for Wilderness Committee, Smith’s media coverage further soured relations and, by 1997, had cemented not just a frosty but an adversarial relationship between the Greens and the environmental movement’s leadership.

By 1998, the BC NDP and Greens were mirror images of one another: one was a party hated by the province’s elites and an ever-increasing number of voters but fairly secure in its party-base relations. The Greens, on the other hand, were a party whose popularity was rapidly growing but which not only lacked a base but, at the social movement level, was surrounded by enemies.

Beginning in 1997, there was a permanent campaign to remove me as party leader, initially based within the party but, as we entered 1999, one that began to find allies outside the party, in the environmental movement. The campaign was largely based on what I term “on side for the big win” thinking. As we have seen with Greg Clarke’s Alberta Party and as we saw with Preston Manning’s United Alternative Project, the question people often ask when joining a movement rapidly ascending in popularity, “why aren’t we growing faster!?” “why aren’t we the government already!?” “why are we targeting specific ridings when we’re about to win every single one!?”

This kind of thinking, in which signs of ongoing marginality are reinterpreted as signs of imminent, total victory, tends to be most common in apocalyptic movements. Although Greens ground their apocalypticism in scientific terms and appear, as far as anyone can tell, to be empirically correct about the imminent collapse of planetary life support systems, this does not make them sociologically immune to the properties we might associate with doomsday cults. Until 1997, the party had terrible membership retention, with members rotating out in an average of eighteen months, just like your typical doomsday cult. Despite the scientific basis of the Green eschaton, members were typically anti-science and skeptical of the Enlightenment legacy. Consequently, the party had little institutional memory and often repeated mistakes ad nauseam.

There had also developed an unhealthy cult of personality around my leadership in my first term, not among my close associates but in other parts of the party’s active memberships. In this way, people often did not understand the party to be a democracy and did not understand that it was their duty to debate and dissent. The Greens had long opposed (1985-1993) the idea of having a leader because they saw the office in a cartoonish, authoritarian, unrelated to the practice of Canadian politics at the time. This was a sense the party culture retained after deciding to establish the office after all. To be the dictator of the party, a person must be trustworthy and intellectually superhuman; otherwise the party understood itself to have submitted to tyranny.

So, my closest allies and I decided that, to grow, the party must change its internal culture so as to become appealing to mainstream, democratic-spirited leftists. And so we embarked on aggressive program of cultural change, changing meeting venues and voting practices. We initiated a comprehensive policy reform that was heralded by Berner’s report Polishing the Turd, which began by offering an unqualified disparagement of the party’s pre-1995 policies.

This campaign of relentless cultural change, in an effort to point the party away from the hippie subculture and create a more democratic decision-making process was about as well-advised as the provincial government’s ISI program. It was a red rag to a bull that had been looking for an excuse to charge.

While the BC NDP saw the provincial constabulary, a growing capital strike and a media consensus closing in on it, in the tiny world of Green politics in 1999, things looked just as dire. Most in the party’s base who had elected us to internal office in the Greens had withdrawn or turned against us over our ambitious program of cultural change. We were surrounded by hostile feminist and environmental NGOs and a hostile labour movement. Furthermore, beginning with Colleen McCrory of the Valhalla Wilderness Society, some major environmental leaders had joined the Greens with the sole stated objective of removing from its leadership.

This is what set the table for a flurry of desperate agreements that would yield the first people in Canadian history being elected to office with “Green Party” beside their name before the end of 1999. More about the actual agreements and attempted agreements in the next installment.

Saturday, March 24^th, 2018

BC New Democratic Party

#301 – 4180 Lougheed Highway

Burnaby, BC

V5C 6A7

Dear Sirs and Mesdames:

Please receive this as my official resignation as a member of the New Democratic Party, its provincial council and its Surrey-Green Timbers riding executive after seventeen consecutive years and a total of twenty years as a party member. I have served on constituency executives in Surrey, Burnaby, Vancouver and Toronto. I provided your party with a crucial endorsement that altered the campaign narrative during the 2001 election; I served as a paid consultant in 2002-03; I have recruited dozens of party members over the years; I have been attending conventions as a delegate from Forum 2000 with Ed Broadbent in 1985 to the 2017 Victoria convention; and, most recently, provided substantial assistance to the Surrey-Guildford GoTV operation that saw Garry Begg defeat Peter Fassbender.

I did all of these things based on the belief that the BC NDP had learned something from its near-annihilation in the 2001 election, that it would not return to office and repeat the mistakes of the 1990s. Clearly, such a belief was utterly unfounded. Rather, it seems that the brain trust that led the party to within a hair’s breadth of total destruction is back in the driver’s seat with a goal of re-enacting a style of governing even less appropriate for today’s BC than it was a generation ago.

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I am forced, therefore, to reach one inescapable conclusion following Thursday’s $6 billion LNG subsidy announcement: the BC NDP believes that subsidizing transnational oil companies to increase fossil fuel exports is the right thing to do, that, in the eyes of today’s NDP, the global investor class who own and run companies like Petronas are more deserving of a break on PST than homeless people trying to replace their shoes. The NDP believes in these things because it is just another capitalist party indifferent to the global extinction event the capitalist system is producing. That must be why, for instance, the terms of reference of the government’s fracking study include the approval of continued fracking.

All the signs were there that this is where we were heading but I held on after the party enacted a fee to prevent poor people from seeking its nomination; I held on after the party approved Site C; I held on after the promise to keep BC’s minimum wage below New York’s, Seattle’s, Ontario’s and Alberta’s for the next four years; I held on after it became increasingly clear that the government is rigging the proportional representation referendum not just to fail but to discredit PR nationally for a generation.

But this nihilistic, headlong embrace of global climate villainy is too much. Go to hell, New Democrats. I am ashamed I gave you a second chance.

Yours truly,

Stuart Parker,

Surrey-Green Timbers Provincial Council Delegate

CC        Rachna Singh, MLA, Surrey-Green Timbers

In September 1997, my most trusted advisor took me aside confidentially to show me something he had been working on for a few months. I had just been acclaimed to my second term as leader of the BC Green Party following sixteen-month period of instability in which my star candidate and his allies had been drumming up a series of non-scandals in an effort to prevent me from seeking a second consecutive term.

I was twenty-five years old and had served as leader of the BC Green Party for more than four years. I enjoyed the ongoing support of the party’s founders, Paul George and Adriane Carr, who ran BC’s then-largest environmental group, Western Canada Wilderness Committee. I had the support of Greenpeace co-founders and lifelong rivals Jim Bohlen and Paul Watson. Following Andy Shadrack’s two attempts to tar me with allegations of financial impropriety backfiring, it seemed like plain sailing for the BC Green Party.

We had run in seventy-one of seventy-five ridings and placed ahead of the Social Credit Party in the previous election. And thanks to Julian’s persuasive and tactical skills, Angus Reid had changed their polling methodology and we had jumped to 5% in provincial opinion polls. Julian and I had also teamed-up with Troy Lanigan of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation and Sonja Sanguinetti, president of the BC Liberal Party to create the Electoral Change Coalition, a collection of groups across the political spectrum representing more than 100,000 British Columbians in their membership rolls, calling for proportional representation.

But in that meeting, Julian suggested that we gamble all that and take the biggest political risk of our lives. He suggested that if we wanted to achieve real power in BC, we would have to reach some kind of accord with the NDP and follow the lead of European Green parties in forming a Red-Green governing alliance.

This would involve nothing short of a 180-degree turn in all my public statements about the New Democratic Party and unknown consequences for the base on which we relied to remain in charge of the Green Party’s governing council.

Let me be clear: we failed. Two and a half years later, we and everyone we had tried to make a deal with was out of a job, politically, except Art Vanden Berg, Canada’s first Green city councillor who would, by the end of his term, be sitting in the NDP municipal caucus in Victoria

I never achieved the high office John Horgan and Andrew Weaver have, nor am I an instantly-trustworthy stalwart for either group of partisans. Still, I think the Nobel Prize winner and premier-elect might benefit from knowledge of our small story from the 1990s and how such promising accords can come crashing down no matter how much they seem to be delivering. Maybe this cautionary tale can avert a similar fate for North America’s first Red-Green governing coalition.

Let’s begin with the poem I recited prior to every meeting after I adopted this plan:

There are those who would build the Temple,

And those who prefer that the Temple should not be built.

In the days of Nehemiah the Prophet

There was no exception to the general rule.

In Shushan the palace, in the month of Nisan,

He served the wine to king Artaxerxes,

And he grieved for the broken city, Jerusalem;

And the King gave him leave to depart

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That he might rebuild the city.

So he went, with a few, to Jerusalem,

And there, by the dragon’s well, by the dung gate,

By the fountain gate, by the king’s pool,

Jerusalem lay waste, consumed with fire;

No place for a beast to pass.

There were enemies without to destroy him,

And spies and self-seekers within,

When he and his men laid their hands to bebuilding the wall,

So they built as men must build

With the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other.

In 1997, Julian reasoned that the first step towards a provincial coalition needed to be made where left-Green vote-splitting had produced the worst consequences. And so we began our project in Vancouver at the municipal level. The Coalition of Progressive Electors, which had formally absorbed the Civic NDP in 1993, had lost every seat on Vancouver city council, parks board and school board in 1996 and the mainstream media had placed the blame for the loss pretty squarely on us, the Green Party, after a spirited campaign in which our candidates got as much as 23% of the vote.

The fact that the NDP name was not attached to COPE also made them an easy starting point, along with the long history of crossing party lines with mixed slates of Communists and New Democrats. It was not hard to obtain an audience with COPE, still reeling from their first total electoral shutout since their founding in 1968. The late Frances Wasserlein took the lead on the COPE side in championing an alliance but, despite our shared interests and literal mutual destruction in the previous campaign, it was hard to cut a deal.

In particular, the electoral system proved a nearly insurmountable barrier in negotiations and led to the agreement’s ultimate unravelling during the 1999 campaign. COPE had been fighting for a single-member plurality first-past-the-post municipal voting system since its founding; “the ward system” as they euphemistically called it, was as close to a COPE article of faith as any policy could be. With the NDP generally winning a majority of provincial seats under first-past-the-post in Vancouver, implementing the same system municipally appeared to be a recipe for a permanent COPE majority.

But for Greens, this would mean, at best, chronic underrepresentation and, at worst, no representation at all, with our party’s vote evenly distributed across the city’s geography. In the end, Julian had to produce a series of maps for COPE showing that we could still implement municipal wards in the city even with the proportional representation that formed the foundation of our negotiating position. We also had to sacrifice all of our “limits to growth” and development freeze language from our policy in order for COPE to agree to a proportional system of municipal wards. But that took over a year of negotiating, to push that through, ultimately requiring the skill of our most personable negotiator, Paul Alexander, the first Green candidate to place third in a provincial election back in 1996.

By that time, I had moved to Victoria to join Art Vanden Berg who had only narrowly lost his 1996 municipal election bid to attempt to replicate the agreement with an official NDP affiliate and begin the work of fashioning some kind of provincial bargain. But there were other reasons to move by then. Shadrack and his allies, emboldened by my recent bout with clinical depression, had begun an aggressive campaign to remove me and my allies from the leadership of the party. As we hit 11% in the polls in the fall of 1998, there was a growing sense of urgency to move forward with the alliances because our time might be running out.

We might be inking deals with municipal NDP affiliates and the labour councils that backed them but, to do so, we were burning through our own political capital at an alarming rate. More on that in part 2.

The wildcard in BC politics, from the mid-1950s until 1996 was the old Liberal Party of British Columbia. In the 1953 election, the Liberals were reduced from governing party to rump party, eking out a small space in nearly every BC legislature until their unexpected transformation into, to paraphrase Roy Romanow, the Social Credit witness protection program and, consequently, the new right-wing government in waiting.

The Liberals’ forty-nine years out of government, from their defeat in 1952 to their triumphant return to power in 2001 are often narrated as a time of failure and irrelevance, which is fine as far as it goes. But what such a story misses is what the Liberal Party was during those long years in the political wilderness. Why did the party keep going? Whom did it represent? What was it for? And how is it that we needed that thing so badly that we made this weird little party all over again, out of the unlikeliest raw materials?

In many ways, it was just like its third-party namesake in the United Kingdom, a perennial electoral bridesmaid, whose MPs hail from, as one commentator eloquently put it, “university towns and the Celtic fringe.” Such a description is a useful starting point for describing the old BC Liberals led by David Anderson, Arthur Laing, Pat McGeer and Gordon Gibson. The Liberals’ ridings were always the whitest in the province with a particularly Celtic aesthetic, containing either a university or one’s bedroom community.

The party’s leaders typically had advanced degrees; they were lawyers, medical doctors, university professors, as were most of the party’s small caucuses, which, until 1991, never represented more than four ridings at once. The core BC Liberal vote, which usually fell between 5% and 20%, was only sufficiently concentrated in a few places to produce sustained victories that lasted more than a term.

The party’s longest-held area was, of course, Oak Bay, followed by Vancouver-Point Grey, Victoria and then Vancouver’s North Shore. That is because Liberal voters could best be described as too rich to vote NDP, and too educated to vote Social Credit. Being a Liberal in BC during the Cold War, when the two main parties battled for the heart and soul of BC’s mining and logging towns and its volatile, populist proletariat, was not really about policy or political ideology. It was about class, a very particular performance of class.

Liberals could be spotted on sight, festooned in their Celtic tweeds and corduroys, with their fine white features and soft hands. Electing a Liberal MLA constituted the ultimate political assertion of secure, old money, the same way a Vancouver Lawn Tennis or University Women’s Club membership might. To be a Liberal was to be above the fray, so secure in one’s privilege as to tut dispassionately at the indecorous rubes who dominated the legislature.

Of course, in dire emergencies, it was sometimes necessary to make common cause with the coarse boozers and used car salesmen who kept the province in order for the companies whose shares the Liberals owned. In one rare emergency a couple of caucus members had to join the Social Credit Party’s cabinet. But that was the exception, not the rule. As long as the coal and timber flowed out through the port, privilege was about effacing one’s relationship to the populism and rentierism that structured BC’s economy and politics, showing one’s security by remaining above the fray, one’s job unconnected to boom-bust rentierism but instead of family trusts, the VSE, the local hospital or the UBC and UVic tenure streams.
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When the BC Liberal Party was suddenly and unexpectedly called upon to shoulder the burden of running BC’s government for the province’s robber barons, the party chose a leader whose personal style and record could keep this constituency on board. Gordon Campbell, anointed by the Grande Dame of BC Liberalism, herself, May Brown, was the logical choice. While not a son of privilege, himself, Campbell was steeped in the values, culture and, of course, civic associations, of the BC Liberal tradition. In the hands of another, Campbell’s orgy of sweetheart deal privatizations and fire sales of the province’s assets might have been seen as simple corruption but he had that curious Liberal dignity that allowed him to invest this exercise with technocratic legitimacy, to redescribe simple looting as an esoteric experiment in the technocratic management of public assets.

Ironically, despite her much deeper roots in the BC Liberal tradition, Christy Clark lacks that gift and so, consequently, something of a seismic shift has been taking place in BC politics.

The old BC Liberals are back, led by a roiling mass of tweed, corduroy and messianic intellectual grandiosity, a man who, if they could have, would have been engineered by the old BC Liberals. Andrew Weaver, the incumbent MLA for the safest true Liberal seat in BC has everything: the tweeds, the corduroys, the elbow pads, a real, live proper British accent, a PhD, a professorship and a propensity to lecture his perceived inferiors on how to do their jobs. Not only that; he appears to decide how to vote on the government budget by tossing a coin, his reasons always unfathomable and obscure, conveying that he deems himself and his party above the fray when it comes to such small things the amount of money allocated to public schools.

Foolishly, my party has decided to field a prominent environmentalist against Dr. Weaver, as though the people of Oak Bay elected him based on his environmental credentials, as opposed to his perfect haute bourgeois aesthetic. What we needed was a candidate in an ascot, preferably owning both a yacht and a horse, and one with a higher-class accent than their opponent, managing their family trust’s nature conservancy. Then, we might have had a fighting chance!

But, as British Columbians adjust to the new meaning of “Green Party,” this will place limits on the brand’s appeal, as much as it might open opportunities, even in the party’s heartland. On the Island, north of Shawnigan Lake and Cobble Hill, people’s British accents don’t keep getting thicker every year as they do further south. In Nelson, even working class English accents are too snooty for an MLA candidate.

More fundamentally, performances of haute bourgeois indifference to the minutia of political economy are in shorter supply these days because of people’s very real, material insecurity, both environmentally and economically. The old BC Liberals are back, in the form of Weaver’s Greens, but does not so much signify their graduation to the status of contender as much as it does their entrapment in the most gratuitous, irrelevant part of electoral class politics in BC.