Canadian Politics - 2. page

Gordon Campbell killed my grandma.

I don’t mean this in a “fuck you Gordon, die in a fire!” kind of way. I like Campbell fine and think he went out on a high note as premier, with his audacious tax policies, that sought to undo some of the damage he did with his first round of tax policies a decade before.

It is more that my grandma was pretty damn tired of being alive by the time she was in her mid-90s. Always fashionable and fit, she could not handle the shame of getting around with a walker. You can purchase a stylish cane. There are no stylish walkers. She had also outlived more than a dozen bridge foursomes and was just too demoralized to go to all the work of assembling another bridge group, only to have its members die on her in a year or two.

The daughter of George Martin, a welder and Bolshevik soap-boxer (yes, an actual Bolshevik; he assiduously followed global communist politics and had taken a position on the Bolshevik-Menshevik split when it happened), my grandmother was also deeply demoralized by the rise of Third Way neoliberalism and the destruction of the world’s democratic socialist parties in the 1990s. So pissed off was she that she contributed her bookkeeping expertise to helping me build the BC Green Party, expertise she had last used to help the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) set up its Vancouver office in the 1970s.

So, when Gordon Campbell was elected BC premier in 2001 and proudly announced the repeal of the forty-hour work week in 2002, my grandmother was pretty sure that it was time to go.

My grandmother was born in 1908, four years after the BC legislature enacted the forty-hour work week. And she felt that she should never have had to live to see the day that this victory for working people, made before she was even born, would slip away. For her, it served as the final piece of punctuation marking the end of the aspirations of the socialist movement.

The political moment into which my grandmother was born during what Mark Twain termed “the Gilded Age,” was the time in which, around the world, socialists came of political age. The period that began in the 1880s and ended with the 1929 global economic crisis did not just contain the Mexican and Russian revolutions. It contained the founding of Britain’s Independent Labour Party in 1893 and its first election to national government in 1923.

As I have argued ad nauseam on this blog, we live in a time much like those years, with its rapidly widening wealth gap, ownership concentration, ballooning consumer debt, penchant for cross-dressing, chaotic international order and debate over women’s sport. The particular aspect of that time that I want to focus on in this essay is the collapse of “the left” as a political coalition.

History of the First Left
“The left” is a term that started as a literal description of a set of allied voting blocs in the French parliament in the lead-up to the Revolution of 1789. Initially, it simply referred to the collection of Estates-General members who favoured radical and revolutionary change. Dominated by liberals, almost from the outset it included socialists, secularists, suffragists, prohibitionists, Abolitionists, advocates of colonial devolution and supporters of land and tax reform. In the ensuing decades a similar “left coalition” coalesced the other great industrial democracies, Britain, Prussia, etc.

It made sense, during the nineteenth century, for members of the left to make common cause. The rising trade union movement was key in legitimating “the left” as a strategic political coalition as liberal parties made space on their parliamentary slates for candidates backed by trade union locals in the burgeoning industrial cities of the age. Class consciousness had not reached the point where individual labour candidates were viable in winner-take-all electoral systems and so liberal parties and trade unionists mutually benefited from their alliance.

While there were of course major conflicts within the left among its constituent groups, and especially between its dominant and original political grouping, the liberals, new political movements that, by virtue of a shared belief in modernization and reform, saw themselves as equally legitimate claimants to the mantle of the Left.

Conflicts between labour and capital were intense when it came to questions like the scale of permissible industrial action and the use of police as strike-breakers. But these were, to an extent, mitigated by shared left-wing beliefs and assumptions such as the status of women and children as protected classes of person within the workplace and without and a shared belief that freer trade and fewer tariffs would benefit both industry and the poor.

But in the 1890s, that shifted throughout much of the Anglosphere. In 1893, the Independent Labour Party was formed in Britain, ultimately resulting in the Labour Representation Committee splitting from the Liberal Party. And English speakers were actually late to the party. German’s socialists and trade union movement had abandoned their partnership with liberals in 1874. In France, the parliamentary divorce took place in 1885.

Throughout the Gilded Age, socialists and liberals would find themselves on the same side of certain issues and in accord on certain causes but these movements understood themselves to be adversarial and were, naturally, embittered by their recent divorces. But socialists, in particular, sought to make it clear that they were not part of some larger political community in which both they and the liberals were in fundamental accord. At both the movement level and in electoral politics, socialists sought to show their independence from liberals, reminding working class people that both liberals and conservatives were movements controlled by and representing “the bosses.”

Socialism and the Forty-hour Week in British Columbia
My grandma grew up in Gilded Age BC because her dad was blacklisted from dock work for his Bolshevik soapboxing, first in Glasgow and then in Belfast. Vancouver, British Columbia, was the western terminus of the British North American rail system, port with such severe labour shortages that communists, criminals and malcontents from the four corners of the earth could still find a decent day’s pay.

And the province had a strong and militant labour movement thanks to the Dunsmuir coal baron dynasty that controlled middle Vancouver Island with their own private army, occasionally assisted by the RCMP. Consequently, BC was one of the first places in the British Empire to elect socialists to its legislature.

Even before the capitalist members of the legislature had separated into the Liberal and Conservative parties, the Labour Party elected its first member in 1898. The following election, in 1903, BC’s first true multi-party election returned a Conservative government with a razor-thin majority, one that eroded over the course of the year, leaving the Tories in a minority in 1904.

Rather that voting with their erstwhile fellow leftists, the Liberals, to bring down the Tory government, they negotiated with Premier Richard McBride to enact a series of socialist policies, the best-remembered of which is the forty-hour work week.

BC’s is an early example of socialists not being cowed into working with liberals and progressives in service of some kind of putative larger left but it is hardly unique to this period. Rather than swearing fealty to one set of bosses or the other, socialist and labour parties and movements played the capitalists off against each other in an effort to secure the best deal for workers. This kind of audacious and often successful brinksmanship caused voters to begin electing socialists as governments in their own right, a political outcome that grew more common as the Gilded Age wore on.

History of the Second Left
But big things changed in the early 1930s with the rise of Stalin as the USSR’s sole hegemon, the rise of the Nazi movement, Franco’s victory in Spain and the realignment of liberal political economy by John Maynard Keynes and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Beginning in the 1930s, responding to the growing consensus in the West that fascism was the greatest threat capitalist societies were facing, Stalin encouraged Soviet-aligned parties to throw themselves into “popular front” politics, not just joining but actively organizing grand anti-fascist, anti-conservative coalitions with progressives and liberals.

Even in places like Canada, where popular front politics never went anywhere electorally, the effects of Stalin’s decision, one shared by many socialists who suddenly found renewed common ground with liberals around basic issues like free speech and elections, was to restore the idea of “the left” as a grand coalition, a large and diverse political community, whose main constituent groupings were liberals, progressives and socialists.

Following the Second World War, the shared project of building the welfare state, albeit motivated by different reasons, kept “the left” together as a political and cultural community. When people said “left wing,” and “right wing,” they had clearly understood meanings. People could be “centre left” or “far left”; the left were always getting into arguments but the arguments were about the correct way to authentically be left-wing, for the most part.

At the height of the Cold War left consensus, social democrats were called “liberals in a hurry,” suggesting that there was not really much disagreement about the political direction society should head among those of the left, just the velocity at which the destination should be approached.

But all that changed in the 1980s and early 90s.

First, with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and then Soviet Union, there was simply no foreign policy justification for liberals to support the welfare state. Those who had worked hardest to enact welfare state policies, leaders like Lester Pearson, John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnston, and Richard Nixon were Cold War hawks who believed that matching or exceeding whatever material guarantees the USSR offered was critical to victory.

For the first thirty years of the Cold War, building the welfare state had been the logical means of both pacifying the domestic left with material concessions and roles in its construction and competing with the Soviets in the international field of public opinion, claiming that a capitalist welfare state, organized on Keynesian economics could outperform a “democratic centralist” one-party state when it came to delivering housing, healthcare, education, etc.

Suddenly, all that social spending ceased to double as defense spending.

Besides, much of the left was becoming entranced the Third Way, a kind of PG-rated neoliberalism that offered a sort of Thatcherism with a human face, especially attractive to liberals and progressives. But even many former socialists, especially those more class-adjacent to their liberal and progressive allies, suddenly discovered the virtues of austerity and free trade.

In battles over the rise of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank’s “structural adjustment” programs, investor rights treaties like NAFTA and Maastricht, with their secret courts and irreversible privatization provisions, socialists were utterly routed in the 1990s, whether in electoral contests, like the 1993 Canadian election that came close to eradicating the New Democratic Party or in the internal politics of big tent left-wing parties, where the likes of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Mike Harcourt routed the parties’ socialist factions.

Socialism After the Second Left
Socialists have reacted to this in a disappointing way. None of the optimism about socialism’s future and the rising power of labour that had ended the First Left were apparent in the 1990s. Socialists had not voluntary exited the left because their prospects looked better outside than inside. They had been marginalized, reduced to little more than mascots of a bygone age within the parties and larger movement culture of the left.

But instead of grimly accepting what had happened and marching forward on our, we socialists instead covered our defeat and humiliation in a rose-tinted nostalgia. “The left” was no longer a historically contingent alliance of disparate movements and interests but a sentimentalized identity rooted in the past.

To accept our defeat within the left was too much in the context of the massive geopolitical and economic setbacks we were experiencing, the collapse of industrial employment and private sector unionism. So, the worse the left treated socialists, the more explicitly anti-socialist its social values and political ideas, the more socialists sentimentally idealized “the left” not as a political possibility in the present but as a post-political social identity rooted in a story about the past, about one’s political and moral lineage and pedigree.

Socialists’ stirring speeches about the moral virtue, noble history and their unshakeable allegiance to a floating signifier called “the Left” have, of late, been in inverse proportion to their actual power and relevance on the contemporary left. The left doesn’t need or want them. It has achieved its current political hegemony by reuniting left-progressives with right-progressives. It has achieved its current electoral power by building a coalition of the private and public sector managerial classes and those who hope to enter them. Socialists and workers are nothing short of an inconvenience on today’s left. Hence its now-constant disparagement of working people.

Like it or not, if socialists ever want to work with the left again, it won’t be by pretending we have not been evicted. It will be the way we did during the Gilded Age, through brinksmanship and careful, strategically rational agreements an alliances. Sentimentally pretending we are still part of the left is the most effective way for socialists to give away the little remaining power we have.

We have to get back to building socialism outside the left, operating independently of the left and we have to get over this idea that the owner class somehow has worse cooties than the managerial class. Because evidence does not support that view. A lot of workers have got there. Maybe if we did, we could actually get something done like, I don’t know… bringing the forty-hour work week back to BC.

I just found this piece while checking through my archive to make sure the 1992 chapters of my memoirs were accurate. I hope this piece disabuses those of you who think my PhD has anything to do with my writing practices or anything else about me of such a notion. This is an essay by a twenty-year-old who dropped out of first-year university.

IS CONSENSUS POSSIBLE IN THE GREEN PARTY?
By Stuart Parker

Several people have put it to me that the consensus process has been harmful to the development of Green Parties because it is a cumbersome and ineffective means of making decisions. I disagree with this strongly. I have seen consensus work effectively in a number of situations and believe consensus to be a valuable process for making decisions in groups. It is my belief, however, that the Green Party of B.C. is doing a great disservice both to itself and to the cause of advocating consensus by perpetuating the myth that the decision making process it is currently using on the provincial level is consensus, or even a distant relative of the process.

Having been an advocate of consensus decision making, and having applied it to groups I have organized outside of the Green Party, I had been puzzled by the lack of success in using the process experienced by the Greens and had always put the problem down to the behavior of a number of individuals. It was not until the B.C. Greens Annual General Meeting of 1992 that it occurred to me that a key and essential element of consensus was missing from Green Party decision making. I was reading and copying down the notes left by a workshop on values important to the functioning of consensus. The notes said, “trusting and respecting everyone.” It occurred to me that the element of trust had clearly been missing since I became involved with the B.C. Greens in 1989.

According to those practicing consensus, it is clear that trust is absolutely essential to the process. Unlike unanimity decision making, wherein concessions on unrelated issues are exchanged for consent on a particular issue, consensus presumes that every person operating within the process is working for the benefit of the group. It also presumes that every participant needs to have a high level of trust in the intelligence and motives of all his or her fellow participants. Under the original definition of the consensus process (as opposed to the one now used by the B.C. Greens), the facilitator is charged with phrasing and proposing all decisions adopted by the group, based on his or her sense of the group’s feelings on this issue.

The party’s faith in the intelligence and selflessness of its facilitators was obviously so seriously jeopardized by 1989 that the facilitator had been demoted to the role of chair in meetings, simply to keep a speakers’ list and receive motions from the floor. The term “enrichment” had been demoted to “friendly amendment” and a voting fallback had been introduced to the process so that blocks could be overridden.

The 1992 Annual General Meeting saw a movement by the party closer to the original definition of consensus, with a one day workshop devoted to consensus decision making, the reintroduction of trust building exercises and increased socializing between the participants. While a sense of trust in the process was not fully restored, the party moved closer to a group capable of using consensus. The 1992 meeting was also by far the most culturally homogeneous, being comprised, almost entirely of participants not only politically but socially part of the alternative movement, virtually all of whom felt fully comfortable and appreciative of the fact that the meeting took place at someone’s home. With a narrow cultural base, the meeting was more comfortable with a consensus process.

1991-92 also saw a sharp (50%) membership decline in the party and an even sharper decrease in funds. While during the growth years of 1988-91, consensus had changed into a unanimity oriented version of Robert’s Rules, after the party’s extremely disappointing showing in the 1991 provincial election, full unanimity, trust oriented consensus came back into vogue. This interestingly parallels the original adoption of consensus in 1985, which had followed the boom years of 1983-84. Membership had dropped from 1200 in 1983 to 700 in 1984 to roughly 350 in 1985. This had followed extremely disappointing electoral showings as well.

When political parties suffer emotionally crushing defeats, as with the Alberta Social Credit Party in the early 1970s and the B.C. Social Credit Party in 1991, where a party’s showings have fallen short of their expectations by orders of magnitude, there are what is known as “back to the roots” movements. In the case of right wing parties with a populist base, this means more barbecues, more meetings in rural areas, policies further to the right, active promotion of “Christian principles,” a movement away from active support of transnational business to small business, etc. In essence, such a movement attempts to create a culturally homogeneous party of white, rural, Christian people, driving away even faster the few mainstream supporters the organization the party has been able to hang on to. After all, it is much easier to handle a crushing defeat, when all the remaining supporters can feel better socially about one another because they not only have similar politics, but similar friends, are of a similar age and class and of the same religion.

Most political movements with populist roots tend to want to go back to those roots to cope with major defeats. Perhaps if the New Democrats had ended up with seven seats in 1991, instead of the Socreds, we might be seeing militant, old line socialist trade unionists taking over the party, pushing feminists and environmentalists to the fringe.

So, here we are with the Green Party and its own “back to the roots” movement. The 1992 Annual General Meeting Agenda invited people to enjoy “drumming and cappuccino” and “invoking the goddess from within.” The Canada Day weekend was forsaken in favour of the summer solstice, which is not a long weekend, in the extreme southwest corner of B.C., on a farm. The reaffirmation of consensus was only the crowning touch, and no wonder that it worked better, when the cultural base to which the meeting and party appealed were narrowed so effectively. We were able to send signals to career oriented people, members of organized religions and generally anyone not a member of the Gulf Islands, Kitsilano, New Age culture that they would not fit in culturally to our AGM.

As was explained to me by the writer of the agenda (whose views on Green policy I respect tremendously and whose work on hosting the meeting I do appreciate) “Well, that’s ‘island life.’” Well, the fact is that most of the people in BC, we are trying to reach, including many environmentalists, don’t live on our island. We are not here to promote a culture, we are here to promote a political program. Counter culture and electoral politics are not easily compatible. While both are necessary to achieve social change, the active fusion of the two strategies will render both impotent.

It is not the Green Party that will save the world, and there is no single strategy that will. The Green Party should be making itself the most effective tool to engage in electoral politics, while it leaves other groups working to save the planet to make themselves the most effective lobbying tools, or monkeywrenching tools, or alternative cultures. For the same reason that environmental groups do not limit themselves by supporting a single political party, and thereby narrowing their base of supporters, so the Green Party should not be narrowing its base culturally.

So how does this reflect on consensus? It is clear that consensus is an effective process in an affinity group of culturally similar people, and I believe, capable of enhancing such a group. But when it is applied to a larger group, without a basis of trust, with membership criteria based solely on paying a fee, either the process breaks down or the group consciously or unconsciously undertakes a policy to discourage the membership of people with whom they cannot easily establish a basis of trust. From 1988 to 1991, we have watched the first process happen and now we are switching to the second. It seems that we have a choice: either to make a farce of the process or create additional membership criteria. Because right now, the membership form mentions neither trust nor culture.

If the Greens are to move ahead, it is my belief that we must create a party inclusive of all people who share our concern for the imminent breakdown of planetary life support systems. We must therefore adopt a process which does not have trust as a prerequisite.

The Strange Case of Grant Devine
In the spring of 2001, former Conservative Saskatchewan premier Grant Devine addressed a private luncheon of Fraser Institute supporters at a swanky downtown Vancouver hotel. There were good reasons for the event to be private. Devine was, even among the most ardent members of the political right, a controversial figure. His government had gone down to one of the most crushing defeats at the polls in the province’s history in 1991, with the party falling from 45% of the vote to 25% and losing 28 of its 38 seats in the legislature, with every single urban MLA going down to defeat. And that was only the beginning.

Senior staffers, backbenchers and even cabinet ministers were prosecuted by the RCMP for an organized expense fraud scheme that had been common knowledge in the Devine government’s final term in office. Former cabinet ministers did jail time for stealing public funds. One committed suicide to avoid an imminent arrest. In the 1995 election, the party was reduced to five seats. And its caucus crossed the floor to form a new party called the Saskatchewan Party, to which the NDP referred in the 1999 and 2003 elections as the “Conservative Party witness protection program.” It has not held a seat since.

But the total destruction of the Saskatchewan affiliate of their party was not even the thing about Devine of which grassroots Canadian conservatives most strongly disapproved. In the late 80s and early 90s he had plunged Saskatchewan deeply into debt by building infrastructure in rural communities far beyond what local demand could support and undertook a pricey administrative reorganization of government to fill the many office buildings he constructed in small communities around the province. He also instituted direct subsidies to farmers and ceased charging resource royalties to oil companies and he sold off most revenue-generating part of the government.

Devine’s government remains widely viewed as the most fiscally irresponsible government anywhere in Canada in the 1980s. Not only did they leave office awash in debt; they had created a massive structural deficit that would take a decade of austerity to eliminate.

The Real Dangers of Public Debt
So, at the private luncheon, where no media were allowed, he was asked about this very thing. His response, and I must paraphrase here, was that he knew, a year into his final mandate, that he was facing certain defeat in 1991. And therefore he chose to destroy the province’s finances so that, when the NDP returned to power, they would be unable to bring in any new government programs, that they would be forced into enacting austerity and not expanding the welfare of the province that gave birth to Canadian Medicare.

I have no idea if this was a mere excuse concocted with the benefit of hindsight or whether it was the plan all along. But it was clearly true: plunge a jurisdiction far enough into debt and its ability to make political choices democratically is profoundly undermined. And one has a pretty good idea of who will be making the political choices in an indebted jurisdiction: the global financial elite, the banks, the bond-raters and the investor class.

Historically, the Saskatchewan NDP, the first democratic socialist party ever to take power in North America, has always been debt-phobic. The party held power for seventeen years before introducing Medicare because it felt that for the policy to have a chance, the province would need to be debt-free.

Because it is private companies, especially Standard and Poors, owned and run by the global financial elite, who hand out credit ratings, a heavily indebted and heavily borrowing jurisdiction can only continue enacting its policies if they meet with the approval of the elite of the financial sector. And once upon a time, it seems like just the other day, New Democrats did not understand the corporate elite to be their best buddies.

As a provincial finance minister I once knew reported of her meeting with Standard and Poors, the fiscal responsibility of your jurisdiction and its future financial plans are but small factors in the determination of your jurisdiction’s credit rating. Bond raters and bankers are, like everyone else, ideological. And they want to see governments and people who share their ideology do well and those who do not, not quite so well.

The reality is that a credit rating downgrade by the bond-raters, changes in the lending terms of banks and other governments are political in character. And, the more indebted you are, the more additional borrowing you need to conduct for the coming fiscal year, the greater the ability of the global financial elite to throw your jurisdiction into a debt spiral through a series of interest rate hikes.

Back in the 90s, we saw that play out at the international level as governments like Zimbabwe’s and Argentina’s went into these tailspins, ultimately resulting in World Bank bailouts contingent on World Bank officials being given control of the countries’ finance ministries decisions over program funding leaving their capitals and moving to New York and Geneva.

I have never understood organizations like the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ argument that borrowing money is somehow socialist or left-wing. Certainly, there was a time when a lot of borrowing was done by social democratic and liberal governments to more rapidly expand their economies and build the welfare state more quickly during the first phase of the Cold War (1948-80). But this was a period when the global financial elite were part of broad society-wide consensus that producing prosperity and a social safety net for working and middle class people was essential to winning the Cold War for the capitalist side.

As that consensus evaporated in the late 1970s and early 80s, borrowing policies that had worked in the 1950s and 60s stopped working. That was partly due to the restructuring the global financial system in 1974 but more importantly, because, unlike in the age of John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith, the financial sector no longer saw itself as a partner in the construction of the welfare state.

The NDP’s Dramatic Fiscal Policy Reversal
When John Horgan and Carole James, his finance minister, came to lead the first BC NDP government in sixteen years, they were proud of the small budget surpluses they posted during their half-decade in power. And this was just one aspect of their commitment to policy continuity with the government they had replaced. This was, in large measure, because their government’s senior decision-makers were veterans of the party’s nine turbulent years in power during the 1990s, especially after its re-election in 1996 when it faced a capital strike by the mining industry and other major sectors of the economy.

The late 2010s and early 20s NDP was not just afraid of the banks. They were afraid of pretty much every major international industrial cartel. Not spooking or upsetting the mining and petroleum sectors was almost the categorical imperative of the Horgan regime. That is because, like a credit rating downgrade, a capital strike can hobble an economy and destroy the ability of a government to pursue its agenda as the economic contraction causes its revenues to fall and its costs to grow.

So, what are we to make of the new fiscal approach of premier David Eby, the tyrant who succeeded Horgan because the official returning officer, who just happened to be a lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry, running the succession process, disqualified Eby’s competitor and acclaimed him with nary a vote being cast by the party or its caucus?

The official $7.9 billion budget deficit he and his finance minister announced for 2024-25 is only part of the story. The actual increase in BC’s debt will be just shy of $20 billion thanks to borrowing hidden away in shell games around capital spending and crown agencies and corporations. The province’s debt to gross domestic product ration will climb from 17.6% to 21% in a single year leaving us $123 billion in the hole. And it is not like this will be a one-time thing, the forecast for the 2024-26 deficit, if Eby wins re-election this fall is $6.3 billion, a number sure to grow as the date of next year’s budget approaches, even if we pretend the inevitable orgy of pre-election spending announcements this fall is not going to happen.

Since becoming premier and, as I remarked above, even in the process of becoming premier, Eby has made it clear that he is a janitor for the global financial elite, someone whom they can trust to continue the massive subsidies to the Royal Dutch Shell and the other partners in LNG Canada, someone they can trust to continue throwing a million dollars a day at the Site C dam, whose energy will power the increased fracking operations necessary to fill the pipeline to Kitimat.

Similarly, the pharmaceutical industry can trust him to pursue to most aggressive policies to increase the supply of legal opioids, going so far as to issue fentanyl to high school students without their parents’ consent or knowledge. And readers of this blog know what I think about his government’s other aggressive policies to destroy kids’ endocrine systems and get them hooked on pharmaceuticals they will need for the rest of their lives.

And that is why in my view, Eby is pursuing fiscal policies that undermine the ability of any successor government, his own or another party’s, to deviate from the policy course British Columbia was on before the NDP even formed government.

Because if this plunge into debt continues, the effects of a credit rating downgrade or a capital strike on BC will soon be so catastrophic that another premier would have to spend years paying down the debt before they dared apply the same carbon tax to Big Oil that they do to individual consumers, before they enacted appurtenance legislation to revive our sawmills, before they stopped experimenting on children with dangerous, dependence-inducing drugs.

If a government wants to change course on any major issue of concern to the global financial elite, it will have to be preceded by years of austerity and policy continuity.

This idea that racking up debt is somehow socialist is absurd because what this kind of government debt really does is drain power out of our legislature and into the boardrooms of the banks and bond raters in New York while their stooge, Premier Eby does a soft shoe routine to distract us and his sycophants praise his supposedly courageous borrowing program.

Back in 1988, very few people in the activist world were working on the climate crisis or, as we called it back then, the Greenhouse Effect. But I had the good fortune to encounter a group of political visionaries who were working hard, not just to touch the conscience of government but to do something that was even harder back then: convince mainstream environmental groups and their leaders that climate would be the defining environmental issue of our age.

Chief among these individuals was David Lewis, my political mentor, the firewood collector, giant and car repairman, not the retired NDP leader. With the publication of Our Common Future by the United Nations, the results of a two-year commission conducted by the prime minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland, the profile of global environmental issues, ozone depletion, migration, chemical drift and climate, temporarily eclipsed the parochial issues and locality-specific concerns.

The scientific community was quick to make that switch in emphasis because its members could see that ocean acidification, ocean hypoxia, global heating and ozone depletion could wipe out ecosystems and species without there being any direct encounter with human beings. Or, as David put it, “if we fail to arrest the destabilization of planetary life support systems, these trees will die, whether they are cut down or not.”

But David and his group, the FOOLS (Friends of the Ozone Layer), were outliers in the environmental movement, especially in British Columbia. There were, of course, exceptions, such as the future English King Charles, Greenpeace International and its founder, Jim Bohlen, along with a handful of others but, especially in British Columbia, where he and I organized, the hostility with which our message was greeted by the mainline environmental groups nearly matched that of the fossil fuel, disposable aerosol and foam packaging industries. And ultimately, Jim, David’s and my insistence on prioritizing global environmental issues over parochial issues in our analysis, during the periods we exerted substantive control over the BC Green Party (1989-91, 1993-2000) helped to provoke the take-over and purge conducted by the eco-courtiers in 2000.

While I have already written another essay on the institutional hostility we faced from the emerging eco-courtier class, and their corruption and collusion with the fossil fuel industry, I want to re-examine the politics of BC Wild (the name of the Sunoco-funded coalition of environmental groups tasked with suppressing the climate debate in BC) through the lens not of petty corruption, but of class and culture.

The Other David Lewis

David Lewis was not a rich man. A university dropout, he lived in a small, modest home in Krestova, a remote rural community that was once the centre of the Doukhobor Sons of Freedom movement. He took odd jobs fixing cars and chopping wood and, when there was a big construction contract in the region, he could get temporary construction work. The first time the consort of the patrician Swedish Green Party leader, Per Gahrton, Ulla Lemberg, met Lewis during an official visit, she was transfixed by the hardness of his palms, their deep callouses and the dirt and congealed engine oil under his fingernails that he hadn’t managed to scrub away for the press conference. She could not stop talking about David’s hands for the rest of their official visit, noting that there was no one so genuinely working class in her party, even in the Far North.

Within a year, with only me and Jim to defend him, David was pushed out of his spokesperson position in the BC Greens, with Jim forlornly remarking, “I think David Lewis is the only person who has ever truly spoken for this party.” David’s charismatic style had made him a darling of Vancouver live radio and decision to attend Globe 90, the UN conference in Vancouver, selling bottles of “sustainable development” as a nineteenth-century vaudevillian huckster, complete with an antique portable sales counter with telescoping legs, had landed him on the national news as a spokesperson for the party. But his willingness to incorporate Marxian ideas of class struggle into his media statements and emotional style of sharing his fear that humanity would not rise to the occasion were frightening to many in the party and even more in the larger environmental movement.

Pressure began to mount from environmentalists outside the party to give David the proverbial hook. This pressure came largely from environmentalists already in the tank for Mike Harcourt’s New Democratic Party, the obvious government-in-waiting as the forty-year Social Credit political dynasty entered its terminal phase.

In the late 1980s and early 90s, BC’s environmental movement was dominated by wilderness “preservation” groups, comprising local volunteer-run, subscription-based civil society organizations like Friends of Clayoquot Sound and the West Arm Watershed Alliance, as well as organizations that, while technically working on a single area, had gained an international funding base and professionalized leadership, such as Friends of the Stein Valley and the Valhalla Wilderness Society.

These latter groups, along with the branch offices of international environmental groups like the Sierra Club and World Wildlife Fund, dominated the stage and were, largely, staffed by members of the incipient commissar class who were also functioning, at this point, as eco-courtiers within the (since 1987) Third Way government in waiting, the New Democrats.

These groups channeled money from all over the world into fighting to preserve the last of BC’s old growth forest from logging. While groups like WWF and Greenpeace had many irons in the fire, their global temperate rainforest preservation campaigns were invariably headquartered in Vancouver or Victoria and the delivery of “results” in BC affected the finances of the entire organizations and all their campaigns around the world.

Return of the Seekers

While David did not oppose the efforts to fence-off ecosystems from mining, logging and other industrial development—after all, these ecosystems functioned to protect biodiversity and absorb atmospheric carbon, mitigating and slowing the collapse of planetary life support systems—he did object the discourse the Big Green groups were popularizing on multiple fronts.

First, these groups did not merely use terms like “save” and “preserve” when they talked about the stretches of forest and alpine they were seeking to have declared parks; they often amplified these claims by suggesting ecosystems would be held in their present state “forever” by an act of the state. David felt that this was both dishonest, given that his models showed that forests ecosystems would need to move nine times faster than the fastest forests had previously moved in the past to adapt to rapid climate change, and because this discourse of permanence directly undermined our movement’s warnings of impending catastrophe.

Second, the sales pitch for these new parks contained much that ran counter to the idea that areas were being preserved due to an ecological imperative. Organizations like Western Canada Wilderness Committee (WC²) went beyond marketing calendars, posters and other forms of low-end merchandise depicting the threatened ecosystems as aesthetically pleasing. They produced lavish coffee table books, featuring the art of photorealist wildlife artists like Robert Bateman and my father, Ron Parker.

Movement leaders, like Joe Foy, would juxtapose the idea that a place like the Walbran Valley merited preservation because it was “untouched” while at the same time exhorting supporters to “get out there” and camp and hike in the regions. Indeed, Foy’s WC² went beyond encouraging eco-tourism. They use the illicit building of eco-tourist infrastructure as a means of strengthening their hand in government negotiations. The building campsites, trails, bridges and moorages became key activities of big environmental groups, especially those based on Vancouver Island.

In this way, David argued, environmentalists were speaking out of both sides of their mouths: touting the pristine, unchanged and allegedly unchangeable character of these areas that situated them outside the economy, while concurrently seeking to build an industry built around the recreational gratification of a particular class.

In later years, during David’s extended break from political activity (1991-97) I supplemented this criticism with the additional observations that rather than focusing on working class jobs being threatened by the logging industry ecosystem damage, such as the commercial fishery and canneries, and working class recreation, such as hunting and trapping, the economic activity that was touted by Big Green groups was eco-tourism, a passtime mainly of wealthy, educated urbanites that tended to provide low wage, non-union hospitality industry employment in rural areas.

In other words, the environmental movement’s focus on wilderness “preservation” had two pernicious aspects that interacted synergistically. First, it minimized the sense of urgency and impact concerning the Greenhouse Effect.

Second, it caused a reversion in the class politics of the movement to a pre-Cold War state. Prior to the Cold War, the environmental movement, as epitomized in the Sierra Club, was a quasi-religious bourgeois movement focused on the spiritual and aesthetic experiences wealthy urban elites could have in landscapes cleared of their human populations. Its international board of directors included leading lights of the Yankee patrician Republican Party elite of the time, like Teddy Roosevelt and Prescott Bush (scion of the Bush dynasty).

During the Cold War, following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the movement had taken a working class turn, focusing on the health of workers and of low-income communities. It championed farm workers with its calls for pesticide bans and working class neighbourhoods disproportionately affected by industrial disasters and waste. It gained major working class allies in farmworker union leaders like Cesar Chavez and Charan Gill.

But now it called not just for industrial workers to accept less work and lower-paying work but also more socially servile and submissive work as is axiomatic in the hospitality industry.

And when environmentalists faced accusations and criticisms from the industrial working class of the North American periphery, their response was typically not one of acknowledgement or compensation but of denial and obfuscation. Environmentalists denied that there would be any economic cost to what they proposed and instead baselessly asserted that in a green economy, everyone would become more prosperous, a delusion that finally reached its crescendo in the LEAP Manifesto of 2015.

The Rationality and Decency of the Proletariat

David, being a member of the peripheral industrial working class, himself, understood exactly how such assertions would play. Industrial workers would reasonably assume that when the costs of something were being downplayed or denied, it meant that they and not the urban bourgeoisie and commissar classes would be the ones to shoulder those costs on their own.

And so he proposed a radical departure in discourse, one that I am ashamed to say I did not have the courage to follow him on. His master term in the interviews he gave in 1989-91 was “share the losses.” Both climate change and the economic transition necessary to limit it would undoubtedly produce losses. And he felt that the only way to gain the support of the industrial working class was to stop trying to bamboozle them and present them with the cold, hard facts of the high cost of transition and a plan for sharing that cost fairly.

That’s because David believed in a politics that I did not yet understand, the politics that Bernie Sanders brought to the coal towns of West Virginia and for which coal miners voted in large numbers. You see: what liberals call “people voting against their own interests” is nothing of the kind. Working class voters are more altruistic than the bourgeoisie and the commissars. Even though they have less, they are more willing to make material sacrifices to bring about a moral order in which they believe. White working class voters demeaned and denigrated as stupid and ignorant are no more stupid than low-income Woke urban progressives working as baristas. The difference is that their culture contains a greater respect for, and ethos of, personal and collective sacrifice.

The Twenty-first Century Degradation of Climate Discourse

But, as it stands, the environmental movement did not listen to David Lewis and things have only worsened. When environmental organizations decided to become “climate champions,” in the late 1990s, they retired “the Greenhouse Effect” and replaced it with “climate change.” Whereas the former term was one that, by its very structure, educated people about the mechanism by which the climate was destabilizing, the one that replaced it severed the term from any theory of causation, making it easier for climate denialist ideas to creep in.

Whereas disputing the Greenhouse Effect entailed explaining why heavier molecules were not trapping heat in the atmosphere, disputing “climate change” simply entailed offering some half-baked theory offering some other cause of the change, or baldfaced denial that change was taking place.

And because the environmental movement’s leadership now deemed regular folks too stupid to understand how their atmosphere was changing, an appeal to reason was replaced with an appeal to authority, “trust The Science!” And indeed those touting this new approach began to suggest that it was problematic for regular people to educate themselves, examine evidence, etc. and that uppity proles who did that were risible figures, fools seduced by low production value youtube videos into a fantasy world. Best to advise the proles to not even try to understand!

And, as the first decade of the twenty-first century closed, environmentalists hit upon an even more disastrous term in which to encapsulate their discourse: “climate justice.” “Climate justice” packaged belief that carbon emissions were causing the climate to worsen with a set of unpopular, punitive government policies that targeted the working class of the Global North’s extractive periphery for special punishment through increased transportation costs, destruction of the used vehicle market, increased costs for basic heating and refrigeration and the singling-out of agriculture for special financial penalties.

It is no wonder, in our present moment that, even as extreme weather events also disproportionately ravage the property and livelihoods of the rural working class, “climate denial” increases, not just because of reaction formation but because “climate science” has been conflated with a set of punitive taxation measures targeting that class.

We Must Share the Losses

But it does not have to be this way. There is still time. As David would say if he were here, “we cannot lose faith that humanity will rise to the occasion.” And that is why I exhort us all to find a just and equitable plan to share the losses and save the planet.