Canadian Politics - 6. page

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Electoral politics was to be replaced by participatory democracy, so the party would not elect a leader.
• Voting was to be replaced by consensus, so the party held marathon meetings to achieve unanimity.
• Countries and provinces were to be replaced by bioregions, so the party chose not to have a central mailing address or office in Ontario or BC.
• Bioregionalism also meant that, because provincial ridings were not based on valley bottom-based eco-regions, the party would have no riding associations and hold no nomination meetings.

This worked for a while because the social movements from which the party drew support were communes and intentional community networks. They had built useful, functional institutions like regional barter banks, locally. They came together regionally at gatherings like the Stein Festival and Hat Creek Gathering and, North America-wide there was even the North American Bioregional Congress (NABC), attended by thousands at its zenith.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.