Canadian Politics - 7. page

On October 3^rd, 2005, George W Bush nominated Harriet Myers to serve on the US Supreme Court. As with every Supreme Court nomination since the 1980s, much of the debate concerning her appointment centred on whether she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade and permit direct state control of women’s reproductive systems.

Unlike Canada, where the Supreme Court invited parliament to re-regulate abortion in 1987, following it striking the country’s anti-abortion law as too restrictive, the US Supreme Court did not invite further regulation of reproductive rights. In this way, the US anti-abortion movement has had to pursue a two-stage strategy to nationalize the uteruses of women of child-bearing years, first, through changing the composition of the nation’s highest court and, second, by passing restrictive laws through the national and state legislatures. In Canada, the Supreme Court has already invited parliament to legislate, and so keeping abortion off the floor of the Commons has become our main priority.

Until recently, however, there was a delicate dance that had to be performed by forced-birth advocates to stack the Supreme Court in their favour and obtain a majority that opposed Roe. v. Wade. The now almost-extinct species of “moderate Republicans” comprising Senator Lisa Murkowski, and almost no one else, held the balance of power in the US Senate and opposed the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

So, a candidate for the Court, or for the US Senate, whose members approved court nominees, had to signal they opposed women’s reproductive rights and wished to overturn Roe v. Wade without ever directly saying it. This entailed walking a tightrope of mobilizing the support of the forced birth movement without ever appearing to directly solicit it. This was effected, primarily, through coded communication or, as our political lexicon now renders this idea “dog whistles.”

A political dog-whistle entails communicating to a large discourse community comprising thousands or millions of people a clear and unambiguous meaning while communicating an unclear and ambiguous meaning or no meaning at all to those outside this community. Anglo America’s Christian Right has invested massively in creating a highly particular kind of civic literacy in its members: the development of a functional political vocabulary of coded communication, of dog whistles. Whatever one might think about this movement’s grasp of math, history or economics, there is no comparable ability to communicate in code among liberals, progressives or socialists. And this movement, especially those parts focused primarily or exclusively on the abortion question, flows right across the Canada-US border.

In this way, the Anglo American anti-abortion movement is both adept, because it is trained, at reading coded communication and, more importantly, expects to receive communication in code. They expect a set of obfuscations and contradictions from their leaders; in fact, certain types of obfuscation and contradiction are used to recognize and authenticate leaders as members of this group. I wrote, back in 2012, about how the “intentional gaffe” is a centrepiece of this system of coded communication.

A look at Twitter shows us that this understanding of the most important political communication is necessarily coded. When Donald Trump announced “I am the chosen one,” his most fanatical followers took no notice of it. That is because they know that if Trump were to reveal himself to be the messiah, he would naturally reveal that information in code. That is why those most committed to the divinity of Trump are most enamoured of and continue to use #COVFEFE in their communication. For those comfortable in this discourse community, #COVFEFE is the perfect term, at once benediction, in-joke and coded message that might mean anything. Its impenetrability has elevated it to the level of holy word, whereas, “I am the chosen one” has been ignored.

While #COVFEFE is the most emblematic of Trump’s communication, it is not typical. Normally, Trump’s way of communicating with his base is to assert something, walk it back, assert it again, walk it back again, “clarify” things through a spokesperson by putting forward some kind of non-existent nuance and then offering an intrinsically self-contradictory position. Does Trump hate Muslims? Yes! No! How dare you say he hates Muslims!? Muslims are awful! Trump is the only one who knows how evil they are! Look at Trump’s Muslim friends! Nobody has ever been a better friend of Muslims in history! Etc.

Everybody knows what Trump means and thinks about Muslims. He hates them and believes them to be an existential threat to America. This bizarre dance of self-contradiction is confusing only to those outside the Anglo American conservative discourse community.

Initially, when Elizabeth May and the Green Party’s national office began generating a series of gaffes, fuck-ups, contradictions and nonsense about abortion, I put it down to the party not being ready for prime time. But this has been going on for weeks now. And every time the Green Party abortion story dies down, May or the party starts talking about it on Twitter again and a new cycle of alleged gaffes begins.

But let us consider, for an uncomfortable moment, that this is the Plan, that May figures about 20% of Canadians are forced birth advocates who feel betrayed by Andrew Scheer, who promised to depart from the national consensus to decline the Supreme Court’s invitation to place abortion back on the floor of parliament. This might seem a dangerous game but, from hiring Warren Kinsella to advocating new oil refineries be constructed, it seems like May sees this as her last campaign and intends to throw every high-risk scheme including the kitchen sink at this final great effort.

When George W Bush told the Christian Right to mobilize in support of Harriet Myers, he had to make the case that she would overturn Roe v. Wade to his base, despite her never having directly denounced the decision. But, instead of saying “she secretly opposes Roe v. Wade,” he said, “I know her heart.” This phrase has become emblematic for those who study the power of coded communication in Anglo American politics and helped to inspire Stephen Colbert’s concept of “truthiness.”

When we see Elizabeth May insisting, as did Myers, that access to abortion is settled law or already decided or that she supports women’s right to choose, we also find her other statements that she is “personally pro-life” and that she doesn’t support “a frivolous right to choose.” In this way, she wants Canada’s Christian Right voters to “know her heart.” While the Liberal Party is desperate to convince these people that Andrew Scheer still secretly supports their agenda, May appears to be covertly competing for the Tories’ virtual monopoly on the serious misogynist vote.

For those who question whether the Greens really are trying to dog-whistle the Christian Right, let us consider the ways in which they have confused the issue:

1. Whipped Votes: May and her party keep stating that the only reason their position on abortion is unclear is that they do not whip votes. They cannot, she explains, because the party constitution prohibits it. Except that I have a copy of the Constitution right here; it is buried on their web site. And nowhere in the document is there a prohibition on whipping votes. This constitutional prohibition is a lie May made up when she recruited NDP MP Bruce Hyer in 2013 and needed to explain his votes opposing gun control. Since then it has been such an oft-repeated part of Canadian political oral tradition that even the Greens’ sternest critics now believe this falsehood.

Second, one of the reasons this prohibition of whipped votes does not appear in the Green Party’s constitution is that it would be unconstitutional, and consequently unenforceable even if it were. As a lawyer, May knows this. The constitution of the corporation of a party cannot interfere with the supremacy of parliament or with the ability of MPs to choose with whom they caucus.
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Third, following the defection of Pierre Nantel from the NDP to the Greens during this election campaign, he expressed support for the Quebec Values Charter, the misnamed secularization bill that is actually a piece of Christian supremacist legislation. That was fine with the Greens. Then he expressed support for Quebec independence. May’s immediate response to this was to state that should Quebec independence come to the floor of the House of Commons, her MPs would be whipped to vote against it. In other words, during the same week that May falsely stated she was not allowed to prohibit a free vote on abortion by her MPs, she prohibited a free vote on Quebec independence. In other words, May would force her caucus to defend Canada’s territorial integrity but not women’s bodily integrity.

2. Debatability vs Support: For the past twenty years and all of the twenty-first century, Canada’s major parties have established a national consensus around the debatability of abortion in parliament. There has been an agreement comprising the Canadian Alliance, Conservative Party, Liberal Party, NDP and Bloc Quebecois that no MP in any of these parties’ caucuses would be permitted to propose or debate abortion legislation on the floor of parliament. The reason for this is that some MPs in each of the major parties’ caucuses oppose abortion; indeed, the Prime Minister of Canada from 2006-2015 was just such a person. Stephen Harper opposes abortion rights but was part of this national consensus, threatening Tory MPs who raised this issue in parliament with expulsion. Even Andrew Scheer has reversed his position on this question, since becoming Tory leader, and now adheres to this agreement.

May and her party have sought to deliberately mis-describe the issue as being either a party’s support for abortion rights, an MPs support for abortion rights or a leader’s support for abortion rights. But this is not what the national consensus is about. Right now, May is the only party leader who is siding with groups like Campaign Life Coalition in calling for an end to this prohibition on debate and proposed legislation. By undermining this consensus, what May is really doing is pressuring Scheer to free legions of Tory backbenchers to nationalize my girlfriend’s uterus by giving him cover to join her in breaking the consensus that has been protecting women for a generation.

3. Court vs. Legislative Authority: To further sow confusion about the abortion issue and more effectively mobilize a US-based discourse community, many Green candidates conflated the Canadian Supreme Court decision R. v. Morgentaler (1989) with the US Supreme Court’s decision Roe v. Wade (1973), arguing that the court had prohibited the House of Commons from legislating on abortion, making abortion a matter of “settled law,” as it was called in the US. But this is not the case. Whereas Roe v. Wade was explicit in prohibiting laws regulating abortion, R v. Morgentaler specifically invited the House of Commons to write new legislation restricting access. In this way, Canadian abortion rights are not protected by the Supreme Court but by the national consensus among parties and party leaders not to take up the Supreme Court’s explicit invitation.

Let me be clear that this cannot arise from ignorance or misinterpretation. Elizabeth May was both a senior civil servant in and a practicing lawyer for the Canadian government when the two Supreme Court decisions on abortion were handed down in 1987 and 1989. She knows the politics and legalities of this issue better than any political leader in our country today.

4. Candidate Vetting: May and the Greens have taken another tack on this issue: they stated that during the candidate vetting process, potential candidates are asked if they support legislation that would criminalize abortion and, if they do, are prohibited from seeking a nomination. This was immediately challenged by past and current candidates who reported that May was lying and they had never been asked this question. Leaving aside the fact that people do lie and do change their minds, and that, consequently, this was no guarantee that Green MPs would not table anti-choice motions in the Commons, the claim was also immediately shown to be a bald-faced lie.

But May and the Greens maintained that they had. Then it came out that two candidates in 2015 had campaigned on an anti-abortion platform publicly and sought the votes of the forced birth movement, and that they had been re-nominated for 2019. May then stated that she would “re-vet” the party’s candidates, a process that she alleged she completed before the party’s filing deadline, except that the two candidates who had run in 2015, and were running again, are still on the party’s slate.

Then, there followed an investigation by the journalistic arm of the Broadbent Institute, Press Progress, an admittedly partisan organization that backs liberal and progressive candidates on the right wing of the NDP. Press Progress found additional Green candidates who opposed choice on abortion, including one who said that women seeking an abortion should need to obtain “permission” from another family member.

One would think, in the wake of all this confusion, that the Green Party would be seeking to lower the profile of its abortion position in the national electoral debate. But that is not what is happening. Instead, true to Trumpian form, the Greens are narrating how the NDP are persecuting them by raising these questions and how they are victims of others’ lies when in fact, nobody is a bigger supporter of women’s rights than they are.

What motivation could they have for talking up all the confusion they themselves have generated, by refusing to rejoin the national consensus and prohibit their MPs from proposing anti-abortion laws (something they still refuse to do)? The faint hope of pulling forced birth activists from the Tory party by staging the kinds of endless gaffes, contradictions and obfuscations to which they have been trained, since the 1980s, to respond to. And that is wrong, morally and politically. Riding the global wave of support for misogynist authoritarianism—even a little bit—is an unacceptable tactic that the Greens must reject.

If Green Party members, candidates and supporters want to stop these insinuations that they are pursuing a dangerous agenda putting millions of women’s human rights and bodies at risk, the solution is clear: don’t call me. Call Elizabeth May and tell her that women’s bodily autonomy and integrity is just as meriting of caucus discipline as Canada’s territorial integrity, or, ideally, much more so.

In 1994, Svend and I both went to jail for opposing the last BC NDP government’s plan to log Clayoquot Sound. Back when I led the BC Greens, the Green Party of Canada never ran against Svend. That’s because he has always put principle and planet before party. The sexual condition may unica-web.com levitra from canadian pharmacy have several causes related to psychological health or physiological health and hypertension one among these causes. Their prospects also see that “this is easy, and if they can do it, then so can overnight cialis soft https://unica-web.com/documents/statut/ustatute.htm I”. Despite the fact that Kamagra comes in different measurements, however generally it is recommended in 100mg structure to ED patients. viagra for free https://unica-web.com/documents/statut/bestimmungen-des-weltwettbewerbes.pdf Erectile dysfunction can be cause by many reasons like overwork, stress, depressions https://www.unica-web.com/data-privacy-german.html viagra sales australia (20% of cases), and more often (80%) is related to previous health issues. There has never been a parliamentarian of any political stripe who has been as consistent as Svend in putting everything, including his freedom, on the line for our planet. That’s why I have always backed him 100% and that is why I proudly stand behind his candidacy today. There is no person our parliament needs more desperately, as we confront the climate crisis, than Svend Robinson.

– Stuart Parker, BC Green Party leader 1993-2000

I said in my first post about the Green Party abortion scandal that I would offer three reasons the scandal is important and matters.

In my first piece, I focused on how Canada’s parliamentary abortion consensus was forged between 1987 and 1993 and how Elizabeth May and the Green Party are the first party to depart from it.

In my second piece, I reminded readers that there is a global context in which these statements have appeared and that Canadians cannot be complacent about the security of women’s reproductive rights in our society.

In this piece, I want to talk about how the rise of global authoritarian movements is connected not just to a set of policies but to the debasement of political discourse in which the Greens are participating.

3. Political Nonsense is the Gateway to Authoritarianism

Today, we can see not just Trumpian policies but Trumpian political discourse seeping into Canadian politics through parties of the Right. Both Andrew Scheer and Maxime Bernier, like their provincial counterparts, increasingly state outright falsehoods, such as Scheer’s baseless claim that the Canadian government was welcoming a convicted British pedophile and serial killer to our country, contrary not just to the claims of Canada’s own justice department but to all statements by the UK government that it had no intention of repatriating the individual. This is paired with a penchant for absurd and exaggerated statements like the claim his son’s life was saved by chocolate milk.

A key tool of right-wing populists is to so debase the national conversation that it seems that everyone is lying and talking nonsense and then treating this as the norm in a liberal or social democratic state, something the can only be solved by giving unfettered power to the people who debased the discourse in the first place. Lies and nonsense, then, are crucial parts of the discourse that has produced Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.

But they are not the only ingredients necessary to render a national discourse so incoherent that it ceases to be a tool voters can use to make collective decisions about how to govern ourselves. The third ingredient is an attack on coherence by destabilizing meaning and truth through constant self-contradiction. George Orwell, both in Politics and the English Language and 1984 stressed the importance of this attack on stable and reliable meaning as crucial for the victory of totalitarianism.

“War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.” These are the master words of Orwell’s faceless totalitarian state

Now, let us examine the Green Party’s first line of defense for their leader saying Green MPs could debate and introduce legislation about abortion: this is not a big deal because the Greens are a party that will not punish or kick out MPs under any conditions whatsoever. In this way, voters were supposed to feel reassured that the abortion thing wasn’t a big deal because May was also okay with her caucus members voting to re-intern the Japanese or re-open residential schools.

But the Greens then proceeded with a second line of rebuttal: they were the most feminist and pro-choice party in Canada and that it was a defamatory outrage that they were being described as anything but. Not just paid and formally selected Green spokespeople like my local candidate but also rank and file members took to social media suggesting that it was as clear as day that May was the greatest advocate women’s bodily autonomy had ever had.
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Strikingly, this line of defense continued, even as current Green candidates were revealed as having publicly identified with the forced birth movement in the previous campaign and had issued anti-abortion statements as candidates in the past. Then another 2015 candidate came forward and talked about May personally seeking funds from forced birth activists and asking her to equivocate on her own pro-choice position in pursuit of money and votes.

And still the party continued to simply re-state that it was 100% pro-choice, that it was the most trustworthy party in Canadian history on women’s reproductive health and resolutely refused to explain or otherwise engage the new revelations.

Every time Donald Trump does or says something unambiguously racist, this is how he proceeds: he states that he is the least racist person in the history of the world, that racialized people are doing better with him in power than at any time in American history and that it is a ploy by his enemies to make him seem racist because they are the true racists.

His surrogates then defend him by making mutually contradictory statements without explanation. We see this re-enacted here too as Green surrogates and supporters assert (a) that their party is the most respectful and trustworthy custodians of women’s reproductive rights (b) that it would be wrong for the Green Party to penalize an MP in any way for attacking women’s reproductive right and (c) that women’s reproductive rights are not important and are, in fact, a distraction from the real issues before voters.

And the great thing is that because the Greens approach every single policy in their book the same way, as non-binding on anyone, this will not just happen with abortion; it could happen in any area of national policy at any point in the campaign.

Another way that discourse is debased by authoritarians is to argue that a thing that is already happening and being witnessed is, by definition, impossible. The third part of the Greens’ line of defense was that each candidate undergoes rigorous vetting during which they are quizzed about their position on women’s reproductive rights and disqualified if they do not support them. Therefore it was impossible for any future Green MP to be anti-choice. Leaving aside the obvious facts that (a) sometimes people lie and (b) sometimes people change their minds, this line of defense continued being mounted after CBC had located two candidates who had run in 2015 and 2019 and were publicly on the record as anti-choice.

Essentially, the Greens were stating “do not believe what you see or hear. The thing you appear to be seeing and hearing is, by definition, impossible and therefore cannot be going on right now.” This kind of reality-destabilizing argumentation is a key to Trumpian discourse down South; and it is being introduced to Canadian politics not by Bernier but by May.

The cherry on top of this, of course, is that really what May is doing is reassuring us that, despite appearances, her candidates are all very fine people, that the real injustice are the unfair attacks on the reputations of these forced birthers… by the media, because the media are reporting the candidates’ own statements. Because both major stories about the Greens and abortion have been broken by the CBC, we also see an importation of the authoritarian trope of public broadcasters as the worst of the Lugenpresse.

What the Greens are effectively doing here is importing into Canada, the elements of authoritarian discourse that are too heavy for our two yellow vest parties to carry right now, with all their baggage of climate villainy and the like.

Populist authoritarianism does not just need an angry populace to succeed. It needs a confused one, one that is presented not a set of policies but a set of irresolvable koans dressed as policy. And that is what we are getting from the Greens.

In my last post, I explained how it it that the Green Party of Canada is doing something unprecedented. Until last weekend, the main “wedge issue” the Liberal Party of Canada was planning to use a certain issue to retain its control over a majority of parliamentary seats: the possibility that Andrew Scheer might depart from the overwhelming political consensus of every major political party (the Tories, Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois) that women’s access to abortion was to be fought-out at the individual level and not through the state, that pro-birth groups should focus their attention on convincing women of reproductive age not to use abortion services rather than focusing on changing laws to eliminate those services.

While the Conservatives are doing everything in their power to indicate that their current anti-abortion leader will do the same as their last one did: make abortion a personal lifestyle choice rather than a legislative one, just as our national consensus has done with climate justice and disposable plastics, the Greens are the true pro-birth radicals.

While Harper and Scheer have said “no matter how much we oppose abortion, we will not let parliament debate it,” the Greens are saying “no matter how much a leader supports access to abortion, we are going to make its prohibition a matter parliament can and should debate.”

In this way, the Green Party of Canada has already restructured the entire national discourse about women’s bodily autonomy. The fact that the party identifies as pro-choice only further magnifies the power of its declaration that parliament, and not my girlfriend, should be the primary decision-maker about her uterus and its contents.

It is at this point, that we should bring in the Green Party’s fourth line of defense for their unprecedented policy: their declaration that the abortion in question is so securely settled, that women’s reproductive health is so safe in this country that their actions couldn’t possibly lead to the actual loss of bodily autonomy by real women.

2. The Global Overton Window on Women’s Health and Rights

I lived in the United States 2009-2012. That is important. I lived in a blue state. A little over a decade ago, Americans said the same kinds of things that complacent, oblivious Canadians are saying today “they can’t ban abortion. The Supreme Court settled that question.” “Nobody could get elected president running on a pro-life ticket,” etc. Today, America is the Kingdom of Gilead, in which pro-choice justices are now a minority on the Supreme Court and women are being executed for having miscarriages.

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In liberal Canada, the only industrialized country so colonial and backwards that it still clings to the 1990s political cul-de-sac of Tony Blair’s Third Way, of social liberal austerity administered by technocrats, as its national ideology, Maxime Bernier, and his People’s Party of Canada were never going to be the vehicle for reopening women’s bodily autonomy as a live political issue here. Something more innovative was required.

Enter Elizabeth May and the Green Party of Canada, a movement comprised not, as many think, of hardcore environmentalists but, instead, of the lowest-information voters in the country.

As I have stated before, the Greens are the only scientifically correct millennial doomsday cult in history. What I mean is that the kind of people who would have joined the Millerites in the nineteenth century, or the Albigensians in the twelfth, have joined the Greens but, by sheer coincidence, the Greens are right that the world is about to end in a series of cataclysms. For this reason, Green voters, and especially Green members, people who believe in an impending realigning eschaton.

Such individuals are often uninformed about how the society in which they live functions arising both from a sense that it is ephemeral and a lack of interest in an obviously unfair dying order. Greens, often, have cartoonish, ignorant and bizarre ideas about the social order in which they live. That is not to say that a more detailed, accurate and comprehensive understanding would not also lead to the conclusion that this order must be burned to the ground as soon as possible, but rather to emphasize how much less information your average Green Party supporter has about Canadian politics than the average Blocquiste, Tory, New Democrat or Liberal.

If there were any party in this election whose members were unlikely to be aware of the thirty-year tenuous national consensus about women’s full personhood, it would be the Greens. Would not they, and not the Tories, be the perfect instrument of a global pro-birth movement to reintroduce women’s bodily autonomy as a debatable idea in Canada’s House of Commons? Just a few “pro-life” Green MPs would be needed and, instead of facing a wall of liberal, left and socialist opposition, the first advocates for jailing women for miscarriages would be self-identified “progressives” in stockinged feet and birkenstocks, and leading that charge, the self-styled feminist woman leading the Green Party of Canada.

Then we will see how soon Canada’s national discourse on women’s personhood flows into the larger Anglo-American discourse of that understands the uterus as the one body part that is the property of the state.

Here is what we know: on September 7^th, 2019, Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada stated that she would permit members of the Green Party caucus to raise the issue of abortion in parliament and propose laws to regulate women’s bodily autonomy without risking membership in the party caucus or any other punishment.

This stood in sharp contradistinction to the position taken by Andrew Scheer since assuming the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. While Scheer had sought and received the vote of many in Canada’s forced birth movement by promising that he would allow Tory caucus members to do this while running for leader, he reversed this position upon gaining the leadership and joined the broad, post-1989 Canadian political consensus that no MP would be permitted to re-open the abortion debate in the House of Commons. While the Liberal Party continues to stoke (perhaps legitimate) fears that Scheer has not really changed his position, it should be noted that every leader of every mainstream Canadian political party in the twenty-first century has joined that consensus. Until now. More on that down the page.

In response to the gaffe, Green Party candidates and spokespeople took one of two tacks. Some focused on stating that the party’s policy clearly and unambiguously supported a woman’s right to choose and that it was a misrepresentation of the policy to state that the Greens were equivocating on that question. Another, larger group focused on reminding voters that there are no Green Party policies whatsoever that bind caucus members because Green MPs, unlike all other MPs, since the glorious days of Preston Manning’s un-whipped Reform Party, would be un-whipped i.e. not subject to discipline for voting against party policy, the party leader or the majority of their fellow caucus members.

Many incumbent and retiring NDP MPs took to Twitter to point out the Greens’ soft line on abortion, which led to a third messaging tack taken by both groups: this was not a real gaffe or a real scandal. It was a fabrication of desperate NDP MPs, fearful of losing their seats over constituents abandoning them for the Greens. Given that this fear (and the consequently poor messaging) was absolutely real, this functioned as the unifying aspect of the Greens’ two essentially contradictory messages: (1) you can rely on us 100% to defend women’s reproductive choice and (2) any Green MP can vote for or against anything they feel like.

After a weekend of back-and-forth, the Greens realized that their strategy for pushing back was insufficient and so, they added a third element: while the Green Party might give its MPs greater freedom than any other party, its candidate vetting processes were as strict or stricter than those of any other major party. They claimed, on Monday, that every candidate for the party had been asked during the vetting process to declare themselves to be unambiguously pro-choice and those that did not were ruled ineligible for candidacy.

But then, a 2015 candidate for the party revealed that May had actively courted forced birth movement activists as major donors in the previous election and that she had been urged, by May, to let the donors know that electing Greens was the best way to get abortion back onto the floor of the Canadian parliament. And then, on Tuesday, the CBC ran a follow-up story about two Green Party candidates, running for the second time in 2019, who had actively courted anti-abortion activists and touted their forced birth views in the 2015 campaign. At the same time, I was privately contacted by past candidates for the party to tell me that the vetting process does not include abortion questions. Taken together, this information fit with the statements early in May’s tenure as leader when she, herself, courted the votes of the Christian Right based on her personal disapproval and condemnation of abortion.

I think this story is a very big deal in Canadian politics. But I have realize that I need to explain the three reasons that it is:

1. Canada’s National Pro-Choice Consensus

When I was a kid, women’s bodily autonomy was still a live political issue in Canada. Women needed a note from a psychiatrist or other doctor to state that their abortion was medically necessary in order to obtain one. Henry Morgentaler was routinely being arrested and doing time for performing abortions at his clinic and not demanding these notes. In 1987, this ended up in the Supreme Court of Canada and, fourteen years after Roe v. Wade in the US, Canada had its equivalent court judgement, leavened by Pierre Trudeau’s new Charter in the shiny new Canadian constitution, barring the state from messing with women getting doctors to help them end unwanted pregnancies.

Following the court ruling, the forced birth movement regrouped. The outcome of the 1988 election was an open question. The Liberal leader was a weak and incompetent drunk, the Steve Fonyo to Pierre Trudeau’s Terry Fox but, on the other hand, he was confronting a Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who was touting a massively unpopular free trade deal with the US, who was universally understood to be extraordinarily greasy and obsessed with his own place in Canadian history; and his government was the most scandal-plagued of the twentieth century. So, looking for a lever to pull, the movement tried to expand its parliamentary delegation by pooling the votes it already had in the Progressive Conservative Party’s Family Caucus, led by Fraser Valley MP Bob Wenman, with a new set of votes: Liberals for Life.
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The Liberal Party had long been a voice for Canada’s Roman Catholic population but had been dominated by anti-Vatican socially liberal Jansenists. But, in riding after riding, the Catholic majority in Toronto flexed its muscle through ultramontane populists like Tom Wappel and John Nunziata who provided crucial volunteers, money and candidates for the party is Canada’s biggest vote pool, Greater Toronto. In riding after riding, Loyalist-white elite Liberal candidates fell to the nearly-white Portuguese, Italian and Latino crowds organized by forced birth leaders in- and outside the Church.

Many Liberals for Life entered parliament in and joined the Tory Family Caucus with a shared agenda of a strict abortion law to replace the gaping hole the Supreme Court had left following their 1987 judgement and the 1987 “free vote” that had failed to pass to place women’s reproductive systems back in the hands of parliament shortly thereafter. But they constituted a minority of parliamentarians.

Irrespective of their views of abortion as a practice, there was a broad small-l liberal consensus in the NDP, PC and Liberal benches that state power was not a tool that should be used to control women’s reproductive health. In 1989, pro-choice Liberal leader John Turner let the Liberals for Life vote their conscience, as did Brian Mulroney, the pro-choice PC Prime Minister who set the vote up, but only after twisting enough arms to make sure it would fail.

But by 1993, Mulroney and Turner were gone. Turner’s successor, Jean Chretien won a majority government. No Canadian, to this day, knows what his personal beliefs are about his church’s categorization of abortion as a mortal sin worse than murder. But, following the collapse of the Tories, and their replacement as English Canada’s second party by the Reform Party, the “free votes on everything and fly economy class” who had heavily courted the Christian Right, following their “betrayal” by the Mulroney PCs, Chretien forged what has been a key part of Canada’s national consensus since the end of the Cold War.

Initially in contradistinction to Reform and, later, in accord with its successor parties, the Canadian Alliance and Conservative Party of Canada, Chretien declared that abortion, if one chose to combat it, was not something one could or should combat with state power. Like plastic pollution and climate change, abortion was, henceforth, to be a question of individual personal virtue and not national policy. sin or no sin, pro-birth or not, Chretien argued, abortion was a matter of individual choice and not parliament. Since 1993, it has been the position of every Canadian PM, be it the pro-autonomy Paul Martin or the pro-birth Stephen Harper, that abortion is not the business of parliament.

The decision to place the abortion debate outside the Canadian public square and outside parliament has been the most consistent and important post-Cold War addition to Canada’s cross-partisan political consensus, like the continuation of Medicare as a national cost-shared program. And, until May’s alleged gaffe the weekend after Labour Day, it showed every sign of staying in place, even in the context of a resurgent global misogynist right. There is no evidence that Scheer was any more likely to fulfill Liberal predictions of re-criminalizing abortion than Harper was in 2006, 2008 and 2011.

But May has changed all that. Now, hundreds, thousands of alleged “progressives,” and a national party that won the last federal byelection and is polling ahead of the NDP, People’s Party and Bloc Quebecois, the other third parties in parliament, are arguing not just that this fragile national elite consensus does not exist but that it should not exist. The Overton window is contorting faster than ever.

While the Greens will tell you that their (completely non-binding) policies are more pro-choice even than the NDP’s, this claim is a distraction from the real damage that they are doing: they are voiding a national consensus comprising every Bloc, NDP, Liberal and Tory leader who has served since 1989 and going further than Pentecostal lay minister Stockwell Day, legendary global neocon Stephen Harper, devout Catholics Justin Trudeau, Jean Chretien and Paul Martin and Thatcherite churchgoer Tom Mulcair in declaring that the Mulroney-Chretien consensus is at an end: abortion is a live issue on the floor of the House of Commons again.

More in the next part.

In Alberta, there is a Manichean struggle between two parties promising massive increases in the extraction of bitumen from the Alberta tar sands, using the power of the state to force new pipelines to carry this increased quantity of planet-killing petroleum through the unceded lands of indigenous people against their will and promising to sue any government that attempts to stop the pipelines, increase safety standards for the pipelines or sue oil companies for any damage they cause.

Both parties promise to maintain the lowest taxes on millionaires and billionaires of any Canadian jurisdiction and condemn former Tory premier Ed Stelmach’s review of oil industry royalties as a rigged stitch-up to mess with petroleum producers. They both favour maintaining the royalty regime of Ralph Klein for oil extraction and brag that they favour lower taxes on the rich than Klein ever supported.

But the two parties do differ on a few important points: an $11 minimum wage versus a $15 minimum wage, the rights of gay and transgender Albertans, whether to also use the power of the state to subsidize coal as well as oil and whether to play footsie with crackpots and racists.

For some people, these differences are enough to keep them trapped in the progressive politics trap of voting for the lesser evil. But, for many of us, the idea of abetting the intentional increase in carbon emissions has become a bridge too far. Yet there is no electable alternative for Albertans who hold this view.

So what is to be done?

In the past, I have written at some length on this blog in opposition to people opposing strategic voting and have encouraged people to vote for candidates from lesser evil parties in elections. I stand behind the reasoning for this.

The belief that individual votes “send a message” is fundamentally incorrect on two bases. First off, a voter’s idea of what their vote means is likely different from how the person or organization they want it to mean something to will interpret it. For instance, many people who vote Green think it will cause Liberals or New Democrats to think “my look at all that environmental concern; what must we do to win these people back?” More, often, however, the interpretation is “look at those jerks voting against us after all we’ve done for them. Let’s make sure to make bigger clearcuts in caribou habitat to show them.”

The exegesis of minority party votes is not something individual voters can control. The meaning made of their votes is out of their control, except in the private meaning-making session they engage in while marking their “X.”

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An “X” next to the name of a stranger associated with a flaky political doomsday cult has no clear or specific meaning that can act on anyone.

Does this mean that I advocate voting for a lesser evil party or giving up on the idea of voting at all? Perhaps. But I have not reached that point yet. Instead, I think we have to develop new voting strategies based on the truth that meaning-making in a social enterprise. That just as with everything else, we have been conned by the neoliberal order into thinking that collective actions are no different than a collection of individual actions.

If we want to take control of making votes that fail to elect people mean something, the way we must do that is intervene collectively, not just at the level of voting but at the level of political interpretation and meaning-making. And we need to engage in meaning-making acts not primarily for the purpose of communicating with people who are not us and not like us but for the purpose of building community, solidarity and connection among those who find the current pragmatic choices of accelerating the extinction event but with slightly different minimum wage legislation untenable.

If we are to move away from casting votes that produce tangible differences in who is elected, we need to move towards casting votes that produce some other kind of tangible difference, in public discourse, in movement-building or in building an electable alternative.

For this reason, I urge people to publicize their vote in an act that also publicizes how they want it interpreted. Maybe this involves entering the ballot booth and igniting the ballot with a cigarette lighter, so as to protest climate change by spending a night in jail. If one cannot afford to be arrested, consider posting a photo of one’s ballot receipt along with a clear and shared explanation of its meaning, be it a spoiled ballot or a Green one. Or if one wants to spend a few extra nights in jail, consider bringing a small scourge with you voting and turning over tables like Jesus in the Temple.

But the only way these things can become effective strategies is if they are a strategy a group takes on, be it an ad hoc affinity group of friends or a formal group that meets regularly with membership fees and a governance structure. More important than the act of voting is the act of contacting friends, comrades and allies and agreeing on a shared strategy to help shape the interpretation of a collective act, figuring out who is fetching bail and lawyers and who is going to jail, figuring out what Twitter hashtag to use for images of spoiled ballots or burning “I voted” ballot receipts.

All voting is hard and dodgy. There is no way of voting or vote one can cast that should feel good or be easy. If it is time, as it clearly is in Alberta, to cast symbolic votes, one must take responsibility for the whole meaning-making act if one is forced to vote symbolically.