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The Trolling of the Wet’suwet’en – Part 2 of Rhetoric in the Horgan Pipeline Debacle

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?”

Struggling to Be a Socialist Internationalist on Unceded Territory

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.

Time to Tear off the Masks in the Media’s Framing of the Horgan Pipeline Debacle

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.
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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.

Royal Dutch Shell settled out of court for Ken Saro Wiwa’s execution in 2009 for $15 million

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, Solicitor-General & commander of BC’s RCMP

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.

How I Helped Destroy Canadian Democracy: Part III: It Is Vetting Not Whipping That Destroys Our MPs

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.

How I Helped Destroy Canadian Democracy: Part II: Citizens’ Assemblies Are an Elitist Cancer

Citizens’ assemblies are an idea that was introduced into Canadian politics as a direct consequence of decisions of which I was part and a movement I helped to build; their pernicious effects on Canadian democracy have only increased in the generation since these fateful decisions. In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Social Credit coalition, two groups that had been most involved in maintaining BC’s big tent centre-right party felt that their decades in the coalition had delivered little or nothing for them: the Christian Right and the “taxpayer” movement, organized under the aegis of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, a group with few formal members but many supporters, pushing what one might call a “neo-Jeffersonian” ideology.

Both of these groups, now exiled from the provincial government for the first time in sixteen years, went about organizing and members became involved in various projects: organizing more actively at the municipal level, working to build the modern electoral reform movement, working to build smaller boutique right-wing parties, working to re-create Social Credit under a new brand name, building the Reform Party of Canada in BC and participating in processes of intellectual and organizational renewal in right-wing civil society organizations.

Following the first-ever re-election of an NDP government in BC, this work intensified. A consequence of this was the creation of two voting reform organizations: Fair Voting BC, headed by former MLA and anti-abortion activist Nick Loenen, and the Electoral Change Coalition of BC, headed initially by Sonja Sanguinetti, president of the BC Liberal Party. However, Sanguinetti soon stepped down from this role and was replaced by Troy Lanigan, the BC spokesperson for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

This happened because while Lanigan’s (and, it happens, my) organization favoured a two-stage referendum process as was used in New Zealand, Loenen’s backed a citizens’ assembly, something that had never previously been used in Canada. Loenen’s argument was that politicians elected under first-past-the-post were in a conflict of interest in choosing a new voting system, as their material interests aligned with the current one. Therefore, the process of choosing a new system had to be de-politicized. During his MA studies at UBC and continued political activity in Richmond following his defeat, he, like the CTF crew, had become aware of a new approach to political decision-making that had been pioneered by the Republican Party in Orange County.

The Orange County GOP had, since the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign of 1964, been the intellectual vanguard of American conservatism producing what is called “Sunbelt populism” and the “Reagan Revolution,” developing language to popularize such ideas as “supply side economics.”

The Orange County GOP had found, as Christian, white and conservative demographic and electoral hegemony had been collapsing with major influxes of Jewish, liberal and LatinX voters, both elections and public consultation processes had been producing non and anti-conservative mobilization and representation. The old solution to maintain elite white power, the idea of “commission government” was not an option because the technocratic, professional class, from which city managers were drawn was also increasingly liberal and non-Christian, even if nearly just as white.

Whereas the process of mobilizing LatinX, low-income or non-white voters tended to move the opinions of those voters to the left, because of the inherent nature of movement-building and mass mobilization, what if voters could be “represented” or “consulted,” through a process that was inherently conservative, individualistic and elite-focused? And so, the citizens’ assembly was born. The technical name was “deliberative polling” but the aptly-named Jefferson Centre trademarked the term Citizens’ Assembly in 1971.

This system of replacing democratically representative bodies with demographically representative bodies was soon tested in other conservative bastions like Richmond, BC. Finally, the neighbourhood busybodies could be cut out of the equation, and the people directly “represented.” This idea had a certain appeal for those on the left too, who resented the over-representation of property-owning, conservative “NIMBYs” in both local government and consultation processes.

Kamagra Drugs increase energy and provide best price for levitra confidence during an intimacy with your partner. In the primary stage the physician found buy levitra http://mouthsofthesouth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/MOTS-04.14.18-Parrish.pdf dictating 50mg to sufferers of impotence. Vardenafil super active cialis learn the facts here now hinders Pde5 debasement of cgmp, i.e. it delays cgmp’s capacity. The FDA has established certain safety guidelines that aware the victims, who have been attacked by heart diseases, recent heart stroke, congestive heart failure, variable blood pressure level, blood cell disorder, bleeding disorder, sildenafil canada stomach ulcer or sudden stroke as these conditions demand a strict prohibition or consumption of alcohol can also affect erections. The problem is that deliberative polling is not just anti-democratic, individualistic and conservative in character; it is also far less accurate than a focus group, because it is not one. When a corporation empanels a focus group to test products or ad campaigns, these things are already substantially complete, to the point of there being message and product samples available; a focus group is essentially responding to a multiple choice test. But in deliberative polling, a group is often presented with the illusion of an open-ended question. This problem is typically solved through heavy facilitation; those placed in charge of the process wield considerable power.

In this way, the permanent government employees who “support” the assembly are the most influential upon it. In fact, the criteria for being part of deliberative polling is often a requirement to be disconnected from the social movements working on the issue before the group. In this way, those involved in deliberative polling serve no one and represent no one, in the democratic sense.

Yet, beginning in 1997, the voting reform movement chose to back-burner the idea of a two-stage referendum process and instead support the BC Liberal idea of a one-stage process, of an assembly followed by an up or down vote on its conclusions. While, in the case of the BC assembly, this was not a disaster for the voting reform movement—the assembly, for reasons that are still debated, gave us a highly saleable system. The problem was the discourse and theory of politics that it popularized, especially following the progressive take-over of the voting reform movement 2005-07.

Progressives began arguing that being politically mobilized about and committed to an issue was a conflict of interest and tainted the democratic process. Furthermore, because the permanent bureaucratic class, rather than elected representatives did the facilitation, research, etc. and essentially set the table for assemblies, including de facto writing the multiple choice question they were answering, progressives loved the idea of these focus groups because the professional class they typically comprised were running them. A focus group of random people disconnected from social movements, assisted by selfless bureaucrats simply seeking to use their education to create an ordered society was exactly the body that should be making political decisions. In fact, they began to argue that citizens’ assemblies were more politically legitimate than legislatures, that being demographically representative rather than being democratically representative was what gave a body the right to govern.

And it did not matter that, following the lucky strike in BC in 2004, citizens’ assemblies began recommending garbage, unsaleable voting systems in Prince Edward Island and Ontario. An important characteristic of these systems was their use of “closed lists.” In most systems of proportional representation, voters choose which individuals will benefit from their support for a political party. Whether open list, single transferable vote, single non-transferable vote, cumulative vote or whatever, in most PR systems, parties end up with the same share of the vote as their share of the seats, and their caucuses are composed of the party members who are most popular with the electorate and, consequently, bag the most individual votes.

In the majority of Canada’s citizens’ assemblies, guided by technocrats, populated by disconnected people, the consensus was to choose closed-list systems, the only proportional systems that share first-past-the-post’s defect that if a voter wishes to vote for a party, the party and not the voter chooses which of their candidates benefits from that vote. To be fair, this was not just a response to top-down leadership and disconnection from social movements. It was also the result of many progressive Canadians telling assemblies that, given a choice, Canadian voters would not choose female or non-white candidates to be beneficiaries of their votes, and therefore needed elites to direct their votes to the women and minorities whom voters were not wise enough to choose.

Because focus groups being guided by selfless technocrats to come up with more efficient means of imposing political order and social control is essentially the utopia imagined by the progressive managerial class, the orderly assembly and not the chaotic and diverse legislature has become the fetish object of the electoral reform movement. In this election, Fair Vote Canada is not endorsing, as it has in the past, legislation to immediately enact proportional representation. Instead, it is calling for a National Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform; it is not even demanding that its terms of reference restrict it to examining kinds of proportional representation. The goal of FVC, today, is no longer the enactment of PR, on which it was founded in 2001. The goal is to achieve whatever kind of voting system technocrats can facilitate a focus group consensus on, irrespective of whether it is even proportional.

This fetishization of neo-Jeffersonian, anti-democratic decision-making is not limited to voting reform anymore. Now, progressives are proposing it to solve all kinds of political deadlocks and disappointments that should be solved through citizen mobilization.

How I Helped Destroy Canadian Democracy: Part I: Demographic vs. Democratic Representation

I have been trying to explain, for some time, how the rise of autocratic government and the collapse of democracy in Canada has taken a different route than in most of the world, and how the ways we nominate and legitimate candidates for elected office are the most top-down, elite-serving and anti-democratic in the Global North.

I have put this in various articles in various terms over the years, beginning with my warnings about the consequences of embedding a process called “vetting” in our nomination processes, following my own experience running afoul of this in 2010 (March 2010) and my return to this theme (May 2018). I have put this in terms of a labour systems problem and looking at the relationship between money, power and work in Canadian progressive civil society and parties (August 2016). I tried explaining the “russification” of Canadian political process and how, through a set of ad hoc, largely unprogrammatic decisions, between 1992 and 2009, political power was drained out of most institutions and people and into the offices of political party leaders (April 2015). I tried explaining this phenomenon from another perspective, looking at the political culture that led most Liberals and New Democrats to side with Stephen Harper and against their parties during the prorogation crisis of 2008, and how Canadians’ understanding of what it means to be a diverse country drove this (December 2008). I have also commented on how “progressive” measures supposedly serving “diversity” are absolutely contrary to efforts by working class, racialized people and women to install representatives who will serve their material concerns in the US (February 2019). And I have commented on how these ideas have been enacted within Canada’s New Democratic Party (May 2019).

But I still routinely talk to people with whom I otherwise agree, who are aware of my writing, at least in passing, who see “citizens’ assemblies” as an unqualified social and political good that should be more prevalent and powerful and who see candidate “vetting” as a thing to do right instead of wrong, rather than as anathema to the democratic process. So, clearly, I have done something wrong in my efforts to explain and sell my ideas. Consequently, I am going to write up as clearly and unambiguously as I can why these things are dangerous and bad and are wrecking Canada, and, as I go, explain how they are partly my fault and apologize for them.

To begin, I want to define some terms to refer to opposite concepts that people see as the same thing and use interchangeably:

Demographically representative: A body of people is demographically representative when it is composed of identity groups reflecting a microcosm of society at large. If a particular group or place is 51% female, the small group should be as close to 51% female as possible. If the particular group is 12% gay and lesbian, the smaller group should be as close as possible to 12% gay or lesbian. If the group or place is 40% liberal, the smaller group should be close to 40% liberal. If the group or place is 40% Liberal, the smaller group should be too. A demographically representative group is a microcosm of society and it is “representative” in the sense that it has the closest possible superficial resemblance to the larger group from which it was extracted. Until the 1990s, demographically representative samples were used in two places: market research/polling i.e. focus groups, and academic research in the health and social sciences i.e. focus groups and test cohorts.

Demographically representative groups were used to discover certain kinds of knowledge. The knowledge they were designed to discover was this: assuming the continuation of the status quo and with no significant change in the social order, how might individuals and groups react to a product, policy, event or health hazard? In other words, the premise of a focus group is to forecast outcomes provided the social order remains fundamentally unchanged. When focus groups were conceived of during the Cold War, nobody thought of the people in these groups as representing the interests of their identity group(s) as a whole. The information one might gain from a college-educated, working class, gay Filipino in a focus group would be how an individual typical of this set of groups might react to something. No one understood an individual focus group member to be a representative of or advocate for the interests of the groups they “represented” because that is not the sense in which the word “represent” was to be understood. Representation referred to resemblance, not to a position of advocacy for shared interests.

Democratically representative: This is a much older idea. The idea of democratic representation is that a group of people organize and come together for the purpose of concentrating their power in the hands of a representative individual in order to exercise political power. The more people participate in this act of upward delegation through voting or some other process, the more democratic the process is and the more power is concentrated in the representative.

It enables cheap viagra no rx you to strengthen your sexual performance that may have this similar affect.In whichever case regarding menopause and sex drives, cures are available to help women go through this quandary. If you use the safe order cialis brand online the medical cost of the purpose will reduce to at least 50 % of the previous cost. Energy buying cialis from canada is created in the mitochondria that are contained in every 100mg of kamagra chewable prevents the degradation of cyclic GMP compounds, made in the medical sciences, ED is not something that one can’t overcome. It is here soft cialis pills dig this generic vaigra pill can play a significant role. Whereas demographic representation is about the identities of those it selects, democratic representation is about the identities of those doing the selecting. Different people have different interests and motivations in politics. By coming together, making deals, finding shared interests, taking on others’ concerns and selecting representatives at various stages, in nominating candidates and in backing nominated candidates in elections, people talk about the problems, concerns and interests of the groups from which they draw their senses of identity and community. Here, a group of people is more “representative” not based on their own identities, but based on the number of people behind them and diversity of identities among those backing them. Democratically representative groups are typically designed not to predict how groups and individuals will behave in the context of the status quo, but for the purposes of either defending or altering that status quo.

 

Often when people on the political left talk about representation, they talk past one another. Some people believe that Julian Castro is the 2020 Democratic primary contender who is most representative of LatinX people. That is true. He is clearly the most demographically representative. Some people believe that Bernie Sanders is the contender who is most representative of LatinX people. That is true too. He is the most democratically representative.

But I am not merely saying that these things are equally good and just different. My point is that making your elite demographically representative of the majority whom it oppresses makes that elite more secure and undermines democracy. In his book, City Trenches, Ira Katznelson lays this out. He explains that whom a representative serves is determined not by the identity groups the person is identified with, but rather who gives that person power and on whom they rely to maintain that power.

On more than one occasion, I have used the example of the Ottoman Empire to illustrate this. An Ottoman caliph (emperor) would choose a court demographically representative of the empire because the court’s job was to maintain the empire’s hierarchical order. If the caliph appointed a Greek Orthodox vizier (prime minister), the vizier served the interests of the caliph because the caliph could hire or fire him at will. But a vizier also had a larger interest: the continued domination of Greek orthodox people into the empire, because were Greeks to leave and form their own country, his appointment would no longer be demographically representative. Because a caliph’s court was a rhetorical project to show the empire as harmonious and diverse, even unrest among Greek orthodox Ottomans was contrary to a vizier’s interests. When an elite group of representatives is selected based on demographic representation, but is chosen from above and not through democratic representation, its interests and actions are not just unconnected to those; they are typically contrary to the interests of those in their identity groups.

This is something human beings have long understood. But modern liberals and progressives use etiquette and affect politics to prevent discussion of how this is shaking out, and instead attempt to impose a collective amnesia with respect to this foundational sociological knowledge.

This collective amnesia and failure of analysis has resulted in progressives hornswoggling other parts of the left into supporting two terrible ideas that contribute directly to the continuing decline of democracy in Canada and the centralization of power in a small group: citizens’ assemblies and candidate vetting.

“I Know Her Heart:” Making Sense of Elizabeth May’s Puzzling Abortion Position

On October 3rd, 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.

 

  1. 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.

 

  1. 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.

 

  1. 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.

My Personal Endorsement of Svend Robinson

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

The Pressing Relevance of JRR Tolkien in Our Times: Part 1: Age of the Counterfeit

Before finally returning to my promised article on conversion, I feel I need to say more about how the corpus of writing on which I grew up, Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit and the Silmarillion, JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth books, have provided me with unique moral and intellectual tools to approach the omnicide we now all face. It is not just that Lord of the Rings is about a world careening into an omnicide, the covering of the created world in an eternal darkness of tyranny and wastelands, fueled by war and wanton, gratuitous ecological destruction.

Before pressing on, as I have in my previous pieces about him, let us acknowledge that, even for his time, Tolkien was a racist, politically and socially conservative man. In many ways, his work demonstrates his greatness as a writer because its message and ideology are greater and more profound than the sum of his own views.

In my recent piece on the right-wing identity politics of intellect, I made some observations about the practice of trolling and the idea of “trolls.” In troll discourse, a person argues for a repugnant and/or stupid view and then one of two things happens: (a) the person browbeats their interlocutor, wasting hours of the person’s time and cannot be argued-down, at which point they declare victory or (b) the person concedes the argument and announces that they never believed the stupid views they espoused, that their interlocutor is the fool for having believed their views sincere.

The figure of the troll is, increasingly, the shape that individual members of the global omnicidal authoritarian death cult that currently runs the US, Hungary, Russia, Brazil and the Philippines, to name a few states, choose to take on when presenting themselves online.

Trolling, a decade ago, was not socially mainstream and tended to be practiced more by libertarian misanthropes than omnicidal death cultists. And the term arose from the geek culture-steeped world of 4Chan and the galaxy of locales on the internet frequented by manga-loving incels. Having been a part of geek culture since the age of nine, when my child psychiatrist prescribed the Basic D&D boxed set to me, I know it to be a rich and complex place with good and bad sides exerting both positive and negative influences on those of us within it. Few generalizations about geek culture apply to the whole space and, like all cultures and subcultures globally, it is turning darker as the sun sets on the Age of Reason.

Like most robust and vibrant subcultures, it has a large corpus of literature associated with it (including much but not all of the speculative fiction genre) and a set of canonical texts that help to structure how other texts are interpreted. JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings remains part of the canon, but something has changed about how it functions to structure the culture: over time, it has become Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of the text and not the text itself. More on that later.

We have to consider, then, that the meaning of the term “troll” in geek culture was substantially influenced by Tolkien’s description and understanding of his version of the monster of European folklore. In fact, we should pay special attention to the unique features that Tolkien (and only Tolkien, not even Tolkien via Jackson) attributed  to trolls.

Like the main non-human villains in Middle Earth, orcs, trolls were created by Morgoth, the Lucifer figure, the original Enemy, during “the Great Darkness.” They were created as “counterfeits,” of ents, the “shepherds of the trees,” gigantic, benign intelligent humanoids made of wood. The trolls, on the other hand, while gigantic, were malign, unintelligent humanoids made of stone.

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Today, when we talk about counterfeit money or securities, we mean a copy of these things so exact, so precise, that it is indistinguishable from that thing. There is an original and the counterfeit is the most precise copy possible, designed to fool all but the most discerning. Such an idea did not exist in the Middle Ages because perfect copies were understood to be the thing; there was no distinction between copy and original if the copy were perfect. (Walter Benjamin’s work explaining this was rendered beautifully accessible in the 1979 classic Doctor Who serial City of Death by Douglas Adams.)

A counterfeit, in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, was something else altogether: it was an obvious distortion mocking the original; in a Christian cosmology, a counterfeit was Lucifer’s mockery of God’s creation. The closest concept to it that we have today are the inhabitants of DC Comics’ “bizarro” universe. Not only was a counterfeit a mockery; it was understood to be an uncanny, grotesque mockery. Some conquistadors who arrived in the New World believed that they had found a counterfeit hemisphere, where the largest city’s centre was not a basilica but a step pyramid where priests performed a human sacrifice every forty minutes. The armadillo was a strong piece of evidence for this theory: it was obviously a counterfeit turtle.

Because they are uncanny, grotesque and jarring, there is much power in the counterfeit. The orcs, Tolkien’s counterfeit elves, trolls, Tolkien’s counterfeit ents—they strike fear into their opponents’ hearts simply by being, by mocking and denigrating creation itself. They constitute an ontological attack on the cosmic order simply by having existed. That they might triumph over real elves and real ents is not just a bad tactical situation; it is a sign that the cosmic order, itself, is in retreat.

The global death cult we are fighting understands that. And, consequently, it is not just trolling us at the level of conversation but at the level of existence.

How better to describe Donald Trump than as a counterfeit president, Bizarro Eisenhower, a grotesque, senescent, foul-mouthed grifter and con man. But counterfeits are not just at the top; they are everywhere. We are attacked with counterfeit science taught by counterfeit professors. The power of a Jordan Peterson comes not from his resemblance to a professor but from his uncanny failure to resemble one. There is no effort by the right to fool us any longer. As a brilliant observer of the Kavanaugh hearings observed, “telling obvious lies is a sign of power.”

This is why men performing the machismo of the death cult, like Doug Ford or Maxime Bernier, focus their attacks on children, the disabled and women: they are not trying to intimidate us by being tough guys. They are trying to unsettle us by being counterfeit tough guys.

Without understanding the original meaning and power of the counterfeit, something Tolkien understood to be so great a threat that it could upend the cosmic order, we are at sea wondering why people seem to be buying into dishonour and dishonesty, shaming themselves with gullibility. But that is not what is happening for them; they have tapped into the unholy power of the counterfeit.

The Green Party Abortion Scandal and the Debasement of Discourse Itself

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.