Having lived in the US and studied its political history professionally, I must confess that there is something truly beautiful about a US election. With basically unlimited money to spend, the best, most competent people are hired to run and orchestrate campaigns. From living in Providence, RI during the 2010 midterms and Kansas City, MO in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election, I can recognize the US Democratic Party’s urban politics pretty well. And they are here in BC, in the form of Vision Vancouver, running for re-election on the identical slogan, rhetoric and image as the Obama re-election bid. We will go “Forward” (reminiscent of the 1996 Citizen Kang episode of the Simpsons, “twirling, always twirling towards freedom!”) with a good-looking, well-dressed, unflappably calm GenX future-focused leader and his odd mixture of friends and allies in the entertainment, technology and financial sectors, backed by organized labour, racialized populations, urbanites and youth.

But it was not looking at the Vision campaign that made me realize the extent of the Americanization of Vancouver politics. It was the bizarre NPA endorsement of pipelines. As I said to Peter Armstrong in a recent e-mail, “here is the pattern I observe:

1. Vision claims you hold an unpopular position
2. You state that the thing Vision is concerned about isn’t under the city’s jurisdiction
3. Vision claims that the issue is “important” and of concern to everyone
4. You state that the thing Vision is concerned about isn’t under the city’s jurisdiction
5. Vision states that you’re hiding the unpopular position they claim you hold
6. You announce that Vision has been right all along and you do hold that unpopular position”

Why on earth was it important for Kirk Lapointe to start defending oil tankers, the LNG industry and various other unpopular fossil fuel initiatives? Because it’s not just that Vision has become the Democrats; the NPA has become the Republicans. This is a party that couldn’t resist leaping into the briar patch. More on that in a moment.

If Canadians don’t recognize Vision it’s because, from the apostasy of Lester Pearson as an embarrassing bought shill for the Cold War US Democratic Party to Jean Chretien’s denunciation of the Drug War and Iraq War, Canadian politics was very much culturally and institutionally distinct from the politics Down South. But since the rise of the modern Conservative Party, our politics is, less and less, that of a vassal of the American Empire and more and more, that of its extension, an unrecognized territory already enmeshed in the US party system, a white Puerto Rico.

US society, for endogenous reasons that need not concern us here, has come to be defined by an intra-elite split primarily driven by epistemological rather than conventionally ideological disagreement.

While I make a historical cultural case elsewhere for this split, its most significant driver is global climate politics. Because of the scientific consensus concerning both human-caused climate change and measures necessary to address it, America’s elite has fractured. A portion have aligned themselves with the majority of the global capitalist class in favouring a shift away from a fossil fuel-based energy economy through measures like cap and trade and carbon taxes that can concurrently reduce emissions and intensify the widening gap between rich and poor. A roughly equal number remain both sentimentally and economically welded to the energy source that enabled America’s rise to global hegemony in the first place, petroleum. In recent US elections, we have seen these two elites go toe-to-toe, backed by large, unwieldy coalitions.

The elite constituency that has ended up dominating Democratic Party politics has forged a coalition comprising non-white voters, younger whites, college-educated and socially liberal whites, trade unionists and environmental activists. Republicans have forged a coalition comprising wealthy whites, older whites, uneducated whites, socially conservative whites and church activists. Painting by the numbers, it is a foregone conclusion that Democrats have come to dominate cities; urban voters, being more educated, less white, more socially liberal and more environmentally concerned vote Democrat.

Prior to the rise of Vision (and its embryo Diet COPE), Vancouver voters were not organized like this. Wealthy Vancouverites grouped up in the NPA; less educated voters tilted left; the Chinese community, especially those more recently arrived, tilted towards the NPA. Vision’s new coalition of green roof real estate barons and their vassals is made possible, first and foremost, by the rate at which people watch and embrace the politics of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, in which low-income people are expected to side with the Democratic machine, even as they tut and shake their heads at the endless series of surprising sell-outs.
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This has severely hobbled the NPA in its quest to regain dominance in the city since 2002. With its principals, particularly Armstrong, so strongly linked to Canada’s Republican farm team, the Harper government, it has struggled to regain the cultural traction it needs to return to its role as the city’s natural governing party. Now that development interests and unions fit together in Vision Vancouver the way they do in the Chicago or San Francisco Democrats, Armstrong’s party is reliant a politics of stealth and outside money from resources companies and a small number of local millionaires with personal grievances with the mayor. And the NPA’s inability to resist praising LNG, Kinder Morgan and Chevron illustrates just how hard it is to maintain this stealth footing. Similarly, its efforts to avoid spooking wealthy social liberals cost it dearly in the departure of its most senior elected official Ken Denike over his homo-and transphobia.

Due to the converging factors of (1) the extension of the new, post-Harper, national party system into the city, (2) the convergence of Canadian and US news media on both the right and left, and (3) the fundamental struggle between a local economy based on selling lifestyle aesthetics and a city based on shipping oil to Asia, Vancouver politics has become a fight between Democrats and Republicans.

The ambivalence Vancouver leftists and progressives feel towards Vision is a long-felt experience for US leftists and progressives since the end of the Cold War and the rise of Third Wayism and the Clintons. That is why Vision’s relationship to unions is gradually shifting from one of partnership to dominance exemplified in the shakedown of CUPE members, threatened with the privatization of their jobs if they didn’t donate protection money to Vision. (And somehow right-wing bloggers spin this as the union exploiting Vision!)

In Surrey, what we are seeing is, again, more comprehensible once we apprehend the Americanization of politics. This is a campaign in a suburb in a blue state or a city centre in a purple one, in which Blue Dog Democrats face off against urban Republicans, united in a discourse of tax cuts, program cuts and “get tough” law enforcement policies funded, no doubt, by the tax cuts. While every party in the election, aside from the Surrey Progressives running for School Board, articulates essentially identical “white flight” suburban policies that focus on familial virtue, thrift and fear of crime, the parties must communicate with their base using dog whistles.

As in much of the suburban US, the Blue Dogs built an electoral juggernaut over the past decade, in the form of Surrey First, a centre-right party with a token progressive (Judy Villeneuve) on its front bench, all the while pushing white flight politics, alternately stoking and the cooling the fear of crime necessary to maintain an economy driven by real estate and building trades.

Today, there is an opening for the local Republicans in the form of the Safe Surrey Coalition. This slate has sought to distinguish itself by having the most viciously authoritarian poor-bashing policies, taking advantage of the splitting of the Surrey First Blue Dogs into a pair of superficially identical parties. But neither Linda Hepner’s nor Barinder Rasode’s Blue Dogs are countering this by echoing pretty much whatever Safe Surrey’s Doug McCallum says. The election has devolved, for the most part, into three parties with nigh-identical “law and order” platforms communicating with their bases through dog whistles and identity politics.

Because, in a place where voter turnout was 24% last time, it is ultimately the election day performance by local political machines that determines outcome, and my money is still on Linda Hepner’s Surrey First surviving its split with Rasode and the creation of One Surrey. If Surrey First is defeated it will be because either McCallum or Rasode has built a turnout machine more formidable than is evident to a non-insider like me.

What will defeat Vision, if they are defeated—and I doubt it—will be that not enough Vancouverites are habituated to this new reality but instead insist on sentimentally clutching our collapsing Cold War party system, refusing to fold COPE or launching new tries at a genuine left, as with One City and Public Education Project.

But Vision has planned for this too. That’s why the polls between Cambie and Rupert, between Burrard Inlet and 45^th Avenue remain closed until tomorrow. Vision candidates have returned, in recent days, to Commercial Drive and Mount Pleasant to campaign because the point of only permitting advance voting on the West Side and South Slope wasn’t to prevent the old COPE heartland from voting. It was to delay it voting until the “don’t split the vote,” “stop the NPA rhetoric” could be elevated to a fever pitch and progressives and leftists stampeded back into the Vision tent at the last moment for just one day.

But still, I choose to sentimentally clutch. I choose to defy prevailing material, cultural and historical forces. I cannot abide a city where the only choice is which elite will benefit from the pauperization and expulsion of all but the wealthiest among us. Ultimately, although the city can exert no political power over the National Energy Board or the Metro Port Authority, it is the site of a culture war, a trophy to be won in this Manichean intra-elite struggle that is pulling us into the crucible of the American Empire.

Okay… last post later today, with endorsements in time for Saturday.

As neoliberalism takes hold of our civic imaginations, we increasingly think of ourselves as consumers of government services, taxpayers rather than citizens. And as governments shift their revenue streams from income-based taxation to fee-for-service arrangements, this reality impacts how we understand our relationship to government, especially specialized service-delivery branches of it.

I have used the term “ratepayer politics,” to describe conservative mobilization structures in our cities, how the people who feel entitled and motivated to vote and organize politically around city council issues are property owners who pay direct taxes to the city, and consumers of services offered at local libraries and community centres. Those who feel the strongest direct relationship to the city as “clients” are those who end up organizing around civic politics and setting the agenda. “Stakeholder” community consultation processes, hard-wired into municipal decision-making, render this explicit, privileging the opinions of groups and individuals based on their physical proximity to and financial stake in the outcome of a development decision.

This is further intensified by the narrowing of local governments’ exclusive policy purviews by placing such things as transportation and emergency services under the control of unelected regional bodies appointed by the province.

As voter registration and turnout fall at all political levels, one of the new kinds of political formations we are seeing is a phenomenon so common in UK politics that it has a name “hospital parties” and “hospital candidates.” Because voters are increasingly less mobilized as citizens participating in a shared, values-based democratic process and view their relationship to the state as paying consumers of its services, new, consumer activist political organizing is becoming more viable. When facing hospital closures and cuts under the Major and Blair governments in the UK, local citizens began organizing around single-issue hospital candidates or forming hospital parties to send MPs to Westminster or, more commonly, councillors to local councils, to advocate for them as consumers, bulk-purchasing health care through a local state-maintained facility. In this light, we can better understand Delta South’s Vicky Huntington as a hospital MLA.

This reality intersects with another historical and BC-specific reality as we think examine how school board politics is changing. In Vancouver, the Coalition of Progressive Electors is viewed, for those who watch City Council as a perpetual opposition party that ran one flash in the pan government in 2002. But from the perspective of school board elections, COPE won four governing mandates (1982, 1983, 1990, 2002) and served as junior coalition partner from 2008 to 2013. And in other elections, the party came close to victory.

In Surrey, there is a more recent and more dramatic story of disparity between power on School Board and power on council. While 2011 proved a shut-out for the Surrey Civic Coalition (the successor party to SCE) on council, the party was able to gain a foothold on School Board, electing Charlene Dobie. This time, rather than trying to make a mayor-centred, two-slate party happen, Dobie has founded the Surrey Progressives, a left-tilting association that is only contesting school board seats. Capitalizing on the fact that in municipalities around southwestern BC, school board elections tilt left of council elections, local progressives are focusing on the school board race—and not just Surrey progressives. Principled leftist and queer activist Nicole Joliet, my favourite candidate in Surrey, is focusing her efforts at building a left base and changing the conversation on her school board candidacy.

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It is too early to tell if the convergence of the factors I have noted above will lead to a fundamental shift in how municipal party systems work in Southwestern BC but there are some grounds for hope. The solidarity that parents showed with locked-out teachers during the school labour dispute this year, their clear alignment to the left of the general public on education issues and the rise in progressive parent activism bode well. In areas of Vancouver, like Killarney, Collingwood and Champlain Heights, that have the most children, school board lawn and window signs outnumber council and mayoral signs. In a low turnout environment, families who have bought into the idea of themselves as consumers rather than citizens may join more left-leaning parents in heading to the polls motivated primarily by school board, rather than council issues. And with more parents’ associations hosting candidates’ forums and speaking out on social media, we may see a much more progressive result in school board elections than we do for councils.

We see this echoed on the right of the political spectrum, as well, with the rise of Vancouver First. While the party remains a fringe organization on council and parks board, its agenda of paranoid, populist homophobia and transphobia has made it a force. It is former school board chair Ken Denike and not party founder Jesse Johl who is understood to be the party’s leader and who dominates its lawn sign presence. For reasons to do with the Americanization of Vancouver politics, which I will visit in my next post, it may be that old coalitions will fly apart as self-conscious parents come to comprise an increasing portion of a dwindling voter base.

When so many voters are de-motivated and cynical, and in the aftermath of the province-wide labour dispute, it may be that 2014 will be that parents, teachers and their allies will produce a major realignment in how civic elections work this fall. If Surrey Progressives and Public Education succeed in electing candidates for a schools-only brand, our whole system of party building and governance may change.

In my view that would be a welcome relief for Vision Vancouver’s school trustees. Like the Vision Parks board, Patty Bachus leads a progressive team that is worthy of re-election, especially now that it includes long-time COPE trustee Allan Wong. With close ties between the Vision board majority and PEP’s candidates and party members, the fate of Jane Bouey, Charlene Dobie and Gwen Giesbrecht on Saturday will determine much about how leftists and progressives begin rebuilding in 2015. If there can be hospital parties, why not school parties?

With effectively no public polling for school board elections, we can only guess and vote with hope. How fortunate that we have so many more school board candidates able to inspire it.

To even begin to talk about a productive voting strategy for the upcoming elections in Vancouver and Surrey, it is first important to clear the decks of faulty logic and misperceptions standing in our way. This is especially important in BC’s two largest cities because those opposed to equity and sustainability agendas have played and continue to play on our natural desire to recoil from the depressing and sometimes frightening reality that confronts us when we take a hard look at the actual situation on the ground. So let us get a few things out of the way.

No Big Tent Progressive Party to Challenge for Government

For much of the past two and a half years, I have worked to build a big tent progressive party to challenge for government in Vancouver this fall. Many have worked harder and longer than I. And many activists in Surrey have been doing the same. Vancouver’s COPE-NDP and COPE-Green coalition slates of the 80s and 90s do not exist today nor does anything like them. The same can be said of Bob Bose’s and Penny Priddy’s Surrey Civic Electors (SCE) of the same era. No electable party is contesting the city council elections in either jurisdiction that enjoys concurrent levels of active membership, popular support, policy breadth and equity-based policy that would make it such a party.

It is very sad that this is the case but this situation will not be ameliorated until we grieve this loss and begin rebuilding. Continuing to pretend that any party meets these criteria is a costly act of denial that holds back the formation of a truly progressive politics.

Three Kinds of Parties

For people on the left, there are essentially three kinds of parties running in this election that are making a pitch to us: (1) neo-liberal centre-right parties that include leftists and former leftists in their party structures and lay a claim on left votes while pursuing policies of privatization, gentrification, deregulation, upward income redistribution and law and order criminalization, (2) small, vaguely leftist affinity groups masquerading as broad-based parties and (3) small parties and independents with a progressive perspective who are seeking an opposition/advocacy role on councils. (Note that this article does not discuss the School Board elections, which will be covered in a future post.)

Coalition of Progressive Electors (Vancouver) [Type 2]

Prior to 2005, COPE was both a large, inclusive party and the broker of even larger, more inclusive coalitions comprising other progressive tendencies that could not be accommodated in COPE’s capacious yet unwieldy political structure. From 1980 to 1986, the party partnered with the Civic Independents; from 1986 to 1993, it partnered with the Civic New Democrats and in 1999 it partnered with the Green Party and two independents. More importantly, it had a large, diverse, active membership, strong links to organized labour and enjoyed support from many local MPs and MLAs.

Whatever narrative of blame one wishes to espouse and where one points fingers, the fact is that this is not the COPE of today. No MP or MLA supports the party; and, from a high of 100% in 2002, COPE’s share of Vancouver trade unions’ political donations has fallen to about 2%. In the past year alone, the party has lost hundreds of members, half of its major donors, half its board and its only elected official to internecine warfare as small personality cults and affinity groups competed against each other for control of the party.

In recent weeks, the party has sought to make some cosmetic changes to appear to open its doors again by choosing a pragmatic NDP-affiliated moderate as its mayoral candidate and hiring an experienced NDP organizer from outside the city to manage its E-day operation. But these changes seem more like acts of desperation and cosmetic tweaks than any sincere commitment to broaden its appeal.

COPE is a shell of its former self and, worse yet, for the sake of appearances, has annihilated its chances of electing anyone by nominating an enormously large, unwieldy slate of candidates, severely hampering the ability of voters to concentrate their vote on the few strong candidates the party still has like former Bowen Island mayor Lisa Barrett and former Vancouver city councillor Tim Louis. While these two might have had a shot at election, the six additional COPE candidates are almost certain to drag them down by diluting the votes of those who want a more leftist politics but are not up for backing the whole COPE slate.

Finally, COPE’s longest-surviving and second-most powerful faction, the alliance between Tim Louis’s iCOPE and Ali Yerevani’s MAWO, is not immune to the creeping conservatism of Vancouver opposition politics. While the party’s superb mayoral candidate Meena Wong and the Left Front led by Tristan Markle offer solidly leftist policies, the Louis-Yerevani faction practice conservative ratepayer politics, opposing, for instance, the nationalization of community centres under the Vision Vancouver Parks Board and pandering routinely to conservative neighbourhood ratepayer and business groups.

COPE is a party that is rotting from the inside, putting on its last desperate performance as a major party in this city.

Independent Democratic Electors Alliance (Vancouver) [Type 3]

One of the splinter parties of COPE, this is the hobby horse of long-time gadfly Parks Board and sex worker activist Jamie Lee Hamilton and has a proven track record of being unable to concentrate enough votes around its one candidate to elect her. That’s a shame. Even when off-message from her agenda of inclusivity and lowering barriers, IDEA’s candidate and only member is highly entertaining, as in her recent digression into the need for governmental action to force the Cactus Club to offer its fish and chips at a discount through its take-out windows. Sadly, Hamilton is irrelevant. Fortunately, even if she loses, she will continue to attend every Parks Board meeting and function as she has for many years, as the Board’s non-voting, unsalaried eighth member.

One City (Vancouver) [Type 3]

This is COPE’s best-funded splinter party. The core of One City is an intersection between the socially-based affinity groups, long-term alliances and ethno-lineal networks surrounding the party’s co-founders, RJ Aquino and David Chudnovsky. Having put some effort into trying to work with these individuals, first to co-govern COPE, then to engage with their post-COPE organizing efforts, it is clear to me that this is an organization that remains traumatized from its members’ experiences of first running and then losing control of COPE. This party makes it clear that while it stands for a Vancouver that is for everybody, membership in the organization and even telephonic or in-person access to its principals is guarded like the Harper Tories.

Perusing the party’s donor list, there is other evidence of this narrowness. Over 70% of all money donated comes from the Canadian Union of Public Employees and nearly all of the large individual donations come from the Chudnovsky lineage.

Now, I want to make clear: there is nothing wrong with this kind of politics. At times, I did this kind of politics in the 80s and 90s. After losing a multi-year crazy-off with scary people while your allies in government humiliate and make liars of you is a miserable experience and there are good reasons to limit one’s contact with new, un-vetted people. That’s why I think it is smart for One City to run only one candidate. The party isn’t presenting itself as a new coalition seeking government; it’s presenting itself as the embryo of that. In sharp contrast to COPE, it is offering a single candidate and concentrating its muscle behind one credible individual. Also, in contradistinction to COPE, One City is not going down the Vision rabbit hole and telling voters what it would do if it controlled Translink and the provincial municipal affairs ministry; it is running on policies it can actually implement.

Finally, One City has proved me wrong. I was concerned that with such a funding overlap with Vision and with founders whose public image had become inextricable from the ill-fated COPE alliance, I worried that the party would refuse to criticize Vision. I have been very pleased to see the party grow into its role as an actual opposition party after a weak start on the campaign trail.

One Surrey (Surrey) [Type 1]

To people in the know, One Surrey is subtly signaling to former Surrey Civic Electors voters who may not have followed the dwindling base of North Surrey New Democrats into the Surrey Civic Coalition and Surrey Matters that it is interested in their votes.

Party leader Barinder Rasode has included the nephew of former SCE mayor Bob Bose on the party’s slate and has received the endorsement of the senior Bose. A few New Democrats are working quietly for the Rasode campaign which has some progressive elements in its policy platform.

But, fundamentally, One Surrey is engaged in an uglier version of the Ontario NDP’s recent flirtation with centre-right pocketbook populism, opposing tax increases, attacking “government waste” as the main culprit for fiscal problems and beating the drum of the need for municipalities to focus on “core services.” Worse still, the party’s main issue is the same issue that animates the far-right populism of Doug McCallum’s Safe Surrey Coalition: crime.

By contributing to a moral panic that targets and blames poor people, demands a “get tough” approach to social problems and stigmatizes people with substance issues, even those actively seeking help, One Surrey has not been a force that has uplifted civic discourse or seeded the soil for equity-focused politics. Surrey voters would do better to cherry-pick centre-left candidates from independent candidates and the Surrey First and One Surrey slates than to throw-in with this new party. More advice about that in part five.

Vancouver Greens (Vancouver) [Type 3]

If the Vancouver Greens don’t increase their standing this election, it won’t be for lack of the best strategy in the city. Adriane Carr has built on her election in 2011 and strong performance as a councillor in the years since by recruiting a small, disciplined slate of well-spoken, intelligent candidates. She has brought back Stuart MacKinnon, the popular parks commissioner with three years of experience under his belt and strengthened her front bench with candidates who have strong connections with and/or names that resonate in the Liberal and NDP establishments in the city.

In many ways, Carr is leveraging her success at doing the very thing that Tim Louis aspires to do, should he return to elected office: playing the role of a one-person progressive opposition, acting as both gadfly and organizer for groups that feel unrepresented on council, while staying true to her party’s core principles. This is easier for Carr because conservative ratepayer politics and residents association pandering is very much part of Green politics, as compared to the exotic import it represents on the far left. Carr has also been better-positioned to challenge Vision Vancouver as it has evolved from being a pink (i.e. light red) party to a light green one. Carr can challenge Gregor Robertson and Andrea Reimer based on their claims to be small-g greens more effectively than COPE could challenge Geoff Meggs, Raymond Louie or Tim Stevenson for being lousy socialists as socialism has generally been dropped from Vision’s evolving narrative.

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The Greens present themselves neither as a big-tent progressive party nor as the embryo of one. What they are and should be supported in is being the best opposition the city can summon up in the absence of such a party.

Vision Vancouver (Vancouver) [Type 1]

Given that Vision Vancouver’s membership rolls are basically Vancouver’s NDP and federal Liberals, it is pretty clear where Vision’s right-wing impetus is coming from: its funders. For-profit corporations want results for their donations: quantifiable, demonstrable return on investment. Whereas trade union members will vote to hand over hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for a promise to be kicked in the face 31% less hard, and will do it again as long as the kick is 10-15% less hard, real estate developers and their companies don’t see it that way.

If they are to build “social housing,” it had better not just produce an immediate state subsidy; it had better so completely redefine “social” as to permit coffin-style bachelor suites to be rented for $2000 per month in the name of fighting poverty and generating equity. If their rezoned buildings must fit with the aesthetic of gentrifying neighbourhoods so as not to kill the golden goose of nostalgic, heritage buildings that attract new condo buyers, they had better enjoy vast rezoning windfalls, increasing the value of their property tenfold or more. If they must tolerate city spending on anyone other than themselves, property tax rates had better be the lowest on the continent.

What Vision Vancouver proves is that no matter what your resume says, no matter what colour jersey you wear on E-day in provincial and federal elections, smart, profit-driven developers can and will make a deal with you if you are willing to help them make money today.

That is one of the reasons that we see such a sharp contrast between the performance of Vision Vancouver city councillors and the party’s Parks Board and School Board. While I will speak to the school board elections in a future post, let me briefly address the Vision Parks Board. Here are candidates chosen from the same pool of activists, voted-on by the same party members. And look at the difference. With no land to rezone, no social housing requirements to waive, no social development metrics to redefine, Vision Parks Commissioners have proceeded aggressively with an equity agenda, taking on conservative ratepayer groups and private clubs, nationalizing our community centres and creating universal, portable access to city facilities. While COPE and the Greens have pandered to insular local community centre associations, with “membership has its privileges” attitudes to public building use, Vision has remained stalwart and unflinching in one of the few projects of nationalization we have witnessed since the Cold War.

Meanwhile, on city council, the contrast could not be sharper. While Gregor Robertson has been a strong public spokesperson for climate justice, opposing the Kinder Morgan pipeline and Tim Stevenson made our whole city proud by his work against homophobia in Russia, when it comes to public policy, as opposed to activism and advocacy, Vision is a conservative party. Its front bench may feature people who have cut their teeth as Greens, Communists and NDPers but what guides this party’s policies on the fundamental questions of equity and affordability are developer cheques, not the party cards in councillors’ wallets.

In sum, neither Surrey nor Vancouver residents can go to the polls on Saturday and cast their votes from a big-tent progressive alternative to govern their city. Instead, they must craft a voting strategy to make the best of the current situation and sow the seeds for better choices in 2018.

No Fair Voting System

If there is one thing I have learned organizing for Fair Vote Canada, Fair Voting BC, the BC Electoral Change Coalition, the Ontario NDP and the BC Green Party, it is that voting as though you already have the voting system you want is one of the most effective ways not to get it. I see many voters crafting voting strategies as though some form of proportional representation is already in effect. It is not.

While Vision Vancouver could have implemented a proportional or semi-proportional system in the form of Single Non-Transferrable Vote, Limited Vote or Cumulative Vote, and were asked to by Fair Voting BC and Fair Vote Canada, they instead chose to maintain the current voting system, offering the excuse that they were holding out for the province to pass enabling legislation to permit their favourite kind of proportional representation. You know, they way they’re holding out of the province to pass legislation banning corporate donations, even though they already possess the power to substantially ban them.

Surrey First has lacked that option due to their lack of a specific city charter from the province, granting them the control over their voting system that Vancouverites enjoy. No blame can be assigned to Surrey’s government in maintaining the voting system under which we will be choosing our governments on Saturday, one of the most unfair voting systems in the world, one enacted in BC in the 1930s with the explicit goal of reducing voter turnout.

Voters heading to the polls on Saturday must make our votes count under a “multi-member plurality system,” known colloquially by voting reform activists as first-past-the-post on steroids, a system even more effective at delivering massive, disproportional, unearned majorities. In 1996, for instance, the NPA won 43% of the popular vote in Vancouver but that translated into 100% of the 27 seats being contested.

To get a sense of how the system works, imagine that there are three groups of voters, comprising 50,000, 40,000 and 30,000 people respectively choosing eight candidates for Surrey Council. Imagine that each group is associated with a party running a full slate of candidates and that each voter voted for their party’s entire slate. The result would be that the party backed by 50,000 people would choose all eight councillors and that the other two groups would receive no representation; 41% of the voters would have 100% of the seats.

But, surprisingly often, Surrey and Vancouver do elect candidates from outside the first-place party. That is because of “split tickets.” While most voters do, in fact, allocate all their votes to the party of their preferred mayoral candidate, a minority of voters don’t do that. How this minority of voters behaves largely determines the result of an election. So I am going to briefly offer an inventory of the subgroups that comprise this group, in order of estimated prevalence:

Mixed Slate Voters

Racist Voters: It appears that the largest group of voters to split their tickets are white Anglo voters with a long history in the Lower Mainland. Unlike the residents of rural mill towns who tend to behave in the exact opposite way, these voters feel that civic politics is “corrupt,” and tend to locate corruption in the awarding of civic monopolies (primarily taxi and food cart monopolies), high-turnout nomination meetings and public displays of generosity. They associate these things with a stereotyped image of South Asian people. South Asians, they seem to think, are an especially corrupting force, what with higher-than-average rates of political party membership and association with civic monopolized industries. Many of these voters will vote for every candidate their preferred party is running but withhold their votes from its South Asian nominees. Academics, community activists and electoral reformers have long made much of the ways in which multi-member plurality voting reinforces racial stereotyping and division and chronically underrepresents South Asian people.

Generally, the best way to salve one’s conscience after doing this is to then use some of these votes to vote for members of a different minority group. While Vancouverites of Chinese extraction don’t view Chinese candidates as harder workers or better fiscal stewards than other candidates, white Anglo racist voters often do, as typified in Rob Ford’s backhanded praise of Toronto’s Chinese-Canadian population. In most elections in the past generation, a Chinese-sounding name has conferred an unearned bonus from white voters of 5-10% while a South Asian name has tended to produce a 10-20% penalty.

Noblesse Oblige Voters: Especially in times of runaway victory and party hegemony, voters for the governing party also—correctly usually—understand that they are not just picking the government. They are picking the opposition. “Saving” a vote for Bob Williams, Harry Rankin, Jenny Kwan, this was something that NPA voters have been doing since the 1960s when they party has been securely coasting into yet another mandate. Noblesse oblige voters understand that the opposition candidates around whom they concentrate their votes will be the ones who get the handful of council seats that are not won by the incumbent government.

Often these opposition candidates will, in some small measure, epitomize what the government voter thinks their preferred party is losing sight of. In 2011, Adriane Carr earned the support of many people who were voting Vision because of its light green agenda and wanted an opposition voice who would enhance that. Conservatives concerned about fiscal probity would routinely save a vote for Harry Rankin to support his line-item budget reviews and ferreting-out of civic waste.

Voters Who Pretend We Have STV: If we had the single transferrable vote electoral system, one could vote for a mixed, multi-party slate and have those intentions translated accurately when votes were counted. That’s not how multi-member plurality voting works but, as I have written elsewhere, for many voters, what matters is how they feel when they cast their votes and the council they envision in their minds in the privacy of the voting booth and not the results of their ballot interacting with tens of thousands of others during the counting process.

I have been hearing a lot from such voters in Vancouver, people who think that there should be a four-party council comprising the Greens, COPE, Vision and the NPA who fill out a ballot that resembles that result, rather than one tactically designed to produce that result. Often these voters do a lot of research, poring over candidate statements and party platforms, attending all candidates’ meetings, etc. but then insist on doing no research whatsoever about how the vote counting system works.

While these voters are not the majority, they do affect the election substantially. Members of this group often exert a powerful influence on which candidates from the second-place party win and which candidates from the first-place party lose in very close elections.

Change-Focused Voters: In Vancouver and Surrey, it looks like the incumbent parties will be returned to office with fewer votes, following a bruising campaign. Voters engaged in a last-ditch effort to prevent this will sometimes scan the ballot for the highest-profile members of any opposition party and cast votes for anyone whose candidacy has a good shot of knocking the less popular members of the governing party. Voters whose primary concern is to defeat Vision may choose a mix of candidates who are polling well, are with mainstream parties, have names near the top of the alphabet and otherwise show signs of being electable.

Of course, such an approach is costly because it often prevents one’s favourite candidate from gaining, in relative terms, on opposition candidates that one likes less. Many COPE voters chose to include Adriane Carr on their slate of preferred candidates in 2011, increasing the chances that some opposition councillor would be elected but reducing the chances that Ellen Woodsworth would keep her council seat by placing ahead of Carr. Depending on one’s priorities, this can be a rational and constructive choice, that makes the best use of multi-member plurality voting.

Well, that’s 4000 words or so. I had better stop now. More tomorrow.

Toronto civic politics has become a sorry sight over the past decade, culminating in the current mayoral race that is drawing to a close. The 2010 mayoral race was bad, ending in the election of a troubled, confused, angry man, far out of his depth in running Canada’s fifth largest political jurisdiction. Rob Ford came into office in four years ago with 47% of the popular vote on a platform that made little sense when subject to the most basic scrutiny; it included, for instance, the construction of $23 billion worth of new subways, paid for with $10 million in municipal program cuts.

The current race features two frontrunners with fiscal plans no more credible than the one on which Ford was elected four years ago. But another important thing unites Doug Ford and John Tory and distinguishes them from Olivia Chow: they understand the role they aspire to play on council in a non-legislative sense. Both Ford and Tory understand the role of the mayor to be one halfway between a CEO and a General Manager; where they differ is on the style of corporate management they wish to employ with their inferiors or junior managers, the city council. Ford favours an old-fashioned confrontational one; Tory would be a softer touch, more consultive and collaborative.

Since Rob Ford’s election, it has become increasingly popular to explain the failures in Toronto governance and the incoherent, lobotomized character of public policy debate as resulting from the moral failings of individual bad actors. No one is to speak of a systems failure. It’s supposed to be just a coincidence that the 2010 race was a contest between “Furious” George Smitherman, the cabinet minister with a reputation for volatile behaviour and a tyrannical management style and a man who kept—for some reason—having the police come to his house to investigate domestic violence reports. And it’s just a coincidence that the two men with the greatest thirst for this office are proud to identify as “buck stops here” bosses.

But the character of people attracted to a job and voters’ estimation of candidates’ suitability for it has a lot to do with the rules defining said job. And much of the crisis and failure surrounding the office of mayor can be traced, sadly, to the last competent person to hold it and the premier with whom that man partnered to restructure the city.

In 2005, David Miller began a major undertaking: negotiating a new governance structure for the city to accommodate the reality of its role as Canada’s fifth-largest government, representing a two and a half million people, providing transit, housing, childcare and a host of other services often associated with provinces not cities. I say “negotiating” because it would insult everyone’s intelligence to claim that Miller consulted Torontonians in order to establish his agenda. Certainly, there was a panel and a set of public meetings but these bodies reached pre-ordained conclusions, dictated from the mayor’s office. I actually don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, besides the pointless and insulting deception that wasted my time and that of other participants.

At the time, Toronto was undergoing a series of budget crises; Miller was just short of a majority (23) of NDP- and centre-left votes to pass his major fiscal initiatives. Because of the lack of a formal party system, the de facto NDP-aligned caucus that backed Miller could not make lasting, stable agreements with centrist elements on council to create a stable, governing coalition. The prohibition on formal parties on council further hobbled efforts because the NDP minority government governing Toronto was, by law, prohibited from making its workings in any way transparent or accessible to voters. Instead, the actual practices of governing Toronto had to be actively obfuscated and driven underground, into an unaccountable, covert party system.

For Miller, there was a fork in the road. It was clear that endemic budget crises, brinksmanship and instability were not the way forward. Something had to change.

I intervened in the debate that followed. I worked with a small cross-partisan coalition of democracy activists like John Deverell, Linda Sheppard and John Thompson. Our argument was this: Toronto needed to grow up; its 45-seat legislature should function like a real legislature. Instead of operating covertly and, sometimes, illegally, Toronto’s municipal parties should become transparent and accountable to the public. The city should stop using the office of the Integrity Commissioner to actively prevent councillors from speaking out about issues outside their ward and instead, it should become important for councillors to offer not just a hyper-parochial laundry list of potholes to be filled but instead campaign by declaring clearly what their city-wide vision was on the major issues, who their allies were and how people across the city could work for that vision. While we were at it, we suggested that it might be useful to reform the voting system to represent non-ghettoized and city-wide communities. After all, for most people the whole point of living in a city with a good transportation is being able to form diffuse communities with people other than one’s neighbours. In such a system, direct election of the mayor would end and we would choose mayors the way we select prime ministers, premiers and school board chairs: through assembling a legislative majority.

Miller and his allies had another vision, one on which New York, Chicago, San Francisco and other “great” American cities had based their recent governance reforms: draining significant powers from the dysfunctional city council into the office of the mayor. In such a model, many of the crises of the Miller era could be averted. In this new model, the major city committees and commissions to which substantial powers are delegated, could be constituted by the mayor unilaterally, without resort to council vote.

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As we grew increasingly desperate in our attempts to mobilize progressives about this impending, anti-democratic centralization of power we became more teleological in our rhetoric. “What will happen when David Miller is gone and the city’s business elites buy themselves a new ‘strong mayor’ who will put these new tools to very different uses?” we asked. “Won’t people with ambitions as petty dictators be drawn to this position and purchase it with their private fortunes, as has happened in the US?” we asked. The response was as unintelligent and devoid of abstract thought as the Toronto political discourse it has generated. It was essentially, “but David Miller IS the mayor.”

The US study we often cited during this debate explains the emptiness of such a position: “The success or failure of a strong mayor depends a lot on experience and personality… No structure is going to substitute for good politics. Even though many of America’s great cities—among them New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco—have visible, charismatic strong mayors, [one] can never design on an individual…” This was ignored so we began making dire predictions. We predicted that, when Miller retired, his successor would be an aspiring petty dictator who was either installed by the city’s major real estate interests or who purchased the office himself out of a private fortune. As history shows, that plan was so ineffective nobody even remembers it.

Essentially, in exchange for enlarged powers in his second mandate, Miller and his allies lobotomized Toronto civic politics. Today, elections are about the vision of the one person seeking the mayor’s chair and little more than the list of potholes each city council candidate intends to fill and the order in which they are to be filled. The plurality of ideologies, identities and communities in Toronto are not to be represented in parties, programs and political movements; they are to be placed outside the discourse. Ideologies are to be denied and obfuscated. Communities are to be ignored or shoehorned into quaint, racialized ghettos with demarcated by twee multilingual signage. Identities are to be reduced to aesthetics and tastes to be celebrated in parades and not understood to have anything to do with political representation.

And the consequences continue to pile up. Today, the biggest, most vibrant governance reform movement in Toronto is RaBIT, the “Ranked Ballot Initiative of Toronto” whose main project is to make sure that the mayor is elected through instant runoff voting, the system used to elect the leaders of political parties at the national and provincial level. The quest to make extra-sure that Toronto’s chief executive enjoys is the first, second or third choice a bare majority of voters in the city. After all, as the only person allowed to run on a vision, platform or program, the mayor had better embody in his person at least a majority of the city.

The idea that a legislative assembly is a body that represents a representative diversity of ideologies and communities, in which coalitions are forged and deals made, that it should be the site where a jurisdiction thinks and talks aloud with itself to choose a vision for its future and a program for achieving it, are ideas on which Toronto has given up. Instead, each councillor, elected by a plurality of as little as 19% of the 40% showing up to vote in an arbitrarily-bounded polygon containing about 60,000 residents, colloquially known as a “ward,” is supposed to represent some mythical neighbourhood consensus, colloquially termed “the community.” No matter that most communities, be they cultural, ethnic, ideological or interest-based are geographically diffuse and reach across all or most wards in the city; the point isn’t to represent actual communities but instead to shut down meaningful debate with the empty signifier “the community.” This surrender under the leadership of David Miller, the decision to create an elected autocracy rather than a transparent democracy is what has produced the ugliness, stupidity and incoherence of the 2010 and 2014 Toronto elections.

As long as formal political parties are illegal and driven underground, as long as it is a breach of councillor integrity to express an opinion or position about an issue outside the arbitrarily-bounded, numbered polygon one is elected by a plurality of voters to “represent,” as long as major policy decisions are taken out of the hands of the city council and placed within the purview of one white man with the title “your worship,” Toronto political discourse and civic culture will remain the thin gruel voters are choking down today.

Director Sara Polley speaks usefully and intelligently of the city’s trauma and the curtailed possibilities for big or intelligent thoughts, for courage and creativity in her piece endorsing my preferred candidate, Olivia Chow. But her mistake is to trace it to the failure of virtue of one sad, drunk man. The trauma was already lying in wait, a poison pill left by her (and my, I’m afraid) 2006 mayoral candidate, an inevitable event once the office of mayor was “reformed” into one that would attract the likes the Ford brothers.

In all likelihood, the Toronto left will have another four years out of power to brood on their irrelevance and marginality. Perhaps during that time, we can consider the road not taken, the possibility of offering voters a different Toronto, one that trusts in the fundamental principles of democracy and seeks to provide the city’s communities with the institutional tools to represent themselves in its legislature and, through deliberation and negotiation, enact a political program that arises from a genuine and mature conversation about what Torontonians can do together.

During the 2012 US presidential election, Bill Maher made an important intervention in identifying a new, or perhaps just resurgent, trend in political campaigning: the wealth seminar campaign. Observing the Romney campaign, Maher decoded its true message: “Mitt, a rich guy, knows how to make you rich too. And, if you elect him, he’ll tell you the secret.” It’s all about presenting a leader who isn’t so much the person voters want to govern them as the person voters aspire to be. As people lose faith in the idea that any political movement or leader could actually address the forces of global capital that are marginalizing and impoverishing them, elections are increasingly imaginative pageants that exist on their own terms. The point isn’t the election result; it’s the campaign because that’s where all the suspense lives now. The result is totally predictable: the “victor” will announce that the cupboard is bare and that we all must tighten our belts with higher user fees, privatization, austerity and handing sacks of cash to corporations and the investor class to keep them happy.

Because we know the result before we vote, our focus then becomes the campaign: what will happen to the characters seeking office, what twists and turns will the campaign take, and who will end up winning the prize of announcing the policies Standard and Poor’s has already drawn up for us? This entails the audience identifying with one of the characters in the shabby pageant they are watching.

While the prospect of being a wealthy, white, good-looking business patriarch appeals to some, the Romneyesque image doesn’t do a lot for urbanites. That’s why, despite a complete elite consensus in his favour, John Tory struggles to hit 40% in most Toronto mayoral surveys. Middle class suburban family men might want to identify with such a wealthy, respected figure as Tory but they are not the majority in the central political jurisdiction of a metropolitan area. And, as it has not endured any amalgamation with adjacent municipalities in 85 years, a much larger proportion of Vancouver’s middle-income families live outside the central political jurisdiction.

If we think, instead, of typical Vancouver residents, the people making major financial sacrifices, allocating as much as 80% of their income to rent or mortgage payments in cramped, substandard housing just to live within the municipalities city limits, wealth seminar campaigning takes on very different dimensions. First of all, people who emerge in their hipster gear from basement suites in Cedar Cottage onto the cramped and erratic number 20 bus have fantasy lives that are governed by something other than dreams of wealth, stability and the ability to provide. They are making sacrifices to be hip, connected and attractive-looking. In their mind’s eye, they identify with a different character in the pageant: that man with movie star good looks, a fit, taut body, a DJing career on the side, and friendships with a vast array of environmental activists, music scene luminaries and TED talk presenters.

Vision has figured out that in Vancouver, it’s not a wealth seminar. It’s a coolness seminar. And that’s why developers line up to hang out with the Vision gang too. They aren’t just converting a $25,000 donation into a $25,000,000 rezoning windfall; they are also getting the parting gifts: a night with great local DJs, a dip in the Hollyhock hot tub. Many wealthy businesspeople, by choosing to live in Vancouver, are already making a similar choice to those living in the coffin suites they are selling. They too eschewing even greater prosperity that would come from working in a more vibrant investment climate like Toronto or Calgary. They too are here for the coolness—and there is a mechanism for purchasing that dip in the hot tub.

That’s why Vision Vancouver is making a mockery of the very idea that candidates for election need to put forward policies on the major issues. Minor issues—sure, they deserve some policy, for the geeks and the everyday running of the city. But notice the striking inverse correlation: the more Vision states an issue is one of the major, deciding issues of the race, the less policy it generates. As witnessed in their 24-hour response to Kirk LaPointe’s school meal program announcement, Vision has the smarts and the capacity to generate excellent public policy on the fly. So we have to understand the total absence of any working public policy around the Broadway subway or the opposition to Kinder Morgan not as an oversight but as part of the plan.
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Vision Vancouver’s number one issue in its re-election bid is the construction of a $3 billion subway down Broadway. In the past six years, they have spent not one cent on the planning or construction of this subway. In their ten-year capital plan, released last month, not one cent is budgeted. Nor is there any money for the subway in the last budget city council passed. That’s because they’re running on the Broadway Subway of the Mind. Like the mayor’s independent wealth, musical acumen, hip friends and striking looks, the point of the subway isn’t the subway itself. It’s the idea of the subway—one that would only be contaminated with financing plans, earth-moving equipment and tunneling machines—that really matters.

Well, that and, of course, the cool people associated with you. That’s where the diabolical genius of Vision will come to be studied by communications and political consultants all over North America. By refusing to make any effort to emancipate itself from Translink or to construct any transit on its own dime (such as the streetcars the NPA promised in 2011), Vision can centre its subway “promise” around one of those meaningless online clicktivist “campaigns,” in which we change the world by clicking “Like” and typing “RT:.”

When one goes to the Vision Vancouver web site and clicks on its “Broadway Subway: What the City Can Do” link, one quickly arrives at the online “petition” Vision is running. Instead of finding policies or plans to build the subway, one is offered the chance to—in some indefinable way—get involved, and then asked for one’s contact information. That’s right: Vision Vancouver has turned election platforms on their head, from statements of what the state will do for you, given the chance, into phishing clickbait. The same is, of course, true of their “fight” against the Kinder Morgan pipeline. There is no plan to build the subway or fight the pipeline because that’s not the point. The point is for Vision to get the contact info for low-information young voters they can drive to the polls in their hybrids on election day and for said voters to feel that their sacrifices are not in vain, that they are on a team of excellent, young, hip, attractive, connected people and not masturbating alone in a flooded basement suite, two months behind on their smartphone payments.

In twentieth-century elections, platforms were an exchange whereby people exchanged their votes for a pledge of future action on their behalf. In the new kind of election Vision offers us, voters exchange their contact information for the opportunity to imagine themselves to be part of a scene… a really cool scene, like the Hollyhock hot tub or DJ night at the Biltmore.

“And yet,” to quote Maher, “no matter how clear Jay-Z makes it that the hot tub is only for the coolest and most beautiful people, somehow, when the song ends, that is us.” After all, what is the alternative?

Until yesterday, I was profoundly pessimistic about the fate of left-leaning candidates in this fall’s Vancouver municipal election. With polls showing that only 18% of Vancouverites were willing to use even one of their twenty-seven votes to elect a COPE candidate (versus 30% willing to give Adriane Carr one of their votes) and only 9% willing to give a single vote to the COPE splinter party OneCity, it appeared that if there were to be an opposition at City Hall, it would be a centrist Green Party opposition or a conservative NPA one. Pollsters haven’t even had the chance to pronounce on the viability of the Public Education Project, a third COPE splinter party that emerged yesterday. (I’m a big fan of PEP’s candidates and will be supporting them in the election, despite their untested brand.)

But then I read that Meena Wong was seeking the COPE mayoral nomination and appears to be a consensus candidate backed by all of the endlessly multiplying factions of the party. If any person can arrest the tailspin of schism and negativity that has overtaken the civic left, Meena is that person.

Until my resignation from the party in March, I was working with her to persuade COPE to adopt proportional representation both as party policy and for internal elections. After I quit, Meena and her husband, Les—arguably the most stalwart PR advocate in the whole BC NDP—continued relentlessly to call for the party to catch up with its voter base on the electoral system. It is due to their efforts that the party did eventually adopt PR for internal elections (although this adoption is largely symbolic because of the way PR is operationally vitiated by the party’s byzantine system of representation quotas).

In the past six months, Meena has also been able to build bridges with the main factions of the party (Tim Louis supporters and Left Front members), despite having worked closely with people who have publicly fallen out with the party. While every other force on the civic left seems to be making new enemies, Meena has been bringing people together—people it is often challenging to bring together.

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I am producing this article, in part, to encourage the hundred or so members I signed up for COPE last year to support Meena’s candidacy.

That stated, just picking Meena for mayor will not be enough to get COPE into the territory where even one of its candidates can be elected. The party must go beyond nominating her and play more actively on her strengths. COPE needs a bridge-builder like Meena to repair relations with the parties run by its former elected officials and board members. After so much bitterness, COPE needs to make the first move with groups and individuals who have left, starting with OneCity and the Public Education Project. It needs to repair relations with the Vancouver and District Labour Council, win over progressive NDP MLAs and MPs, and open more stable lines of communication with the Green Party. These are all things she is well-positioned to do. If COPE authorizes Meena to do the kind of bridge-building on its behalf that she has done to earn the strong consensus around her candidacy, her nomination could be a game-changer that saves the party’s brand.

Nominating Meena Wong as COPE’s mayoral candidate will not, by itself, restore the party’s ability to elect candidates. But if that is the party’s first move in an ambitious project of consensus-building and outreach, COPE may just have—at the last possible moment—saved their party and provided hope to the thousands of Vancouverites who need it.