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Happy Tenth Anniversary, Battlestar Galactica

In 2009, I wrote an article on the representation of Mormon cosmology in the Ronald Moore re-make of the Battlestar Galactica TV series. I never got around to writing a second version of this article incorporating the revisions that were recommended to me in workshops and conferences in 2009 and 2010, nor a version incorporating the second half of the final season of the series. I doubt that I will now.

Anyway, with today’s celebration of the tenth anniversary of the series premiere, it seems a good time to revisit the article and pass it on to fans who may have missed it the first time around. So, without further ado, here it is: Battlestar Galactica and Mormon Theology

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Doctor Who: Man, Monster and Minor – Part II: The Silence, the Rise of the Trauma Monster and the Inward Turn of the Home Front

This article is the second of two on gender dynamics in Doctor Who. The first appears here.

In 2013, I suffered a minor psychological breakdown, triggered by, among other things, the new Doctor Who monster, a race of creatures called “the Silence.” The Silence, likely an homage to Joss Whedon’s the Gentlemen, are creatures with one singular power: the ability to make anyone who saw them forget that they had the moment they looked away. The horror of seeing one of the Silence inheres not in witnessing the creature’s hideous visage and diabolical nature but in remembering all the other times you had already seen the Silence and forgotten they were there. Not just “there” but everywhere.

These creatures had been distorting human history since its beginning, silently manipulating the fate of the world for their own diabolical ends. As one explains, “we have ruled your lives since your lives began. You should kill us all on sight but you will never remember we were even here. Your world is ours… we are The Silence.” For how long have they been doing this, someone asks the Doctor, “as long as there’s been something in the corner of your eye, or creaking in your house or breathing under your bed or voices through a wall.”

The Silence are one of the most successful villains of the new Doctor Who, since its resurrection by Russell T. Davies in 2004, an adversary that has sent English children back to their proper viewing perch for the classic series, behind the sofa. While the Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans, the totalitarianism monsters of the Second World War and Cold War have returned, they mainly offer viewers a sense of nostalgia and continuity, not terror. Nor has there been any great effort to update monsters who are more adaptable to our contemporary fears of inhuman authority, dehumanization and the annihilation of culture and emotion; there are no new, scarier Autons or Axons to speak Matrix-esque fears of the present day.

I would suggest that this is because our modern risk of cybernetic dehumanization inheres, in part, in our loss of any clear sense of implicit threat as our phones and consoles merge with our bodies, the kind of fear that was narrated more easily a generation ago in David Cronenberg’s Existenz. For this reason, such fears are not central to the reinfusion of terror into Doctor Who.

As in the original series, the Doctor must convey a sense of manly heroism relationally and symbolically, by protecting a female companion from danger. Because the main character has been transformed from an asexual being into an ambiguously and ambivalently sexual one, the non-consummated nature of the Doctor’s relationship with his companion is one that, even more strongly, conveys a Victorian restraint-driven manliness. Now, the Doctor is tempted, from time to time to engage romantically or sexually with his younger female companion. And yet, for some important reason, he must restrain himself from doing do.

In trying to understand why this must be, the show’s queer subtext seems a logical explanation; Russell T. Davies’ Doctor feels fleeting moments of attraction to his female human companion but not enough to actually sustain the rich, romantic, sexual relationship she wants and “deserves,” with some more suitable male partner, the Will and Grace “fag hag” dynamic played out episode after episode.

But let us, for a moment, consider how the nature of the Silence and the other popular new monsters in Doctor Who link the unconsummated sexual dynamic to the return of the show’s ability to convey horror. Steven Moffat has struck fear into the heart of a new generation of youngsters (and adults like me!) with the Silence and the Weeping Angels by triggering the fears of contemporary watchers the way the Daleks and Cybermen played on the fear of totalitarianism that existed in audiences of half a century ago.

Like the creature lurking under beds and behind curtains in the current season, the Weeping Angels and the Silence evoke the consciousness of victims of childhood abuse and sexual violence, and the ways in which the resulting trauma plays on the memory of survivors. While the Silence are creatures one forgets every time one looks away, only to recall, with ever-increasing horror all the times one witnessed and forgot, when one sees them again, the Weeping Angels speak to the vigilance that survivors of trauma experience.

Weeping Angels are monstrously strong and lethal creatures that can only move when no one is looking at them. One must never close one’s eyes, never look away, never let the lights go out, never blink or the Angels will set upon you and tear you limb from limb. For so many victims of childhood sexual violence, this fear of the dangerous world that comes into being when the lights are out has left a residual vigilance, that permanent imprint of trauma that remains sleepless and vigilant, hoping to delay the seemingly inevitable reckoning with horror.
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Before I met the Silence, I had always found the idea of “repressed” and “recovered” memories hard to understand, hard to believe in. How could something so life-altering and horrifying really be forgotten? How could one go through life never remembering things around which an abused child’s life is organized? But that misses the point of repressed memories—the horror of repressed childhood trauma is not repressed once; it is repressed again and again. And even as the events themselves recede, the horror only grows in power because every time you remember the event again, every time it breaks through repression and localized amnesia, you remember all the other times you saw the monster and repressed it again because you could not bear to gaze upon its visage. The work of repression is constant, repetitive and exhausting; through it, we become unwitting, involuntary accomplices in the conspiracy of silence that surrounds trauma and abuse.

When we hear the voice of the Silence, we hear generations of priests, teachers, parents and relatives whispering those words, “we have ruled your lives since your lives began. You should kill us all on sight. But you will never remember we were even here. Your world is ours… we are The Silence.”

It is in this light that we must understand the unconsummated nature of the Doctor-companion sexual dynamic. The Doctor cannot sleep with his companions—not because he is gay—but because he knows their secret: that they are victims of trauma and abuse, and that he would be exploiting his knowledge of who and what they really are if he did so, much as he might wish to.

It also helps to explain the feature of the series that fans find most aggravating: that nearly every companion, in her childhood, became entangled with the universe-threatening monster the Doctor is fighting. And it is her prior encounter with the trauma-inducing events and creatures that set her on a path that will, inevitably, intersect with the Doctor’s. Here, our modern Dcotor stands in for the charismatic, altruistic future therapist, police officer, social worker, foster parent with whom the traumatized person must confront the foundational evil that has been hanging over her life, a hero bound by ascetic vows never the turn that intimate relationship into a sexual one.

Serial killers, rapists, human traffickers—these are our new demons in popular culture; they have replaced the Nazi war criminals and Soviet agents of half a century ago. They hold that status because they threaten our patriarchy’s minors, our home front; they target “our” women and children, not men. And by interposing oneself between these predators and the women and children of England or America, one becomes a masculine hero, no matter how effete or unmanly one’s body or personality. This gendered, relational position doesn’t just permit the Doctor to be a dandy hero; it gives us Gil Grissom, Spencer Reid and a host of other otherwise-insufficiently masculine men who hunt the monsters who threaten the new home front.

At this point, people who are not me might focus on the ways in which this argument shows Doctor Who to have always been a patriarchal show that subordinates women to men (perhaps aside from the 1979 and 1980 seasons). This can be said of most shows on TV and, frankly, most good ones, not because the film industry is full of misogynists but because we continue to live in a patriarchal society that constantly re-inscribes its gender dynamics in its literary and dramatic production.

What interests me are the ways in which the show operates within these gender dynamics to adumbrate new possibilities for narrating the deeply gendered repression that remains near the heart of our society. I have yet to see any portrayal of repressed memories of abuse more compelling than the Silence, one that engages not just individual trauma but the multigenerational, structural character of abuse and trauma.

When Jack Cram, the radical native sovereigntist lawyer went mad, he spoke—inaccurately—of our society being run by a conspiracy of pedophiles in our courts, churches and legislatures. There is, of course, no such conspiracy. It is just that our society runs as if there were. When I wrote of the lethal silence that powered southern lynchings, the silence that enables predators like Bill Cosby and Jian Ghomeshi to seek out and assault new victims with impunity, the picture in my mind was of the Silence, as depicted by Stephen Moffat, that powerful force, as old as the human race itself that stops us telling others what has happened to us, that chokes cries for help in our throats, that seeps into our houses and places of work, stifling our words.

While there is much to criticize about the new Doctor Who, in particular, the direction of the show since the Davies’ departure, I continue to draw inspiration about how to be an ethical man enmeshed in a patriarchal society. Just as the old series taught me how one could be clumsy, eccentric, hard-to-understand, strangely-dressed and yet mysteriously heroic, I choose to draw inspiration from the possibilities the show lays before us. All that is needed to be a man, Doctor Who continues to tell us, is to fight to protect the home front. As the Doctor says of the Silence, “they’ve been running your lives for a very long time now, so keep this straight in your head. We are not fighting an alien invasion, we’re leading a revolution. And today, the battle begins.”

Geekery Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

Gender in Doctor Who: Man, Monster and Minor – Part I: The Home Front, Manliness and the Dandy Hero

The first time I quit politics, I gave a concession speech crediting my seven-year career as leader of the BC Green Party to the British science fiction series Dr. Who for “teaching me that a tall, eccentric, clumsy, curly-haired man can, indeed, save the universe.” My valedictory remarks ended with a quotation from the Doctor’s first farewell, in 1964, to his young, female companion/assistant, a traditional feature of the show by the time of its cancellation in 1989.

Although, the first of these companions had been the Doctor’s granddaughter, the young, shapely, wide-eyed female companion became the most predictable feature of the cast. Indeed, out of the original series’ 667 episodes, 647 feature such a character. While Dr. Who companions were generally portrayed as assisting the Doctor, it was only at the apex of second-wave feminism (1977-82) that their role does not consist substantially of screaming, being injured, getting captured, being rescued and asking questions in a way that enables the main character to demonstrate his superior knowledge.

Although there is an argument to be made that Dr. Who companions did more good than harm when it comes to widening the range of possible female roles on television, I don’t think much of it. After all The Avengers premiered in 1961 and, by the year before Dr. Who began, already featured witty, assertive, female action stars. But, as with my views on racism in J R R Tolkien, the idea that a work of literature beloved by self-identified geeks be flawed, even chauvinistic, and yet still do and say worthy and important things, is unlikely to find unanimous acceptance.

And that is a shame because Dr. Who does have a lot of important things to tell us about gender and sexuality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It was, after all, the crew at Queer as Folk who successfully revived the series in 2004, because the original series could be easily read as having a queer subtext, a subtext that almost spilled over into simple text in the years 1970-74.

When Jon Pertwee played the title character, he portrayed him as a dandyish man with a slight lisp and an over-coiffed silver perm, dressed flamboyantly in a cape, powder-blue frilly shirt and velvet smoking jacket, a man with refined tastes who imported gorgonzola cheese from Italy when exiled to London. And just in case anyone missed what the Doctor was in those years, William Hartnell reprised his original role in the tenth anniversary episode, pronouncing of his two successors, “so, you’re my replacements, a dandy and a clown!”

The “galactic hobo” portrayal of the Doctor, first by Patrick Troughton (1966-69) and then by Tom Baker (1974-81) was more typical of the original series, and one for which it is better-remembered. However, it is worth noting that an explicitly dandyish hero was played by Peter Davison (1981-84), featuring two young male companions, for the first time since the 1960s, something that would have simply been too queer for Pertwee’s already sexually problematic portrayal.

Still, one would be hard-pressed to find any portrayal of the Doctor in the original series that could be considered conventionally manly. Neither Troughton’s and Baker’s hobos, Pertwee’s and Davison’s dandies nor Hartnell’s and McCoy’s curmudgeonly know-it-alls were heroic in a conventionally masculine sense. They eschewed physical violence, favouring more ambiguously-gendered forms of aggression, relying on deception, self-control, trickery, superior knowledge and manipulating their enemies, almost none of which showed a trace of athleticism.

Sure, there were some ways the Doctor’s body was capable of feats impossible for ordinary humans but those feats were devoid of athleticism; he could hold his breath for minutes at a time, practice obscure martial arts without breaking a sweat and cheat death by “regenerating” into another body. But when it came to feats like mountain-climbing, the show went so far as to lampoon its title character’s lack of athleticism, having him retrieve from his pocket, the self-help book Everest in Easy Stages and, upon discovering it to be written mostly in Tibetan, Teach Yourself Tibetan.

This kind of masculine heroism, centred in superior knowledge, self-control and cleverness had once been the ideal form of “manliness” in the English-speaking world, as compellingly argued by Gail Bederman in Manliness and Civilization. Back when colonizing and “civilizing” the “darker races” was the job, the manly hero of Rudyard Kipling’s world was not unlike the Doctor. The Englishman or American who carried the “white man’s burden,” had to, by necessity, distinguish his manliness from the “primitive masculinity” he allegedly opposed. Indeed, societies whose theories of masculinity were most congruent with this exaltation of restraint, were those most lightly colonized by the English and Americans, the Kingdom of Hawaii and India’s Hindu principalities outside the formal British Raj.
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But, the nineteenth-century drew to a close, concern over declining birth rates or “race suicide” and the rise of Tarzan comics made effete young men like Teddy Roosevelt re-make their refined manliness into a less restrained, more violent masculinity.

Yet, in the English tradition, the ideal of the dandy hero did not die such a quick death, in part because of conscription. There was not just a cultural need to see the continuation of the dandy hero ideal into the twentieth century, but a politicized national interest. Characters like Biggles, the under-aged gentleman-hero of the RAF occupied a contradictory and frequently-lampooned role in British pop culture, increasingly incongruent with the appetite- driven, violent masculinity of the likes of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, the heroes who epitomized twentieth-century manliness.

What allowed Biggles to survive through the 1950s, 60s and 70s, as the Second World War, and attendant conscription, receded from the public mind was the fact that, in the Biggles comics, the war never really ended. Because he was defending the home front, the women and children of England, his masculinity, while quirky, could remain undisputed. Wartime masculinity was more capacious and diverse because it could be clearly unified around the defense of England’s territory and non-combatants against the forces of autocracy or fascism. There was a teleology to masculinity: it was the nature that existed in men that motivated and enabled them to defend the non-combatants at home. If they could not be masculine by virtue of their nature, dandies could be so by what they accomplished: the defense of the home front.

And so we come full circle to Doctor Who, the show that captured a nation’s imagination in 1964 by creating a space-age monster that perfectly symbolized totalitarianism: the Daleks, from whom the Doctor is forced to defend his granddaughter Susan and her teacher, Barbara Wright. Fundamentally, Doctor Who kept the ideal of the dandy hero alive in the same way Biggles did, by demonstrating his masculinity teleologically (by succeeding in his defense of women and children) and relationally (because this could be enacted through his observed protector relationship to a woman and/or child). Because a dandy was no longer intrinsically manly, his masculinity (and hence heroism – this is a patriarchy, after all) had to be telegraphed in this way. The dandy-hero defended the home front (i.e. women, girls and boys) from the totalitarian forces of continental Eurasia (Daleks, Cybermen, Autons, Sontarans, Rutans, Axons, etc.) The asexual relationship between the Doctor and the endless parade of pornographic archetype companions (leather-clad savage, stewardess, micro-skirted professor, ditzy secretary, etc.) served to underline their minority relative to the centuries-old Time Lord and, hence, his role as their protector.

As time wore on and we became a people whose contemporary political and cultural struggles came to revolve more around Stonewall and less around the Holocaust, the queer reading of Doctor Who became a more obvious one. And, for more and more viewers, it became a proto-Will and Grace. The companions came to stand in less for the women and children of wartime England and more as the beard or “fag hag” of the gay, male hero, the asexuality of the relationship conditioned less by the woman’s putative minority and more by the man’s queerness.

But this transition ultimately deprived the show of its underlying dramatic tension. As the memory of fascism receded, audience members were not on the edge of their seats, nor, as many fans remember their younger selves, peering out from behind the sofa, to see if fascism incarnate would succeed in its evil design and land on England’s metaphorical shores. The show, by the 1980s, had become a parody of itself (a parody that I personally loved!), with a cult following of gay men, sexually inept geeks and hard-core sci-fi aficionados.

Without the women of the home front to protect, there could be no compelling dandy hero and hence, no mainstream audience.

It is with this understanding that I will visit how it is that the tension and drama that old Doctor Who gradually lost have somehow been restored in the new series, how a dandy hero, who is queerer than ever, is once again a compelling television character. In the second half, I will suggest that this is, once again, centred in relational gender dynamics and our perceptions of the most sinister threats to the virtue and safety of women and children in Anglo society.

Geekery | fusangite |

COPE’s Developer Donations: A Response

Mainstream media are now covering the Coalition of Progressive Electors’ campaign manager’s decision to ask key party candidates to actively solicit donations from real estate developers during the recent Vancouver civic election and the party executive’s decision to file a fraudulent election return with Elections BC to cover this up. Among those are some who actively worked to discredit my efforts and those of fellow director Kim Hearty to bring prior major ethical lapses foreshadowing these to light.

These included the ongoing membership of directors and future council candidates Tim Louis and Wilson Munoz in MAWO, a violent sectarian cult whose database is maintained by Louis, the commission sale of rent-a-crowd votes by the Mainlander organizers to Louis, efforts to intimidate me through interference with my partner’s career and workplace, ongoing misinformation of members and the general public concerning internal party practices and procedures, control of committee and director votes through direct cash payments by Louis to board members, committee members and parliamentarians prior to key votes and an ongoing alliance with real estate developer Michael Goodman, whose personal fortune comes from Fort MacMurray real estate development tied to tar sands expansion and providing mortgage brokering services to offshore speculators in Vancouver real estate.

Today, many people, especially candidates and party activists who have been aware of these issues all along are feigning surprise and outrage at this latest turn of events. This is all par for the course. To COPE activists, there are two kind of people in the world: (1) good people who are powerless and rail against the evil people who run things and (2) bad people who can be held responsible for all the bad things that happen. Because, for COPE members, people who can be held responsible for things are part of a separate ontological category than themselves, it is unsurprising that no COPE candidate, finance committee member, election committee member or board member (with the notable and exceptions of Anita Romaniuk and the party’s registered financial agent) has taken any responsibility for campaigning as the only party that does not accept donations from real estate development firms, actively soliciting and receiving donations from said firms and attempting to file a fraudulent financial report with Elections BC. That is because COPE members see themselves as the people who hold others responsible, not people who take responsibility. To a COPE activist, people who are responsible for things are an ontologically separate category of being.

Everyone active in COPE was either in possession of all the information they needed to know that their party’s campaign was nothing more or less than a fraud perpetrated on the people of Vancouver, or could have easily obtained such information had they practiced due diligence a potential candidate should.

That’s why everyone is pointing fingers and demanding each other’s resignations without, for a moment, wondering if they have anything to apologize for or resign over. While Gayle Gavin and Keith Higgins have gone to some effort to offer an apology to members, this apology actually belongs to the people of Vancouver. I hope that Anita, Gayle and Keith let the real victims of COPE’s fraud–the tens of thousands of voters who supported them–know how sorry they are.

Anyway, now that all this is blowing up, questions might be asked as to why I still endorsed three of the party’s twenty candidates. Here is my answer: because there was no risk of the party governing, because the party’s candidates, had they been elected, would have continued to understand the Vision-NPA majority as a set of ontologically separate beings who had nothing to do with him. While they would work to sabotage the creation of any kind of principled, democratic, accountable progressive party, they would have been immune to offers of power by the majority because to have actual state power is to be responsible and accountable for things — and that’s for that other species of creature, the black-hatted villains with power.

Below, I enclose the original resignation letter I sent to my supporters in early March of this year. The apologies I offer in it I now extend to Vancouver voters as a whole.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Today, Carlito Pablo published excerpts of the letter below in the Georgia Straight. Because of the Straight’s pro-COPE/pro-Green slant, almost no part of this letter criticizing COPE appeared. Thanks to the distorted impression the article left, I now feel it is incumbent upon me to publish the whole document for those who, like Ann Livingston, found the piece largely devoid of my reasons for leaving COPE.

Tuesday, March 24th, 2014

Dear Friends and Supporters,

As Hunter S. Thompson would say, “after an agonizing reappraisal of the whole scene,” I have decided not to stand as a candidate for Vancouver City Council in 2014 for any party or as an independent candidate. You are among a great group of people who have worked hard, investing time, money and emotional energy in offering a progressive, populist alternative to Vision Vancouver this fall.

Please accept my thanks for all your commitment and hard work and my apologies for making poor decisions that have resulted in coming to naught. For those who hang out with me because you’re interested in long, over-analytical explanations, read on. For those just glad to be off the hook, please accept my thanks and know that I’ll be in touch in a more sociable way soon.

Unfortunately, I do not think that progressive Vancouverites are ready for a sufficiently broad left-populist alternative yet, despite how desperate the situation is. In my work to put together a big tent coalition that could run on a platform of constructive change and principled opposition, I have discovered the depth of the collective trauma caused by the fission and collapse of the COPE government between 2002 and 2005.

I have come home to a left that is profoundly divided and deeply distrustful, obsessed with petty score-settling and paranoid “I told you so!” politics. Ironically, the myriad warring factions that today comprise what passes for a civic left in Vancouver are united in their belief that we lost a tremendous, once-in-a-generation opportunity in 2002 to remake our city as a compassionate, diverse place in which it was possible to live with dignity from cradle to grave, a place that had room for kids, for families and for older people, regardless of their wealth or income.

When I came back to Vancouver in 2012, after an eight-year absence, it seemed clear to me who was at fault and what was to be done. It seemed obvious to me that the people who crossed from COPE and the Green Party to form Vision were the culprits, their betrayal leveraged by developer donations and the small cadre of federal Liberals and Shaughnessy and West Point Grey whose strategic alliances have kept them in continuous control of our city for three quarters of a century. It seemed to me that Vision was comprised of the cheapest sort of sell-outs, people willing to the bidding of big business for a fraction of the perks, donations and invisible exchanges NPA representatives would demand.

It seemed like America after Lincoln’s assassination, when the human rights gains of the Civil War were squandered by a corrupt, incoherent and unfocused presidency. Like US president Andrew Johnson’s relationship with the planter aristocracy of Dixie, the class insecurities of the former communists, socialists and Greens populating Vision’s front bench just greased the wheels for sweetheart deals, concession and corruption. NPA councillors would not be awed into multi-million dollar concessions by a game of squash at the Arbutus Club, a business lunch at the Vancouver Club, getting to commission their own rigged study from KPMG or $1000 seat at a Cancer Society fundraiser. This is a world in which they comfortably move, not like those underdressed Vision imposters. They would just not get as drunk on that fine Kentucky bourbon as today’s Andrew Johnsons seem to be.

It seemed that the state of the city could be explained by the low character of a handful of opportunists on the left. This was a credible narrative for me—Vancouver seemed to be the logical conclusion, the most extreme manifestation of Tony Blair’s Third Way.

But now I am not so sure.

Having tried to work in COPE the past eighteen months has made me see something darker and more frightening in our city’s self-styled progressives. When I signed up 89 people to show up and vote to emancipate COPE from its self-destructive relationship with Vision last April, I had failed to understand who and what COPE was; I had failed to understand the nature and character of my allies. I now realize that the people I installed as the new decision-makers in COPE are equally to blame for monstrous government our city has had to endure since the formal COPE-Vision split a decade ago.

COPE’s toxic, meeting-intensive culture of interminable, acrimonious, incoherent nonsense that is politely called “debate” would drive any sane person out of active participation within two years. This is not an accident. This is the plan. Years ago, back when he was one of my biggest supporters, Adriane Carr’s husband Paul George gave me some advice about to control an organization: make the internal environment so toxic that only crazy, ineffective people can stick around. I think that’s been the theory of my former allies in COPE for some time. When new people come in, get as much work out of them as you can and burn them out so that they never attend more than two annual general meetings, so they never crack the code of the party and challenge your leadership.

The two warring factions of COPE have operated together to make this a reality. David Chudnovsky’s faction played this game one way, becoming increasingly reliant on the fresh meat of young activists who could be thrown into the meat grinder that COPE was, in order to keep a small, secretive cabal in charge of the party and its direction. Tim Louis’s faction played the other way. To quote a long-time COPE activist and Louis supporter who ended all activity in the party after her former allies turned on her a few short months after attaining a board majority, “Tim finds very damaged people and he heals them—just enough.” It has been by learning and synthesizing the opposing faction’s strategy with his own over the past two years that Tim is now COPE’s undisputed, unchallenged autocrat.

Many things have kept the Louis faction effective over the years. They provide a sense of importance and social relevance to individuals who might find those things nowhere else. In this way they are committed to looking past disability in the most admirable way, thinking through the ways our society wastes the considerable talents of the traumatized, addicted, disabled, etc. and then mobilizing those talents in the service of the greater good. I once had just a fraction of their ability to see real talent in deeply dysfunctional, marginal individuals and find a way to include them in doing really important things, not just at the margins but at the centre of the enterprise. Over time, I have lost that talent; I don’t miss it but wish I had put it to better use when I had it.

Then the muscles get the 5mg generic cialis extra energy and strength in time of copulation. Here are some tips to help you in sildenafil cheap your difficulty. Erectile dysfunction or impotence is said to be faced at any point of time in life but if you take care of your health by giving up smoking, alcohol and try to stay fit by spending some time for these relations. viagra cheapest Easy tips to obtain Kamagra In many of the cases, it has been a common cause of tinnitus is excessive exposure to loud noise or age associated tinnitus. viagra cheap india Sadly, because many of these individuals have such limited social options and face such discrimination because of poverty, invisible disabilities and other marginalizing factors, they are left to endure a corrosive, predatory, abusive internal culture that they must weather due to the failures of our movements, and of society at large, to provide real alternative spaces for them to socialize and participate in struggles for social justice. I can leave COPE for greener pastures; for some whom I leave behind, there are no greener pastures—this is as good as it gets. Their experience is that the abuse they endure in COPE is the price they must pay to function as social and political beings in our city.

But there is something darker still. Every significant Louis supporter I have met has talked about the disaster of 2002-05 and how we must learn from those mistakes so that COPE – or some future left-oriented party hoping to govern – never squander another opportunity like that again. Theories about how to avoid this invariably showcase two factors:

(a)    COPE either didn’t have or didn’t follow good, radical, socialist policies for the city. This time we’re making radical, deep, well thought-out policy that serves social movements and thinks through the deep, structural changes our city needs.

(b)   COPE let careerists, moderates and lightweights looking for a payoff run as the party’s candidates because they were more charismatic or connected. Not this time. This time we’re running salt of the earth long time social movement activists.

But the problem is that the COPE they are building isn’t doing the things it imagines itself to be doing.

First, COPE has almost no policy and almost nobody is interested in it. When policies are put forward they are back-of-the-napkin ideas that arise on the floor of policy meetings, backed by minimal research or they are the personal hobby horse of a member, disconnected from the demands or interests of local social movements working on the issue. Curiously, what few policies there are are strangely conservative and often echo positions held by the current city council, especially when it comes to buck-passing to senior levels of government on transit, childcare and campaign finance reform. It is as though COPE doesn’t think it needs to make policy because it imagines that it is pure, incarnate policy—by being a thing, you don’t have to do the thing.

COPE in 2002, on the other hand, had a clear, coherent, robust body of policy, hashed-out by members over many years, cooperating closely with social movements and organized labour. The problem in 2002 was not lack of policy but the institutional disconnect between a party’s elected caucus and a party’s corporate organization. This problem was structural in character. No amount of rule-making by the corporation of a party can legally bind its caucus because elected officials are not legally recallable to a party; the only power a party has to discipline its caucus is to choose not to renominate them; COPE’s threatened use of this very power in 2005 is what led to the present state of affairs. The belief that using stronger language in party policy and stronger language to make the caucus accountable to the membership is wrongheaded in two ways: (a) the party is actually doing a worse job on those fronts that it was a decade ago, (b) this plan was tried and directly led to the present state of affairs.

Second, and much more importantly, there appears to be no understanding of how to recognize character or corruptibility. Tim Stevenson, for instance, was one of the most upstanding, ethical, principled members of the 90s NDP caucus, who ran against the party’s welfare cuts in 1996 and won the party’s nomination anyway. The view seems to be that if people were not bought-off by Vision and their developer friends last time or are presently associated with those who were not, they are tested, trustworthy, reliable people who will be able to stand up to threats, bribes and intimidation. In my view, the absolute opposite is true.

During my brief time in COPE, I came to discover that the current leadership group is structured on a politics of small-scale financial patronage of people with marginal employment prospects or otherwise straitened financial circumstances. Votes and committee composition might turn on sums of less than $200, doled out by the ruling patriarch, but these tiny amounts of money actually hold much of the putative leadership group together. While the scale of bribery within COPE is so small as to be statistically insignificant when compared against the reciprocal exchanges of donations development permits at City Hall, it is, if anything, more formal, more central to and more prevalent in the party’s day-to-day operations.

And yet, those financially tied to the party chairman will actually tolerate breaches of principle, vendettas and intimidation tactics that would raise the eyebrows of the most ruthless Vision operative. If the excuse-making, denials and cover-ups that followed the mobilization of MAWO (Fire This Time) and the sleazy reprisals against my family are anything to go by, Vision didn’t just poach COPE’s talent; it may actually have made off with some of the party’s more principled members. The overwhelming majority of principled people of the left in Vancouver today are not to be found in the leadership group of either party, having abandoned both in disgust while I was living in Ontario and the US.

Let us consider, then, that those who comprise COPE today have not sold out because they are principled but because nobody is buying. Let us consider the possibility that the creators of Vision bought off only those worth recruiting and that those individuals likely exacted a higher price in progressive policy concessions and political support than those who remain in COPE would have, that the invisible-handed God caused developers to purchase only genuine assets, not unreliable, damaged goods.

The fact is that if someone can be bought off for a $10/head commission on party memberships, a few hours of minimum wage data entry work or dribs and drabs of minimally-remunerated cold calling; if they are willing to look the other way in the face of lies, threats, intimidation and retaliatory attacks on members’ families and charitable enterprises, and write these things off as just the price of doing business for such a pittance, their chances of turning down a consulting contract from Westbank are minimal. If they are wowed and brag to their friends about getting to eat some inferior vegan appetizers at Tim’s house a couple of times per year, imagine how lunch at the Terminal City club would seem to this crew – or better yet, a weekend at Hollyhock or some other favoured Tides retreat location. COPE is not massing the army of the incorruptible; it is doing the very opposite: finding and mobilizing the most desperately corruptible in the city.

If we actually want people of conscience in our city government to arrest the extirpation of the elderly, of poor people, of families—really, of all but the richest and most privileged of us, we need to build a whole new political movement in this city, one that is safe and inclusive. We must begin from a basis of love and, equally importantly, honesty. We must acknowledge how far we have gone wrong, how far we have strayed from the path if we ever hope to build a political movement able to advocate for a better city. We must reject the politics of long shots and shortcuts and engage in the hard, rewarding work of once again creating a space where our city’s social movements and ordinary citizens can make their voices heard in the elected bodies of our city government.

If you’re interested in talking about that project, let me know. Either way, thank you so much for giving of your time and energy over the past year and a half. It has meant a great deal to me and I will be in touch in the coming months to thank you more personally. We had a lot of fun doing politics in the past year and a half; let’s not lose that.

I am sorry things worked out so badly. Ultimately, the responsibility is mine. I should have done a better job of listening to people who were around during the time I was gone. I should have checked my own ambition and not ignored the ample signs that I was leading you somewhere scary and bad. I really wanted things to be different this time. I’ll never give up and I’m sorry I’ve let you down.

In solidarity,

Stuart Parker

President, Los Altos Institute

Thursday, March 14th, 2014

PS        After some thought, I have agreed to make this a public document with the following addition:

I have received increasing criticism for speaking out against corrupt and unethical behaviour in COPE. Apparently, there is an implied duty on the part of party supporters to participate in covering up abuse and corruption whenever they see it in the party, even when it is directed against them. You don’t really believe in social justice—the theory goes—if you are not willing to counsel silence or publicly deny the testimony of those who do speak out.

Coming out of the black community, this programmatic silence is well-known to me. It is how we created early “role models” in communities too profoundly traumatized by the legacies of slavery to produce many healthy people. During my last month in COPE, I leaned on the writings of bell hooks about how the creation of false heroes through practices of deception and  excuse-making has, itself, become destructive, producing mental ill-health and placing the least healthy among us in our vanguard.

Hooks talks of her refusal to keep confidences she has never agreed to keep. Witnessing or hearing of bad acts does not conscript us into the project of secret-keeping and silencing. In fact, the belief that it does, first and foremost, created Vision Vancouver and its politics of hypocrisy, corruption and cover-ups, the belief that we not only need not but must not hold ourselves to the standards to which we hold our adversaries. Our politics must be underpinned by courage, decency and honesty. To build the kind of solidarity capable of challenging the forces of global capital, we must build our movements on practices of truth-telling and open debate. And I still believe we can.

Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite |

Cosby’s Wager: Faith, Rape, Race and Respectability

I responded on this blog to the celebrity rape apologetics around the Jian Ghomeshi case in the early days of the story breaking because, at that point, other voices challenging the most pernicious topoi of rape apologetics had yet to emerge. I have been pleased to see actual opinion leaders in this country articulating the things that I would have felt the need to say, were they not being said better, louder elsewhere.

I am now wading into the Bill Cosby case with some reluctance and sadness because, in the articles I have read, I feel that certain points are not being made. And following the New Republic’s well-intentioned misinterpretation of the functioning of “black respectability” politics in this debate, I feel that I should say something that might be otherwise missed now that there is no question that Cosby will live out his few remaining days as a pariah, exiled from both the entertainment elite and America’s black elite and it is clear that people, once again, feel bad about not “believing women.”

One of the things that is being missed, here, in my view, is what is actually meant by “belief” here, and how this shakes out when it comes to all those rapists out there whose violence we will continue pretending we do not suspect or have not witnessed. Ever since the reconstruction of the term “faith” during the Protestant Reformation, our society has sought to conflate two things at our peril: (1) proceeding as though a thing were true and (2) believing a thing to be true.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, two allied social processes forced us to begin conflating these things. The first was the Galilean or Scientific Revolution, in which Galileo Galilei changed the disciplinary architecture of the sciences by demanding that the discipline of “Physical Astronomy” (the “true” structure of the universe as described by philosophers and theologians) be subsumed in the discipline of “Mathematical Astronomy” (the mathematical and geometric model of the universe as used by mathematicians do write calendars, predict eclipses, etc.). Whereas key ecclesiastical and imperial authorities of his day agreed that the discipline of Mathematical Astronomy should incorporate a heliocentric redesign based around elliptical planetary orbits, they were unwilling to subordinate their geocentric Physical Astronomy of crystalline spheres and circular orbits to Galileo’s vision.

In a related conflict, anti-corruption crusader, revitalizer and reformer Martin Luther began arguing for something called “justification by faith and faith alone,” arguing that the sole determinant of the salvation of a human soul was that person’s “faith” in God, his commandments and the eternal life he offered. Here Luther was not so much the author of a new understanding of cognition, representation and truth, as was Galileo, but the end of a long thought process reaching back three centuries to the mandating of Confession by the Lateran Council of 1215.

“Faith” or “fidelity” had long been understood and translated as faithfulness to Christian teachings about how to conduct oneself: having a drunken pancake breakfast once a week with friends, giving to beggars, not criticizing people for a sin you’re also committing, etc. Perhaps the greatest work of late medieval alchemy was the transformation of “faith” into the sustaining of magical beliefs within one’s consciousness in contradiction of evidence. In this way, faith was transformed from fidelity to good practices to a sustained lifelong act of self-deception, or at least, as the magical worldview of the Bible’s authors came to be increasingly discredited, that is what it became.

It is not really until the emergence of the Enlightenment consensus in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that these elite-level changes were felt by the majority in the European and Euro-American worlds. Until then, our culture remained one in which public and private selves, moralities and knowledges were understood, if not as a social good then, at least, as a social necessity. But in today’s post-Enlightenment world, such discrepancies are no longer understood as the grease that enables the machine of society to work but as an endless series of moral and epistemological failings and hypocrisies of weak people.

The #ibelievewomen hashtag, laudable as it is, reinforces the “enlightened” worldview made—for very good reasons, at the time—by the likes of Luther and Galileo. And it shows us how stupid its excessive and uncritical embrace has made us. The issue is not whether we believe the women who courageously come forward to denounced celebrity rapists (or the vanishingly small, tiny fraction of one percent who are less than truthful); the issue is whether we act as though we believe them. The issue isn’t really what our private thoughts are; the issue is our social conduct, how we communicate and act when we hear these allegations.

The reality is that we do believe most of these accusations most of the time. It’s just that we would rather pretend we do not. As a long-time electoral reform activist, I’m extra-familiar with this routine. People who oppose democracy i.e. the equal, effective voting power of every citizen, almost always pretend a level of innumeracy they do not, in fact possess. They understand perfectly well that our current voting system is unfair and unrepresentative and that there are a bunch that are fairer and more representative. But it is much more socially acceptable to feign incomprehension and magical belief than to argue against something as universally beloved as democracy.

And that’s just the voting system, a dry, abstract issue.

People are far more committed to feigning stupidity and ignorance if it allows them to keep admiring popular rapists, and to keep socializing with the rapists in their own circle of friends, family and acquaintances. But since the age of Luther, this kind of thinking has become more pathological. No longer is it enough to publicly pretend that the local town councillor, fraternal organization president, racialized community leader or star athlete isn’t a rapist, one must fragment one’s own consciousness to suppress that knowledge, to both know and not know. Social demands to turn our bullies and monsters into admired patriarchs have not changed; what has changed is our ability to admit that our charade is a charade, conducted for social purposes.

In this way, it is not that we believe our rapists; it is that we have faith in our rapists, that we have taken on the lifelong project of subordinating the conclusions of our native intelligence to expedient social truths.

In this way, we can understand that it is not so much that the “Age of Faith” and the “Age of Enlightenment” succeeded one another but that they developed contemporaneously, that “faith,” as an epistemological and social practice not limited to religion, becomes a necessity when public, social truth and private, individual truth must be collapsed into one another. In this way, Reformation and Enlightenment ideas of opposing hypocrisy and questing after truth necessarily turn on themselves. Now, when it comes to the predators in our midst, we do not just have to negotiate a disjuncture between our public claims and private assessment of important men in our community; we have to conduct an ongoing war on our own consciousness to conceal this operation from ourselves, even as we continue performing it. Maintaining two self-consistent yet incompatible stories is hard enough. When one does that work while concealing said work from oneself, it is profoundly mentally taxing and generative of madness. Furthermore, having faith in rapists also generates new kinds of danger because we lose the ability to reliably protect those vulnerable to predators from harm, in that we are only intermittently conscious of the degree to which we, and those around us, are at risk of predation.

Of course, disrupted consciousness and successful self-deception are, at best, incompletely experienced. Most of the time, our native intelligence wins out and we make perfectly accurate assessments of the people and events around us; the problem is that voicing those thoughts is driven so far underground as to be exiled from the realm of conversation.
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So, let us consider the case of Bill Cosby in this light, that the great man was not a man we believed but a man in whom we had faith. As at most times and places, the decision to have faith is not a matter of life and death necessity. It is a matter of risk-reward calculation. Whether consciously or semi-consciously, we ask ourselves this: “What is the reward for acting as though what I have just heard is true? And what is the danger or damage to which I might be subjected if we call it out as false?”

You see, the great liars of our day are usually not people who generate belief as much as they generate faith. The great lies of our age, like climate change denial and the Iraq War, are not ingenious, hypnotic deceptions but wagers, structured like Pascal’s Wager (one of the most honest expressions of the true meaning of faith in the modern era). Rather than lies driven by brilliant deception or narrative artistry, the great social lies of our time are those in which the audience is persuaded that something needs to be true, not that it is, in some way, true. The great baroque liar was Baron Munchausen; the great modern liar is Blaise Pascal.

Much as I want to go along with the New Republic’s belief that we refused to believe Cosby was a rapist because white liberals sanctified him as an acceptable representation of black male power, I cannot. White liberal America has Barack Obama now to represent continence, hard work, respectability and sweater-wearing. For white society, Cosby was obsolete a decade ago.

The people for whom the calculus changed were not the white elite but the black elite, with so much to gain and so much to lose.

As bell hooks has eloquently explained, the intertwined projects of “racial uplift” and “black respectability” are inextricable from Jim Crow and the age of racial passing, when all black success in America was necessarily grounded in deception. This deception had two related but distinct aspects. And it is the first aspect with which non-black Americans are more intimately familiar, means by which black Americans hid themselves or hid their blackness to escape persecution. Successful black professionals lived in inner city slums or in run-down or deceptively modest homes to conceal earnings and savings that their white neighbours might confiscate or destroy. Other “success stories” like my aunt Connie “passed,” using their light skin to feign whiteness and mislead their neighbours and friends into thinking that they were not the descendants of slaves.

But the second kind is the more pernicious, the kind to which hooks has spoken so eloquently: the deception of false credentials, the pretense of a harmonious family life, the concealment of substance abuse, and the manufacture of false heroes. Because black Americans were and are so profoundly traumatized by the multi-generational campaign of physical and psychological abuse perpetrated by white society, the thing at which we must most desperately pretend is our mental health.

As discussed in articles about the problem of the “good victim,” in rape apologetics, violence produces trauma; trauma produces madness; madness makes us do things that are not respectable; if we do things that are not respectable, we prove the racists and misogynists right. For this reason, it has long been a collective imperative in the American black elite to conceal how traumatized its members are. Joining the black elite, whether at the town, city or national level has, since the moment America suffered a black elite to exist, entailed the concealment of trauma, illness and madness, especially in places where the black elite subscribes to the politics of respectability that Cosby has long embodied.

Growing up among Vancouver’s black community leaders, there are ways in which my experience of the disjuncture between what is true and what needs to be true intensified through forms of double consciousness to which Frantz Fanon and others have spoken.

But, in other ways, our community was more like the baroque world, just before the age of faith. We were allowed to know which great men and women, which community leaders, which black heroes were liars, thieves and abusers more consciously and to discuss their deceptions more openly. That’s because coordinated deception was not just about individual gains and individual good; these deceptions were for the greater Good of the Race. Some of the older people in our community remembered the lynchings, stonings and burnings; for them, these deceptions were a matter of survival. And for younger members, the dream was that, if only the façade could be maintained a little longer, the next generation wouldn’t have to feign health, heroism and credentials; they would truly possess those things and the multi-generation charade finally could end.

What has brought Bill Cosby down are his declining faculties. That loss of mental acuity has caused him to lose track of the fact that his fraud and deception do not belong to him alone but to the leaders of the Race. What has changed is not who Cosby is, nor who other members of America’s black entertainment elite know him to be. What has changed is Cosby’s Wager.

In recent years, Cosby has become more vociferous in attacking the personal virtue, decency and respectability of the newer, younger members of the American entertainment industry’s black elite. Comic Hannibal Buress could finally say “rapists don’t tend to curse on stage” precisely because Cosby was attacking him. Instead of being the aging patriarch who charged with leading the collective charade of health and miraculous recovery from trauma, Cosby forgot himself and began attacking the very consensus that shielded his own predation. New and aspiring members of the black elite had nothing to gain from Cosby’s inclusion in their number and everything to lose. It no longer needed to be true that the grand old man of NBC Thursday night was a good and decent family man. It now needed to be untrue for the exact same reason it had needed to be true in the 80s: for the good of the Race.

The question we need to ask ourselves is not “why did we not believe those women?” It is, instead, “why did we pretend we did not believe those women?” And I can tell you why I did: for the Good of the Race, so that the sacrifices of my mother, uncles, great aunts, grandfather, great-grandfather, all my ancestors, all the way back to the guy we imagine tried to tunnel out of Elmina Castle, would not have sacrificed in vain.

In recent months, I have become more convinced by hooks’ arguments that Jim Crow is over, that black elites and aspiring elites must change culturally, commit ourselves to honesty in new and revolutionary ways. I will do my best and endeavour to live my faith by being faithful and to try, every day, to believe what I know to be true, no matter the reward for acting as though I have been fooled.

Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence Race | fusangite |

Crafting a Left Voting Strategy for November 15th, Part 4b: Tim Louis and Adriane Carr Ruined My Day; Help Them Ruin Kerry Jang’s

Reviewing What We Know

Casting strategic votes in Vancouver is going to be tough this election. We cannot tell much from the polls but this is what we can tell. To review what I have said in previous posts and what has been reported in the media,

  1. The NPA is close enough to Vision Vancouver in popular support that its top candidates are almost certain to place ahead of Vision’s bottom candidates.
  2. Adriane Carr continues to enjoy enough popular support to place in the top ten spots again and it is possible, though not likely, that her running mates, Pete Fry and Cleta Brown could place as high and ninth or tenth place.
  3. RJ Aquino, the sole candidate for One City enjoys substantial financial support from trade unions and key members of the civic left, including some working on election day turnout operations for their union and for Vision Vancouver. Nevertheless, he does not register in any poll measuring voter intention.
  4. The Coalition of Progressive Electors, sitting at about 10% of the vote, has prioritized injuring Vision Vancouver over any serious attempt to elect any candidate. For this reason, even its most credible candidates, with experience in government and strong media profiles, do not register in polling or, if they do, are at the very bottom of the pack, with less than half the votes they need to reach tenth place.
  5. Surrey First, One Surrey and Safe Surrey are neck-and-neck in the polls but, given the larger and more established election day turnout machine and Surrey’s appalling 24% turnout rate, this likely means Surrey First is leading.
  6. A Chinese name delivers a 5-10% bonus in votes, coming primarily from white voters who subscribe to Rob Ford’s theory of East Asian people as embodiments of thrift and hard work.
  7. A name near the beginning of the alphabet delivers a 5-10% bonus in votes, coming primarily from voters choosing a mixed slate but running out of votes before reaching the bottom of the ballot.
  8. A South Asian name delivers 10-20% penalty, coming from primarily from white voters who have nativist sensibilities and an inchoate sense that people with above-average rates of political party participation and brown skin are a source of “corruption.”
  9. There is no possibility of delivering a progressive majority on either Vancouver or Surrey city councils.

With these nine points in mind, I am making my recommendations.

Vancouver Endorsements

Meena Wong (COPE): Meena Wong is a far better mayoral candidate than COPE deserves. And she has put on a tremendous campaign without money or elite support. She is almost certain to score better than any third-party mayoral candidate in living memory. Her platform, emphasizing compassion, duty and affordability is the best platform. It has been my pleasure to work with her in the NDP, COPE and the proportional representation movement. She is not just a great candidate but a great person of unimpeachable character.

Risk: Casting a symbolic vote for Meena in this election could result in the election of Kirk Lapointe and the defeat of Gregor Robertson.

Reward: Casting a symbolic vote for Meena in this election could result in the election of Kirk Lapointe and the defeat of Gregor Robertson. Let me elaborate: whether or not Vision is returned to office, it is clear that our current mayor is one of the forces that is most influential in dragging the party to the right and placing it in the hands of developers. Vision will be a better, more progressive caucus without him, less likely to be at the beck and call of developers. A vote for Meena is strategic because it doesn’t just symbolically show that there are hard-core progressive voters in two; it runs the risk of making Vision a better party.

Adriane Carr (Green): Adriane is currently the only progressive opposition voice on council. To lose her would be a major blow to our city. As I predicted in 2011, she was the perfect person for the job of one-woman opposition, doing the work of four councillors and making it look easy and fun while she skewers Vision time after time.

Risk: In an election that is so close, it is highly likely that, at most, one progressive opposition councillor will be elected. If you want RJ Aquino, Tim Louis or Lisa Barret to win, casting a vote for Adriane makes that harder because they won’t be able to gain on her in the rush for ninth or tenth spot. A vote for Adriane could defeat Tim, RJ or Lisa if electing them is your priority. The other risk is, of course, that Adriane is a ruthless, autocratic dictatorial leader; some of the passion that animates her animus towards Vision is a slash and burn politics that will not tolerate apostate Green Andrea Reimer, her protégé, wielding power in this city. While Adriane is the best choice to oppose and stymie Vision, she will stand as an obstacle to the formation of any open, democratic progressive alternative in this town.

Reward: The reward of electing Adriane is that there is a committed, implacable opponent of Vision Vancouver calling for transparency, sustainability, equity and accountability on council. We will have a watchdog, a gadfly, a passionate advocate. Ultimately, I believe that the danger of empowering Adriane to prevent the formation of a big tent progressive party is massively outweighed by the service she will perform as a progressive councillor. In my view, taking stock of the actual situation before us, Adriane Carr is the best and most important vote you can cast.

Tim Louis (COPE): Tim is the only COPE candidate who is registering in the polls. Eight places back, it is highly unlikely he can win but Tim is a brilliant man, and a fighter. I would never count him out. Like Adriane, he has treated me horribly, engaging in slash and burn political overkill to drive me out of COPE, if not as bad, certainly in the same league as the kind of politics Adriane used in her dealings with me in the late 90s. Both Tim and Adriane have ruined my day many times. I believe that, if both are elected, they will, together, be able to ruin the day of Kerry “affordable housing is something that somebody can afford” Jang, and infuriate our city council’s development industry shills. If the determination and ruthlessness Tim and Adriane have shown in their dealings with me are anything to go by, I think that, as a two-person opposition team, they might well cause some Vision councillors to quit even before their terms end.

Risk: As with Adriane, the things that will make Tim a great councillor will make him an obstacle to the creation of any big-tent left party capable of governing. After all, he was a key protagonist in driving moderates out of COPE in the first place, sending good people like Tim Stevenson and Sharon Gregson into the arms of the developers.

Reward: If we don’t elect people like Tim and Adriane, how many low- and middle-income people will be left in this city to vote for a better party in 2018? Possibly not enough. Ultimately, the reward of returning Tim to council vastly exceeds the risk because, without a strong, implacable, determined opposition, Vision and the NPA will annihilate this city’s affordability.

Lisa Barrett (COPE): I wish that COPE had run a different campaign and featured the two-term mayor of Bowen Island, former Green candidate, dedicated organizer and all ‘round fine human being Lisa Barrett was, like Meena, slumming it on their slate. My hope is that despite the absence of this, appearing as close as she does to the beginning of the alphabet, that 10-20% bonus might just push her up into a level of support where she could compete for tenth spot.

Risk: The only risk of voting for Lisa is that your vote will probably be wasted.

Reward: With Lisa on council, there is a chance that we could have a representative there who is willing to begin the long, arduous work of building a big tent progressive party.

RJ Aquino (One City): RJ Aquino is a solid candidate, a good activist and a person with many respected members of the civic left standing behind him who could neither abide the corporate toadying of Vision nor the dysfunctional madhouse politics of COPE. Sadly, his support base is so enmeshed in an inward-looking trade union culture that consistently overestimates how effectively it is reaching non-unionized people, I worry that polls are right and RJ doesn’t have a hope in hell. Nevertheless, with his name at the top of the alphabet, a solid vote concentration strategy, great allies in the Public Education Project and CUPE, he has a shadow of a chance of winning.

Risk: I worry that RJ’s backers spent so much time fighting Tim and crafting greasy deals with Vision that their immediate instincts are not openness, inclusion and transparency. Certainly my attempts to even communicate with One City seem to bear that out. I worry that, like Tim and Adriane, RJ may also turn out to be more of a hindrance than a help in creating a big tent progressive opposition. Some of his backers’ promises and plans have reduced my fears but not entirely.
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Reward: It would be great to have the candidate with the best, smartest team and the best, smartest policies on council, advocating affordability strategies that don’t require magic, corporate largesse or mind controlling Christy Clark, not to mention a candidate who has a policy to make sure my pint is really a pint.

What? Nobody Else?

There are a lot of good candidates that I do not recommend people vote for because of the way multi-member plurality voting works. Because I am encouraging people to cast votes for candidates based on their heft in a minority situation and not pretending we’re choosing a government, which is what I advise voters to do for Parks and School Board, I am reluctant to recommend votes that could displace one of these four individuals who are desperately needed on council. Strong cases can be made to vote for Pete Fry (a Strathcona community leader and a second Green), Tim Stevenson (the conscience of Vision and a global leader and pioneer for queer equality, who could pull a Gregor-less Vision left), Niki Sharma (a needed single-parent and South Asian voice with a stellar track record for equity on Parks Board) and Cleta Brown (a great black leader in our city and another potential second Green). But any of those candidates could potentially displace Adriane, Tim, RJ or Lisa for the one or two non-NPA, non-Vision spots on council.

Our civic opposition has to face into major headwinds for the next four years. They must be dogged, determined and implacable, willing to put everything on the line to stop the agenda of dispossession that both the NPA and Vision support. A single councillor must have a voice as powerful as that of half a dozen ordinary members of council; they must be incorruptible; and they must be willing and able to stand alone, relishing the fight they must bring to the council majority every single day. We cannot allow sentimental attachment and genuine affection for the most progressive Vision candidates to cloud our judgement, nor dare we elect Greens who are not battle-tested and ready not just for the onslaught but for the charm offensive that seduced Andrea Reimer and placed her on their front bench.

I have known all of the four council candidates I recommend. Three of them dislike me, perhaps even loathe me. But they are the right people for the job before us.

Surrey Endorsements

As in Vancouver, the hope of a progressive council majority in Surrey is out of reach. Instead, city council voters need to vote strategically to maximize the progressive voices on council.

Barinder Rasode (One Surrey): Even if Barinder is really the law and order conservative she presents herself as, something very important will be achieved with her election. For many years, South Asian people in Surrey have been vastly underrepresented relative to their demographic strength. While in single-district first-past-the-post elections at the federal and provincial levels, racially biased voters have held their noses and voted for candidates of South Asian extraction out of party loyalty, the multi-member plurality system at the municipal level has allowed a racist minority to keep sterling candidates out of office, based on geographic origin of their family lineage. For this reason, a Rasode victory would turn on its head decades of embarrassing underrepresentation for an important group of people who have contributed much to Surrey.

More importantly, Barinder Rasode has been the best sort of Blue Dog centrist pragmatist, signaling through candidate selection, endorsements and organizer recruitment that her new party, One Surrey is ready to be a big tent that offers a better deal and more prominent place to progressives than Surrey First does with its aging, champagne socialist token, Judy Villeneuve. If left and progressive Surrey residents choose to make Barinder mayor, we may see the kind of civic renaissance, at the level of senior civil service appointments and issue leadership that Calgary has enjoyed under Naheed Nenshi. While it is possible that she will not rise to the occasion as mayor, she is a far more compelling choice than Linda Hepner or the disaster that Doug McCallum presents.

Risks: It is possible that, in a close race, Rasode may draw enough votes away from Hepner to elect McCallum. If the council race were not so close to being a draw, this might not be a concern because, as Toronto proved under Norm Kelly, sometimes progressive changes happen faster when there is a conservative troglodyte for mayor, whose mere existence drives council to be more civilized and equity-focused in its policies.

Rewards: Not only would thousands of young, South Asian people in Surrey have a mayor who reflected their portion of the community, Surrey would have the most progressive mayor it could reasonably elect and a beachhead for a better deal for progressives and leftists within a big tent.

Michael Bose (One Surrey): Michael doesn’t just make this list because he is the nephew of the last NDP mayor, Bob Bose. But it doesn’t hurt. In his own right, Michael has a solid NDP pedigree, sitting on the Agricultural Land Commission and demonstrating a progressive record on the Surrey Memorial Hospital Foundation. And near the top of the alphabet, with a recognized family name, he is the One Surrey candidate most likely to win.

Risks: With so few progressive candidates running for major parties, there is little danger that a vote for Michael will displace other progressives in contention for a council seat.

Rewards: It is highly likely that the One Surrey caucus will be small. As such, which candidates end up on council will make a huge difference with respect to the character of One Surrey as a party. If the party does not win a majority but does elect Michael, he will play a crucial role in setting its direction and establishing its character as a new political formation.

Gary Hoffman (Independent): As my friend and Surrey resident and long-time NDP activist Chris Green observes, very few candidates have had the courage to break out of the white flight moral panic discourse that has enveloped this campaign. For courage alone, Gary is to be commended. Not only that, he has campaigned on key equity issues: affordability and accessibility. Gary’s campaign and that of Nicole Joliet have been the only progressive campaigns in Surrey this cycle. They should be rewarded with votes, even if Gary has, according to polling and lawn sign presence, little chance of victory.

Risks: The only risk of voting for Gary is that it will be wasted.

Reward: On the remote chance, Gary wins, he could act as a major beachhead on council. And, if he loses, a decent vote count could still help to embolden those thinking of mounting a genuinely progressive in 2018.

Judy Villeneuve (Surrey First): Judy has been an important voice for the progressive minority in the Surrey First coalition. Originally elected on the SCE slate with Bose, she has survived a series of political shifts in Surrey, in large measure by not reliably sticking to progressive principles publicly. While she is, no doubt, a voice of moderation in the current regime, she is not a councillor likely to courageously take a position in favour of marginalized or low-income communities, as evinced by her silence in the current effort to throw recovery house occupants into the streets in the hopes that they migrate to Vancouver, where the local health authority has more plentiful resources for homeless people.

Risks: It is possible that, in this highly crime-focused election and, with all parties so close, Villeneuve might dislodge a more progressive independent or One Surrey councillor. While such a chance is not highly likely, it is certainly within the realm of possibility.

Reward: It is entirely possible, that, as in 2011-14, Villeneuve will be the closest thing to a progressive on council and, even if there is more than one progressive or left councillor elected, she will be the only one in the probable governing caucus, that of Surrey First.

No One Else!?

Yep, as in Vancouver, I am recommending a very small slate. In my view, the most likely election outcome is that Surrey First will win a majority of council seats and Safe Surrey and One Surrey will have, at most three council seats to divide amongst themselves. With that understanding, it is simply too dangerous to throw votes at vaguely progressive centre-right. One Surrey candidates like Narima dela Cruz or Kal Dosanjh, based on the danger that they will displace Michael or stand in the way of Gary’s longshot candidacy.

Well, that about wraps it up. Happy voting tomorrow. And stay tuned for my post-election analysis on www.LosAltos.Ca

Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite |

Crafting a Left Voting Strategy for November 15th, Part 4a: Plurality Voting and My Picks for Schools and Parks

Proportionality, Plurality and the Mathematics of Chaos

In 1995, Mike Harcourt’s government commissioned a study from SFU’s Institute for Governance Studies, headed by future NDP MP Kennedy Stewart. Stewart’s report recommended that, in municipalities throughout the province, the “at-large,” “block vote” or multi-member plurality voting system that I described in the first post in this series be replaced by the voting system we use in federal and provincial elections, first-past-the-post. For a reason that still eludes me, we call this system “the ward system” when we apply it to cities, even though it is one of many possible ward systems. Why not just call it what we call it at the other two political levels? Who knows?

In any case, Stewart recommended this system as a clear improvement on the current system for a number of reasons, one of which might surprise some people in the voting reform movement: it was a minor step towards proportional representation. Contrary to some popular beliefs, proportional representation is not one particular voting system; it is a principle. The more proportionally representative a system is, the fewer wasted votes it contains and the more the share of the vote received by a party corresponds to the share of the seats it wins.

One of the reasons that first-past-the-post is more proportional than, for instance, multi-member plurality voting or instant runoff voting (IRV/AV) is that it generates more chaos and randomness, more “noise” from a statistical perspective. That’s because, in order to make one’s vote count, a voter has to guess roughly how every candidate running in their area is doing and cast a vote based on that guess. While multi-member plurality voting or “block vote” doesn’t generate as much randomness and chaos, it does, by virtue of being a plurality voting system, generate some, because it requires guessing.

Instant runoff voting (IRV) is a system in which voters in a single district rank candidates in order of preference and see their vote transfer to their next-favourite candidate if their favourite didn’t get enough votes. We can’t do that in a plurality system, in which voters mark Xs instead of numbers on their ballots. Sometimes voters guess wrong about who is in first or second place and accidentally pick people with no hope of getting elected. It is often these bad guesses that account for the representation of minority viewpoints in plurality voting systems, that make them unintentionally produce slightly more proportional results overall, when compared against majoritarian systems that use ranked ballots. (That’s not to say that all systems that use ranked ballots fail to produce proportional results; STV is one of the most proportional systems out there.)

So let me be clear from the outset: making your vote count in Vancouver or Surrey tomorrow involves guessing how other people will vote and casting a ballot based on those guesses. At least some of the guesses you make will be wrong and some of your votes will be wasted. That’s a shame but there we are.

But I’m Against Strategic Voting!

All people who vote seek to affect the world around them by voting. Because the voting systems we have often waste our votes and have us end up with none of the candidates we like winning, some people have started suggesting that we can do a better job of affecting the world around us by casting votes based on their symbolic value, casting votes that “send a message” even though they elect nobody. Sometimes—and this election is one of those times—I give people such advice. But let us be honest about two things:

  • Just as you don’t control how a victorious candidate you pick will act once you have elected them, you don’t control how the people to whom you wanted to send a message will interpret your vote. Often the people from whom you withhold expected votes will get mad at you and say “to hell with those guys! I’m not even going to try to make them happy anymore!”
  • You are still voting strategically. It’s just that your strategy is to try and change public discourse based on the pile of wasted votes to which you have chosen to contribute.

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To this, some people respond with “but I’m voting with my heart!” In federal elections, this will then be followed by a claim like “every Green vote makes the world greener.” In that case, you’re still a strategic voter; you’re just voting based on a flawed theory of cause and effect, magic or junk science.

So, let’s go forward with the idea that we’re all voting strategically and we’re just trying to come up with a good voting strategy. So let’s start easy.

School and Parks Boards

The Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation has faced a lot of criticism in the past three years by community centre groups and the Vancouver Aquarium. I happen to agree with a small amount of that criticism but disagree with most. But what impresses me most about the board in Vancouver has been its courage and self-confidence in standing up to our tenants. That’s right. We own the community centres and the land on which they and the Aquarium sit. This is public land that we run by electing commissioners to the Board to make decisions on our behalf.

To a greater extent than any previous board, our current Parks Board has chosen to make this a reality for Vancouverites, by placing and enforcing new conditions on the Aquarium’s lease. Now, I happen not to agree with those conditions. “Let the whales fuck,” is my view. But what I do agree with is the board’s willingness to set policy and defend that policy in court.

Similarly, I strongly support the board’s termination of centre-specific community centre membership and the introduction of a single card for all community centre programs and activities across the city. “Membership has its privileges” has no place as an ethic in our public facilities and I am glad to see the breakup of the system of balkanized private clubs where centres in wealthy neighbourhoods can offer the most services at the lowest cost, while centres in poorer areas struggle to provide the basics. The process of nationalization that our Parks Board has begun is dragging our community facilities at least into the twentieth century and making our shared ownership a reality. The governance of our community facilities should be determined in an election in which all of us can vote, not in closed meetings of private, fee-paying clubs.

Vancouver Parks Board: Endorsing Five Vision Candidates and Two Opposition Candidates

For the reasons above, I strongly endorse Vision incumbent Trevor Loke, the only sitting Vision commissioner seeking re-election. I also support Coree Tull, with whom I worked on the Nathan Cullen campaign and who I know will make an excellent commissioner, committed to carrying on this work. But, given Vision’s continued rightward drift at the Council level, it is going to be important to insure that its opposition is a progressive one, not a conservative one at the Parks Board. Although her party opposed nationalization of the centres, I nevertheless endorse Anita Romaniuk, the sanest, most level head left in COPE, one of only three candidate with previous government experience, and the party’s only realistic shot at a Parks Board seat. I also endorse, Stuart MacKinnon who acquitted himself admirably as the Green Party’s Parks commissioner two terms ago. To round out those four strong candidate, I recommend votes for former COPE Parks candidate, now on the Vision ticket, Brent Granby, along with his running mates Naveen Girn and Sammie Jo Rambaua.

Vancouver School Board: Endorsing the Teachers’ Association Picks

Educators, opinion leaders and parents associations have been just shy of unanimous in supporting the School Board candidates listed on the front page of this morning’s Metro. The incumbent Vision board and the candidates for the Public Education Project, Jane Bouey and Gwen Giesbrecht, both of who were on the 2011 COPE slate with Anita and Brent. Of the excellent team Patti Bacchus has assembled, I want to particularly encourage a vote for Cherie Payne, not just because of her sterling record on the board but as part of a much-needed group of emerging leaders in Vancouver’s black community. A vote for Cherie isn’t just a vote for a strong team with good values; it is a vote for strong, black female leadership in this city. It is also important for Allan Wong, first elected with COPE a decade and a half ago, to be able to continue with his strong equity agenda that he honed in the city’s oldest progressive party.

More than on any other board, I advise against a COPE vote here. Not only are such votes a waste, they send the wrong message to a party that has treated its school trustees and schools activists so shabbily since 2013.

Surrey School Board: Surrey Progressives and Nicole Joliet

Nicole Joliet cannot win but she is, in all likelihood, the most progressive candidate running for anything in Surrey or Vancouver. For that reason alone, she merits a symbolic vote. But it is also important to show solidarity with a trans candidate in a city whose school board politics have, historically, been organized around homophobic book bannings and the repression of gay-straight alliances. As the step-parent of a queer kid myself, it is really important to me that we send a message not just to politicians and voters in Surrey but to the city’s large and vibrant queer youth population that they have our support.

It is unfortunate, then, that the Charlene Dobie and the Surrey Progressives are running a full slate. It means that, to vote for Nicole, you will have to drop one Surrey Progressive. Just don’t make that one Charlene, the party’s leader and best shot at keeping a progressive presence.

And I have run out of time! Vancouver and Surrey Council endorsements later tonight.

Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite |

Crafting a Left Voting Strategy for November 15th, Part 3: The Americanization of BC Municipal Politics

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 45th 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.

Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite |

Crafting a Left Voting Strategy for November 15th, Part 2: School Board Slates and the Fruits of Declining Turnout

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.

Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite |

Crafting a Left Voting Strategy for November 15th, Part 1: Grieving Our Losses and Admitting Where We Are

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.

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