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People make deals out of desperation. That is just how it is. In 1999, my leadership of the BC Green Party was every bit as imperiled as Glen Clark’s leadership of the NDP but for different reasons. That’s what I was talking about in part one, when I said we were running out of time.
Despite their full-throated support of the first-past-the-post system today, conservative British Columbians were deeply disillusioned with the system in the second half of the 1990s and casting about for alternatives. This was because parties to the right of the NDP had won 58% of the popular vote in the 1996 election but the NDP had won 52% of the seats with just 39%. Not only that, the main centre-right party, the BC Liberals had, by itself, bested the NDP by 3%, producing a classic first-past-the-post “wrong winner” election in which the BC Liberals won the popular vote 42% to 39% but lost the seat count thirty-three seats to thirty-nine.
Consequently, much of the province’s corporate and media elite had never really accepted Glen Clark’s NDP as the legitimate government as they had the Harcourt government that preceded it. But despite this, most of the NDP base remained secure at an organizational level. The province’s trade union movement, environmental movement and feminist movement remained firmly in the NDP camp. Only anti-poverty organizations in Vancouver and on the Island moved away from the big orange tent during this period and this was largely because the NDP had made BC’s underclass the target of public scorn and brutal fiscal austerity between 1993 and 1995. But the same was not true of public opinion. While every major environmental group continued to stand with the premier, even after he called them “enemies of British Columbia,” environmentally and socially concerned voters were drifting away in record numbers, irrespective of what movement leaders had to say.
The Clark government, for its part, had a constrained ability to deliver for its base. The government was under constant attack in the press and faced ongoing legal harassment, that it later turned out was facilitated by Clark’s own Attorney-General, Ujjal Dosanjh. It also concurrently faced a capital strike by the mining sector, a concurrent European boycott campaigns, one by Greenpeace, the other by the BC Chamber of Mines and a major downturn in the Japanese and South Korean economies, the most reliable consumers of BC coal.
Consequently, the Clark government focused their efforts in three main areas: reinvigorating the economy of the Northeast with increased natural gas and petroleum exploration and extraction, reinvigorating the private sector trade union movement through the introduction of sectoral bargaining in the construction sector and the “fast ferries” project, an import substitution industrialization (ISI) scheme to spur creation of an aluminum-hulled ship-building sector. The first endeavour was an unqualified success; the second was abandoned before completion; the third was the focus of much of the ire of BC’s establishment against the government.
The BC Green Party faced diametrically opposite circumstances. Between 1996 and 2000, the party rose in public opinion polls from 2% to 11% of the popular vote. Our byelection performances, were generally positive; we won a number of polls in the Surrey-White Rock byelection, where we were noticed by the Legislative Press Gallery and, thereafter, began to appear in Mike Smyth, Les Leyne and Vaughn Palmer columns. We won Lasqueti Island in the otherwise-disastrous Parksville byelection of 1998 and we placed third, ahead, of the NDP in the Delta-South byelection of 2000.
We also gained prominence as co-founders and spokespeople for the Electoral Change Coalition (ECCO), a broad alliance of groups campaigning for proportional representation, led by Troy Lanigan of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation.
But while we posted modest increases in our annual party budget and membership, the reality was that the BC Greens were basically a $80,000 per year, 1000-member organization and remained so throughout this period. That was a sight better than the 100-member, $25,000 per year organization whose leadership I won in 1993 but the absence of commensurate growth in membership or donations to match our poll standing and gains in media credibility was concerning.
Much of our popularity rested on a handful of extraordinarily talented and hard-working individuals. Julian West, an MIT Applied Mathematics PhD, was, likely, the second- or third-best political strategist in BC at the time and he was giving us twenty hours per week for free. It was he who had cunningly persuaded the original Angus Reid polling form to begin prompting voters with our name because he demonstrated that failing to prompt was producing underpolling. In this way, our sudden poll breakout, from which gains in popularity and media coverage cascaded, was likely as statistically erroneous as the 0% we had previously been polling. West was also the author of ECCO, following his brilliant display of erudition and humour to Lanigan at an otherwise nightmarishly boring Social Credit convention. The Coalition’s founding president, Sonja Sanguinetti, the president of the BC Liberal Party at the time, also lent an unwarranted credibility to the enterprise given that my closest advisor, folk singer Geoff Berner, and I had been her eldest son’s closest friends in elementary school.
Furthermore, incredible as it might be to present-day readers, the ECCO, while getting us plenty of media coverage and respect from people on the right actually tainted the Greens. First, the founder of BC’s proportional representation movement was former Social Credit MLA Nick Loenen, a Dutch reformed conservative former seat-mate of premier Bill Vander Zalm, whose book on PR suggests that it is the best way to successfully de-fund abortion in Canada. With support from no left-wing organizations except Western Canada Wilderness Committee and the David Suzuki Foundation, ECCO, which included anti-abortion activists Kathleen Toth and Heather Stillwell, the leaders of the BC Family Coalition Party and the Christian Heritage Party of Canada, respectively, looked to many on the left like a right-wing group, its president being Lanigan, head of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation.
“Proportional representation is just a scheme to ensure a permanent right-wing majority in Victoria,” was the feeling of most on BC’s left at the time. ECCO, in this way, marked the Greens as a dangerous, alien force, fake leftists making common cause with the right.
Before one steps into any kind of relation or cheapest price for viagra involvement such as marriage or living in. Although, most of the people cope with baldness and move ahead, the rest find it miserable without hair. levitra 20mg australia On the off chance that you can ever accomplish any erection, then price of levitra the physiological methodologies at work in the making of the amino acids L-glutamate, L-proline and creatine. rx tadalafil These stamps are moistened and allow a formation of rings around male penile body. At the same time, this period also featured a hardening of opposition to the Greens by environmental organizations. During the 1996 election, I had worked with the Georgia Straight’s Charlie Smith and Western Canada Wilderness Committee’s Adriane Carr to expose a corrupt election funding shell game that was helping the NDP win environmentalists’ votes.
BC’s largest, blue chip environmental organizations, like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and World Wildlife Fund, had, during the NDP’s first term, become part of a consortium called BC Wild, an entity formed at the behest of the Pew Charitable Trust, the charitable arm of Sunoco, the Sun Oil Company of Pennsylvania. In early 1996, in the run-up to the election, BC Wild members had been approached by individuals close to the heart of the BC government to create another consortium, this one called British Columbians for a Better Environment (BCBE).
BCBE, which purported to speak for all BC environmentalists, ran a campaign specifically focused on driving down the Green Party vote in the election, using the slogan “Don’t make your vote a toxic political waste.” Because of limits on third-party election spending and on election spending by charities, complex financing arrangements had to be made, with certain coalition members paying for different parts of the campaign. The necessary transparency of the financing permitted Smith to correlate each organization’s BCBE spending with its receipt of recent, unexpected and, in some cases, unsolicited provincial government grants for either almost exactly the same amount of money. According to Smith’s accounting, BCBE was being funded not by Sunoco, not by its member organizations but by the BC Ministry of Environment.
Already disconnected from and unpopular with all of the province’s environmental groups, except for Wilderness Committee, Smith’s media coverage further soured relations and, by 1997, had cemented not just a frosty but an adversarial relationship between the Greens and the environmental movement’s leadership.
By 1998, the BC NDP and Greens were mirror images of one another: one was a party hated by the province’s elites and an ever-increasing number of voters but fairly secure in its party-base relations. The Greens, on the other hand, were a party whose popularity was rapidly growing but which not only lacked a base but, at the social movement level, was surrounded by enemies.
Beginning in 1997, there was a permanent campaign to remove me as party leader, initially based within the party but, as we entered 1999, one that began to find allies outside the party, in the environmental movement. The campaign was largely based on what I term “on side for the big win” thinking. As we have seen with Greg Clarke’s Alberta Party and as we saw with Preston Manning’s United Alternative Project, the question people often ask when joining a movement rapidly ascending in popularity, “why aren’t we growing faster!?” “why aren’t we the government already!?” “why are we targeting specific ridings when we’re about to win every single one!?”
This kind of thinking, in which signs of ongoing marginality are reinterpreted as signs of imminent, total victory, tends to be most common in apocalyptic movements. Although Greens ground their apocalypticism in scientific terms and appear, as far as anyone can tell, to be empirically correct about the imminent collapse of planetary life support systems, this does not make them sociologically immune to the properties we might associate with doomsday cults. Until 1997, the party had terrible membership retention, with members rotating out in an average of eighteen months, just like your typical doomsday cult. Despite the scientific basis of the Green eschaton, members were typically anti-science and skeptical of the Enlightenment legacy. Consequently, the party had little institutional memory and often repeated mistakes ad nauseam.
There had also developed an unhealthy cult of personality around my leadership in my first term, not among my close associates but in other parts of the party’s active memberships. In this way, people often did not understand the party to be a democracy and did not understand that it was their duty to debate and dissent. The Greens had long opposed (1985-1993) the idea of having a leader because they saw the office in a cartoonish, authoritarian, unrelated to the practice of Canadian politics at the time. This was a sense the party culture retained after deciding to establish the office after all. To be the dictator of the party, a person must be trustworthy and intellectually superhuman; otherwise the party understood itself to have submitted to tyranny.
So, my closest allies and I decided that, to grow, the party must change its internal culture so as to become appealing to mainstream, democratic-spirited leftists. And so we embarked on aggressive program of cultural change, changing meeting venues and voting practices. We initiated a comprehensive policy reform that was heralded by Berner’s report Polishing the Turd, which began by offering an unqualified disparagement of the party’s pre-1995 policies.
This campaign of relentless cultural change, in an effort to point the party away from the hippie subculture and create a more democratic decision-making process was about as well-advised as the provincial government’s ISI program. It was a red rag to a bull that had been looking for an excuse to charge.
While the BC NDP saw the provincial constabulary, a growing capital strike and a media consensus closing in on it, in the tiny world of Green politics in 1999, things looked just as dire. Most in the party’s base who had elected us to internal office in the Greens had withdrawn or turned against us over our ambitious program of cultural change. We were surrounded by hostile feminist and environmental NGOs and a hostile labour movement. Furthermore, beginning with Colleen McCrory of the Valhalla Wilderness Society, some major environmental leaders had joined the Greens with the sole stated objective of removing from its leadership.
This is what set the table for a flurry of desperate agreements that would yield the first people in Canadian history being elected to office with “Green Party” beside their name before the end of 1999. More about the actual agreements and attempted agreements in the next installment.
