Yesterday, at 3:00pm, the John Horgan government issued a shocking statement. Rules designed to protect public health than banned “large gatherings” of 250 or more people were rescinded for all major construction projects. Almost immediately, the man camps constructing various parts of the LNG Canada megaproject began ordering their fly-in employees back to work. These employees are being asked to return to job sites with as many as 1200 workers, with a single mess hall and canteen, and barracks-style residences at close quarters. To get to and from work, every three weeks, they will be flying through YVR, one of only four airports in Canada open to international travel.
It was at that moment that a certain naïve argument about NDP governments was, finally, laid to rest: the belief that the reason New Democrats make pro-oil, logging and mining industry decisions is because they are somehow beholden to private sector trade unions and industrial workers. This is not the case. Because, with this announcement, they have informed British Columbians that there is no one about whose lives they care about less.
Had the NDP not done this, companies like Kiewit would have had to issue layoff notices to their workers. Those workers could then have successfully applied for Employment Insurance benefits and had their replacement wages funded from federal government coffers. In other words, not lifting this order would have cost the BC government not one cent and kept workers with their families under safer conditions.
Instead, they have chosen to plunge those workers, many very frightened, into a cesspool of viral transmission, out of which they will rotate once every three weeks to interact with their families and with airport workers. There is no question that people will die because of this move. Because if they quit their jobs, they will not be eligible for government assistance. Just like the Community Benefits Agreements that are being used to justify the project’s pipeline, these are not voluntary decisions but decisions taken with a gun to the head, a knife to the throat: your choice: work in a giant infection zone or have your family thrown onto the street.
Why is that the choice? Well, because unlike the Republican government of Indiana, for instance, the BC NDP refuses to prohibit private landlords from evicting their tenants during the crisis. This act of extortion is not, in fact, happening all over the place. Somehow a Republican president, governor, senate majority and state legislative majority in the Midwest are outperforming the BC NDP in treating people who work with their hands with honour and care.
How we get here? The answer is simply, nostalgia. Today, when I was talking with an NDP stalwart on messenger, I suddenly got mad at myself. I said “this is like a bunch of black Republican activists in South Carolina complaining about how Newt Gingrich ruined the ‘party of Lincoln.’”
In NDP offices all over Canada, there are framed portraits of Tommy C. Douglas, the father of Medicare and the patriarch of Canadian socialism. They are no different than the portraits of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, that adorn the offices of Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence and a thousand other Republican legislators.
There is no question that the NDP were once the good guys, once the party of working people, the disabled, the poor, visible minorities. But, that was a really fucking long time ago, back in another century. Just like Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglas, Booker T Washington and Jackie Robinson are part of the Republican Party’s past.
But it has been as long since the BC NDP publicly renounced that heritage as it was between the nomination of Barry Goldwater on a pro-segregation platform in 1964 and Newt Gingrich’s ascent to Speaker of the On brand viagra no prescription the other side of the coin, anything ‘egg’ shaped is supposed to aid women’s fertility, this not necessarily going hand in hand with libido. Therefore, you will definitely find Tadaga medication in its websites for great relief from the condition. generic viagra cialis If you masturbate multiple times in a day then this trouble might get developed soon. canada cialis levitra Psychosexual therapy levitra 20mg uk can also help women overcome orgasm problems. House. In between, there had been Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” Reagan’s “welfare queens,” the Drug War, “Willie” Horton and a host of other crystal clear messages about who the GOP were.
We can do the same in BC.
On March 10th, 1989, the BC NDP’s leader Mike Harcourt announced that the “NDP no longer believes in the redistribution of wealth.” In October 1993, Harcourt unleashed the “BC Benefits” package of welfare reforms that increased homelessness in BC from 11000 to 27000 in eighteen months, that prohibited refugees both from working and receiving social assistance, the slashed welfare rates and capped the number of people who were permitted to be disabled at the same time.
In 1996, the BC NDP won re-election promising to take its (later found to be unconstitutional) policy of a three-month residency requirement for welfare and apply it to the education of newcomers’ children. They shelved the policy after the election. In 1999, they ended local district teacher bargaining and created the Public Sector Employers Council process that has inflicted unconstitutional austerity programs on BC schools for a generation.
In 2009, the BC NDP ran on an election platform called “Axe the Tax,” opposing North America’s first carbon tax and leavened with chequebook populism about how it would help people “keep money in their pockets.” Elsewhere in Canada, the Ontario NDP proposed the creation of a new ministry of austerity that would find new government cutbacks to make at a rate of $300 million per year.
It is no wonder that John Horgan gave $6 billion in new fossil fuel subsidies to companies like Royal Dutch Shell. Let’s remember that, less than six months after becoming premier, he told media he felt it was his civic duty to turn against social movements that backed the party.
I have focused a lot of attention on how Horgan is the guilty party, or how our collective leadership is, but really, the guilt belongs to every one of us who worked from 2001-17 to put this stagnant, corrupt, confused institution back in office. As I have written elsewhere, the real question is why social movements continued backing the NDP for more than a generation after they made it crystal clear who they were.
We are just as ridiculous as those half-dozen bewildered elderly professional suburbanites who are wheeled out to tell CNN how baffled they are, as moderate, freedom-loving Republicans at what has happened to their party since the days of Dwight Eisenhower, who integrated the schools in Kansas, a man who last governed at the same time as Tommy Douglas.
