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COPE and the Rush to Petty Dictatorship

Any other party that had just lost half its board, its only elected member and 40% of its support in the polls would be rushing to become broader, more open and more relevant to our city. But not COPE. The main business the party will transact at its next general meeting this March will be the current Executive’s latest efforts to prevent ordinary voters and social movement activists from setting this party’s direction going into what could be its last election campaign.

Following the Executive’s success in using procedural roadblocks, misinformation, and patently false legal and mathematical arguments to defeat proportional representation at meetings in September, October and November (despite PR winning with 66% of the vote the only time members were permitted by the chair to vote on it), the next cynical move is to appear to comply with the members clear demand for a more diverse Executive that represents more than one faction of the party. Using the language of equity and diversity, a set of Trojan Horse amendments to COPE’s constitution are now being put forward, which appear to comply with the wishes of PR-supporting members seeking diversity but which, in fact, institutionalize the current leadership through a system of appointed tokens.

This March, at the party’s two-day policy conference, COPE members will be asked to ratify a Byzantine set of bylaw amendments whose primary purpose appears to be intensifying the control of the party by the faction that currently dominates it by insulating the current Executive against defeat by the members at the July Annual General Meeting or June Nominating Convention.

2. Equity Representatives on COPE Executive
BE IT RESOLVED That PART 4 THE EXECUTIVE Point 1 be amended by adding a new point d) to read as follows
PART 4 – THE EXECUTIVE
1. The Executive shall consist of the following persons (the “Voting Executive Members”): ….
d) representatives of each Equity Caucus, who may be so designated by the respective Caucuses and ratified at a general meeting.
1) one Voting Executive Member position for each Equity Caucus

Four new seats are being created on the COPE Executive, increasing its size from twelve elected members to sixteen. These four new members are elected not be the COPE membership as a whole but by four party committees (“equity caucuses”); these seats will be occupied from the time each caucus selects is occupant until the caucus removes them unless the next general meeting of the party votes not to ratify the selection, in which case the seat is then vacant until the caucus can make a new selection.

Because these appointments do not appear to expire and, except at the moment of ratification, are outside the purview of the general membership of the party. These appointees sit on the executive from the moment of their appointment until they face a ratification vote at a later meeting and, only if that meeting votes to leave the seat vacant rather than accepting the representative, are they removed. If they are not removed, they continue to serve until they wish to vacate the position. And even if they are removed, the caucus can appoint a replacement who will serve as an executive member until their ratification vote.

This means that, together with those elected to two-year terms at the 2013 AGM and those elected to 16-month terms at the March general meeting, there will be ten (out of a possible 16) seats on the Executive that will not be subject to election at the July AGM. In other words, even if the general membership completely repudiate the current executive at the coming AGM, they will retain a 10-6 majority on the Executive through the election.

BE IT RESOLVED that PART 7 COMMITTEES be amended by adding a new Point 6
6. Equity Standing Committees
There shall be four (4) Equity Standing Committees: Aboriginal, Differently Abled, Ethnic Diversity, and LGBTTIQQPP2S. The Committees shall be selected by their respective Equity Caucuses.

This set of bylaw amendments is odd because it does not specify who will comprise the equity caucuses. It states that the committees will be appointed by the caucuses but not how the caucuses will be appointed. With no specific rules in effect for regulation of caucus composition, the party must default to the resolution passed by directors on May 10^th, 2013 concerning the composition of all internal party committees on whose composition the bylaws are silent:

Whereas the members of COPE vest final oversight powers in the Executive,

Resolved that the Executive confer on committees the power to alter their composition by a majority vote of members;

Further resolved that any decision by committees including those pertaining to their membership may be reversed by a majority vote of the Executive;

Further resolved that all committees except those named in the Constitution and Bylaws exist at the pleasure of the Executive and may be created or disbanded by a majority vote of the Executive.

Further resolved that the times and locations of each committee and caucus meeting be communicated to the Executive a reasonable amount of time in advance of each committee and caucus meeting;

Effectively, this means that the current Executive may determine the composition of the four equity caucuses which, in turn, elect four members to the Executive. This is a political feedback loop whereby the current executive can insulate itself against the democratic will of the members depriving it of its majority at the Annual General Meeting.

In other words, the Equity motions have not been forwarded for the purpose of democratizing COPE but for the purpose of empowering the current clique to appoint themselves dictators of the party, irrespective of how members vote this summer.

Some might well ask, “does it really matter who controls the Executive when the members get to pick the candidates?” Well, that’s where the Executive’s new Code of Conduct comes in, a Code that gives it sweeping powers to fire candidates at will. Below are the relevant excerpts:

1. This Code of Conduct replaces any previously enacted code of conduct and applies to

a. Members of the COPE Executive

b. COPE Candidates elected to Civic Office

c. Candidates for Civic Office

~ and ~

2. All persons to whom this Code of Conduct applies shall refrain from
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a. Speaking against or criticizing COPE Policy in any public forum or communication including but not limited to media interviews or statements, candidates debates, web comments emails blogs and/or social media.

b. Speaking against or criticizing each other or any COPE Member in any public forum or communication including but not limited to media interviews or statements, candidates debates, web comments, emails, blogs and/or social media.

c. Advising or assisting COPE members to engage in 2a. or2 b. above

d Advising COPE members to express dissatisfaction with COPE and/or decisions of its membership meetings by financial means, including but not limited to boycotting COPE fundraising events, cancelling PACs, withdrawing or not providing financial support. (This especially applies to Executive members, who as Directors of the Society have a fiduciary duty to always act in the best interest of COPE).

~ and ~

6. If Allegations are upheld, consequences may include but are not limited to:

a. In case of first incident , the respondent will be offered the opportunity to resolve the matter by providing written acknowledgement that

i. their actions violated this Code of Conduct

ii. they will offer apologies as directed by the Executive

iii. they promise not to re-offend.

b. In case of

i. a first incident, should the respondent not accept the opportunity described in a. and/or

ii. a subsequent incident where allegations are upheld,

the Executive may take the following action(s).

1. In all cases the respondent will be offered the opportunity to resign.

2. Should the respondent choose not to resign

a. The Executive may remove the respondent from any “executive-appointed” role or position.

b. The Executive may make a special resolution to a general meeting to remove an Executive member per the BC Society Act: Part 3 Directors 31 (see References below )

c. The Executive may make a resolution to a general meeting to expel the respondent per COPE Bylaws Part 2 Membership 1.d) (see References below).

d. Staff may be subject to progressive discipline up to and including termination.

To be clear, then, any person expressing dissent or suspected of encouraging others to express dissent may be summarily removed from their position in COPE unless such removal is explicitly prohibited by the Society Act. This dissent might be as minor as telling a friend over the phone that an upcoming fundraising event might not be very fun for them or mocking a member of the Executive in a humorous tweet. Given the way the current Executive assumed power in COPE, by vigorously attacking the previous majority and its policies in conventional and social media, organizing phone banks and refusing to participate in key campaign events, it is clear that this group could not survive a fair application of this Code.

This leads me to believe that, as with the rules for social assistance recipients, the goal is not to have an actually enforceable policy but instead to create an environment of arbitrary terror, in which everyone is in violation of the rules all the time but only those disliked by the Executive are punished. The addition of written confessions and show trials seems especially absurd, given that the current leadership are in no other ways Stalinist, having largely adopted a small-c conservative ratepayer politics of NIMBYism, heritage preservation and meeting-intensive processes designed to magnify the voices of the wealthy and well-educated while silencing low-income and marginalized people. Marginalized people, these proposed bylaws make clear, are not to be empowered but to act as tokens or pawns, permitted to act as proxies for a rich, white, middle-aged, property-owning, West Side lawyer, but only insofar as they comply with his will and that of his handful of long-term toadies, yes-men and financial dependents.

Obviously, whether I choose to remain active in COPE will depend on how this meeting goes in March. There is little point in participating in a party that has so completely rejected democracy in favour of the pettiest, most small-minded personality cult. If this were the Cold War, one might hear grim arguments about breaking a few eggs to make an omelette or the like but this isn’t. This is about the quest of a group of bourgeois baby-boomers trying to get one guy on city council as a kind of commemorative mascot of the days it really was a Manichean struggle between the forces of labour and capital.

Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite | February 17, 2014

Political Geography of Community – Part 4: Dispossession, Dislocation and the Invention of the Neighbour

With a title like this, the only sensible thing is to begin by talking about wool.

Wool has a lot to do with the way that English-speaking who can trace their lineages to Great Britain seem to have got a pretty good deal this past half-millennium or so. Wool, strangely enough, was crucially helpful in teaching the English people how to make selves that are especially well-adapted to capitalist relations between human beings.

This remaking of the self in capitalist terms, and its sweeping political implications can be found in Thomas More’s Utopia in which the author comments on a process called “Enclosure,” whereby collectively-owned shared lands on which peasants raised crops were privatized and fenced through a series of acts by the English state. Instead of people eating sheep, More observed, with Enclosure, now, “sheep eat men.” Land used by humans to raise food to feed themselves became land that was converted to range land for sheep.

It was not enough to dispossess peasants, More went on to observe; they were then criminalized, as they are today, for their dispossession through laws against begging, brigandage, vagrancy and debt. This process, which had begun nearly a century before More wrote, only escalated over the next two centuries and more and more English commoners were dispossessed for a wider and wider range of land uses as the English state financed itself through privatization.

Once they were dispossessed, powerful forces set to work on those who had lost their lands to encourage relocation. People moved to find work; and if they couldn’t find work, the state and its agents would find it for them by converting them into convict labourers, indentured servants or pressganged members of the armed forces. For the most part, people were eager to find work and moved considerable distances – down brigand- and beggar-infested toll-roads to find somewhere to work.

These people were no different from the economic migrants of any era; their choices were conditioned by familiar factors. Is there work where I’m going? How can I persuade people to let me do the work when I get there? Are there people I know there? If I get there and something happens to me, will there be someone to bail me out? England’s market towns, which had begun their demographic rebound in the 1400s, were often the destination but many people urbanized into London and many still simply moved from one rural area to the next, often in short-term work directly associated with the wool industry. As Britain’s sheep population grew, so did the ranks of the dispossessed and dislocated.

Because these mass economic migrations were not actually associated with new technologies as much as new market conditions, the English people had the curious honour to being in the vanguard of a process that would reshape even the rest of Western Europe decades or centuries later. While processes like this had taken place at many other places and times, the sheer scale and duration of Enclosure created a critical mass of a certain kind of unstable, disconnected migrant consciousness. By the seventeenth century, common English folk thought about their relationships to their place, family and job differently than others on such a large scale that a whole new discourse emerged, a discourse that the state intervened to help shape.

We know this because of the King James Version of the Bible, a very expensive state-sponsored project to produce a text around which a new, Protestant, capitalist English identity was to be built. The KJV provided a dislocated, increasingly socially literate populace with popular, universal words to help them make new selves and new worldviews for the strangely kinetic, insecure people into which they were being transformed by the privatization of indivisible collectivities, like families and family. It did that by replacing the word “brother” with “neighbour” hundreds upon hundreds of times.

Let us be clear that English neighbours centuries ago were like our neighbours now: people you don’t really know who might or might not stick around. Now, as then, we have words for the relationships that can develop out of neighbourliness: friend, spouse, co-worker, cousin, brother-in-law, etc. Medieval English people had other words too from before the era of the neighbour like “gossip,” from the compound word “god-sib” – someone connected through a god-parent, a ubiquitous institution that linked huge portions of the population together.

But, in the world of Enclosure, new ideas of “neighbourliness” became crucial new forms of solidarity. The English people had a shared imperative, whether working as translators for one of the greatest state-directed propaganda campaigns of all time or simply trying to survive a move to a new town, where they had heard there might be some shepherding work, without first starving to death, to idealize a new form of community, neighbourliness. Neighbours were a new kind of person: a person forced into physical proximity with you by economic exigency.

As the Nobel Committee has recently recognized, one of the most effective means of surviving large-scale market-driven and state-supported dispossession, dislocation and social service downloading is through the mobilization of private micro-credit. The ideals of neighbourliness as propounded by popular early modern English writers like Thomas Tusser were, first and foremost, means of mobilizing micro-credit within a marginalized population. A cup of sugar or flour lent by one’s neighbour remains, to the present day, our idealized image of what neighbourliness ultimately means. A few pence, a little flour, an egg – in Jacobean England, the ability of the dispossessed and marginally employed to rely on new acquaintances for sustenance was crucial for the success of the first socially capitalist society.

This new social ideal and associated practices were, at once, forms of solidarity amongst the dispossessed and marginalized, crucial for the generation of the minimum material and political security needed to survive and a means of pacifying a populace in the face of oppression while concurrently reducing the material obligations of the rulers to the ruled.

These techniques may also damage penile tissues leading canadian cialis pharmacy to other dangerous situations. A viagra sale mastercard man has to take it at least 40 minutes to mix with blood and start working. What are the symptoms of Erectile miamistonecrabs.com cheapest levitra Dysfunction? If you are facing erectile dysfunction. Relaxation, medical hypnosis, meditation, acupuncture, acupuncture with customized hypnosis CDs, and massage are all ways to combat this issue is by using a prescription medication known as buy online viagra. What neighbourliness was not and is not is a natural form of social organization – it is necessarily a social response to the prolonged, systematic physical dislocation and atomization of a populace due to economic exigencies. It is no coincidence that the labour movement sought to undo the great intentional translation errors of the KJV. It was not simply that labour discourse in the past two centuries has sought – almost unconsciously –to restore the meaning “peoples” in place of the KJV’s “nations,” as the translation for εθνη; it has been even more invested in changing “neighbour” back to “brother.”

While leftist thought has grappled seriously with the ways in which discourses of “nation” have reinforced racism and imperialism, the response to the other great KJV linguistic reordering has received short shrift. While a handful of important scholars have recognized the ways in which neighbourliness serves to inhibit class consciousness in that it is locates identity formation – and hence, solidarity – in residential rather than work spaces, this only scratches the surface of the problem of neighbourliness.

People imagine, incorrectly, that neighbours, neighbourhoods and the neighbourly ethic are timeless, pre-capitalist things. And while we can trace the word to the time before Enclosure, its universalization in the sixteenth century was part and parcel with it coming to refer to a probably impermanent, quasi-stranger. To be neighbourly was to engage in reciprocity as an act of faith – to enact solidarity in the absence of the trust or knowledge one might expect in the world before Enclosure.

What are the implications of this to the Jane Jacobs urbanism that has come to be so uncritically embraced by self-identified leftists and progressives? Let us historicize neighbourliness and see its fetishization as an ideal as a reasonable proxy for instability, atomization and dislocation. And let us consider the implications of understanding the neighbourhood as a form of defensive solidarity that emerges when more genuine and complete forms of community in place are under constant attack.

Of course, today’s neighbourliness is not identical to the kind developed in the sixteenth century. In Vancouver and many other major cities, neighbours are, more often than not, families forced by the housing affordability crisis to move farther from work, to suburbanize, or, conversely, childless people who work longer, more irregular hours in order to stay close to work and reduce their commuting time.

What does it mean when friends, relatives and coworkers have been evacuated from your physical locale and you are surrounded by strangers? Or, worse yet, what if you are one of the new strangers, desperately trying to narrate your relevance to a series of closed doors and impersonal shops? Faced with these socially fraught circumstances, some of us lean on the idea of neighbourliness to fight back. We know those people – they are the elderly people on your doorstep with a petition for something, the odd cadre of corduroy and tweed-wearers who attend the annual general meeting of your community centre, the acquaintances who cold-call you to ask your feelings about the decline in parking spaces and, increasingly under Vision Vancouver, the people eating finger sandwiches and writing on white boards at some kind of city-financed meeting that always seems to be taking place in Multipurpose Room C, next to the swimming pool.

Those people are very much doing what self-defined neighbours have done for centuries: using a concept that is being actively popularized by the state as a means of social control and service downloading to attempt to organize against state-supported economic development and community reorganization projects. This minority of actively-neighbourly neighbours think they are part of a big, fictive community that contains you and everybody who lives near them, with whom they hang out at the Canada Day block party that never quite gets around to happening. As I have argued elsewhere, these people are actually quite unlike most people they live near; the people they are like are the neighbourhood activists who live in other parts of the city.

Neighbourhood activists often see the majority who never seem to be around for the public meeting about the development permit application as, in some way, deficient in civic virtue. As in most discourses of civic virtue, dating back to Ancient Athens, those most lacking in civic virtue are typically the most economically dislocated, those whose time is most occupied by working, commuting and fundamental household tasks like child-rearing. Or, as conversely put by Marianna Valverde, “The local champion role is one that can be played private citizens as well as politicians… playing the role of micro-local champion is time-consuming, which may be a reason this role is generally played by people with few work and childcare responsibilities.”

Ironically, those who represent neighbours are those least like them. Those able to engage in acts of representation and advocacy are situated at the polarities of economic security with their ample time arising either from considerable familial wealth or from self-inflicted poverty in order to remain in their chosen geographic area. This mirrors the situation at the inception of neighbourliness where those most active in the civic life of the neighbourhood. Early modern England’s most active neighbours were epitomized in the figure of the neighbourhood patron, an aspiring gentleman and town notable, or the disrespectable scold, the “crazy cat lady” of her day.

Furthermore, those who use their limited time to, in preference, associate with lovers, friends, coworkers, teammates or relatives, who congregate around activities like sports, co-parenting, drinking or gambling in preference to micro-governance are understood to, in some way, be quasi-citizens, people who have lost their full franchise. Maybe that is why neighbourhood activists are so comfortable in asserting what “the community,” or “the neighbourhood” really wants in these public processes—they have annexed their neighbours’ citizenship to themselves.
I write this not because I prefer the agenda of Vision Vancouver to that of the party that came fifth in the last election, Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver. By and large, I find their policies preferable to Vision’s on nearly every front, despite the party’s stated purpose being the governance of the city by the very people I just disparaged.

I offer this harsh critique not because what groups like COPE, NSV or the Green Party are doing is wrong but because it is inherently insufficient. The conservative fantasy of the neighbourly past that these groups evoke when they point to the Greenwich Village of Jane Jacobs becomes a more entrancing mirage each year precisely because the real bonds between people are being destroyed through dislocation and replaced with neighbourliness, a state-sponsored fiction designed, from its inception, at the height of Enclosure, to pacify the populace by substituting a counterfeit for real community.

More in the next part on alternatives based on organic experiences of community.

Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies | fusangite | February 13, 2014

Surprise: Another Resignation!

In the coming days, you may hear that I have resigned from the board of COPE. I remain committed to and enthusiastic about the party’s chances in the election next year but I feel that I cannot, in good conscience, appear to support the direction our board is taking the party.

In April this year, members of COPE voted overwhelmingly for a slate called “Independent COPE” on the expectation that our party would strike a bold and independent course in the coming elections. Instead, this appears to have been interpreted by the board majority as carte blanche to enter into new and equally ill-advised alliances with regressive and dangerous forces in our city while, at the same time, rejecting overtures from community groups and social movements.
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At December’s board meeting it is expected that a “Code of Conduct” will be passed prohibiting any member for the Executive from expressing dissent with or criticism of the board majority. I need to be free to speak against these ill thought-out decisions as I continue the work of building COPE and linking it with our city’s social movements. And I remain confident that the majority of members and supporters will once again choose an independent and progressive COPE at the party’s nomination meeting and AGM in 2014.

Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite | November 26, 2013

On Side for the Big Win

In 1996, there were a lot more passenger trains in this country. There were daily trips between Victoria and Courtenay and between North Vancouver and Prince George via 100 Mile House to name a few. But the evisceration of VIA Rail was just getting going with the Chrétien government’s third budget. It was hard to guess which train lines would vanish when, so my friend Oscar and I thought I had better take the train trip that had fascinated me the most: the Winnipeg-Churchill run through the entire breadth of Canada’s boreal forest and across the tree line. It was a great trip in which I watched Oscar swim in the Arctic Ocean and looked at amazing comic book-style ivory dioramas of Inuit legends; it’s one that I hope people can still make when another two thirds of VIA’s funding is cut by Harper in the next fiscal year.

But the thing I remember best about it was dropping in on my friend K at the 1996 Progressive Conservative Party convention in Winnipeg on the way. He and my other Tory friends had been crushed by the party’s annihilation in 1993 personally, financially, ideologically, you name it. But they were young and not prepared to give up. When I arrived, it was late on the Friday night and people were in high spirits. I began asking where K was and was directed to a ballroom on the top floor of the convention hotel, where he and New Brunswick Opposition leader Bernard Valcourt were in finalists in the convention’s “bungee running” competition.

As though re-enacting the entire post-Mulroney experience of the party in a single cathartic episode, K, former Special Assistant to the Speaker and Valcourt, disgraced former cabinet minister were tied to the wall on opposite sides of the room with long bungee cords and were competing to stretch their cords far enough, fast enough to reach the bottle of single malt scotch on top of a makeshift plinth in the centre of the room – but not so fast that the cord snapped them back to the wall. Auguring things to come, Valcourt got the bottle and shared a small amount of it with K before putting me in a celebratory introductory headlock and staggering downstairs.

Then I asked K how the convention had gone and he was ebullient. Having made Jean Charest party leader, he felt confident the Tories would (as they did) regain official party status in 1997 and believed that, with hard work, they could form the Official Opposition. (They failed to do that but did get a fifth of the popular vote, the second largest share in the election and more than half of the victorious Liberals’.) The reason he was confident, he explained, was that the convention comprised only two main groups of delegates: people who shared his clear-eyed vision of how the party could claw its way, incrementally, back to relevance and less clear-headed delegates who were “on side for the big win.”

The reason K felt confident in the party’s recovery was that, while forming a core of dedicated donors and volunteers, those On Side for the Big Win were not crafting election strategy. The term soon joined my vocabulary as a crucial descriptor for a certain kind of activist as I entered my second term as BC Green Party leader.

But by 1999, the term had taken on a less rosy complexion in our shared lexicon. K and his allies were fighting off a takeover attempt by David Orchard (something I’d advised Orchard to do over dinner in 1997 as a media stunt). Orchard’s supporters were utterly humourless and totally convinced that, upon their guru’s election as party leader, the Tories would surge into first place and form a majority government. I, meanwhile, was fighting off a leadership challenge by Adriane Carr who confidently proclaimed to anyone who would listen that once people saw her in the televised debate, she would become premier of BC.

Therefore one must viagra sales in australia keep alcohol at bay while using anti-impotence drugs. But most men are struggling to discuss it in front of any health professional, it is better free viagra no prescription to have the drug before an hour of intercourse. Regular pelvic examination with your cialis no prescription wouroud.com gynecologist helps you identify endometrial cancer and which creates further need for proper education on ICT. Your cosmetic surgeon will have prescribed a medicament that will the patient viagra genérico 25mg deal with the irritation. It was tough for K and me, in our respective parties, to challenge prescriptions of sudden, easy, total victory because so damned many people were On Side for the Big Win. Why, such people wanted to know, was I trying to build electoral alliances with labour and New Democrats? Why was I diverting energy from suburban ridings into a handful of city centre and hippie-filled wet belt rural seats? These kinds of compromises and sacrifices seemed insane to people who imagined total victory to be just around the corner.

But I want to suggest that this desperate conviction of total, imminent victory in the face of overwhelming evidence, like having less than 1000 members in your party and a budget of less than $70,000 per year, is not really optimism at all. It is actually the most pernicious manifestation of despair one can find.

Magical thinking – see my article on this elsewhere – emerges most often when people lose the ability to imagine an actual, real, plausible path to what they want and they retreat into a kind of conscious, dissociative fantasy life in which they replace real world improvement with an imaginary future in which they take refuge from the bleak realities that surround them.

Nobody has ever been more On Side for the Big Win than the Native Americans who joined the Ghost Dance movement of the prophet Wovoka who promised victory in battle through invincibility to bullets and European disease and divine assistance in a rectifying eschaton that would cleanse the Americas of colonists. The false, desperate confidence of those who rode into battle to die during the closing of the frontier in the 1880s was not actual hope – it was total and abject despair.

Today, many of us on the Civic Left are caught between two kinds of despair: a cynical and hopeless politics of brokerage and collaboration with corporate real estate elites on one hand and the politics of the Big Win on the other. To follow either path is to succumb to despair.

I – and a growing coalition of people I meet every day – can see a narrow, hard, steep path for this city’s left to recover, to stand against the escalating efforts to cleanse the city of all but the wealthiest among us. But we must keep our wits about us. We are not on an inexorable march to victory any more than we have been permanently defeated – there is hope but that hope is fragile, evidence-based and meriting careful analysis and clever strategy. But we must guard against that hope turning to desperation and ourselves, our friends and allies coming On Side for the Big Win.

Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | October 25, 2013

Stepping Down As Fair Vote Canada Vice President

September 24^th, 2013

Dear Fair Vote Canada,

I am tendering my resignation from the national board effective September 30^th, 2013, as soon as I wrap up my commitments to the Executive Director hiring process. I returned to activity at the national level in FVC this winter not because my interests are focused at the national level or because I feel that the FVC organizational culture is a comfortable fit for me but due to a threefold crisis.

A Toronto “social entrepreneur” and the personality cult centred around him were attempting to seize control of Fair Vote Canada in order to place FVC under the direction of an affinity group whose main activity is shilling for elements in the Liberal Party of Canada that are working to stymie reform in Ontario and BC.
Fair Vote Canada had made disastrous personnel and leadership decisions that had sent it into a near-fatal organizational tailspin.
The endemic conflict and scorched-earth tactics that the above two factors produced were fundamentally altering the social contract of the voting reform movement in Canada, making it an unsafe and conflict-ridden space in sharp contradistinction to its previous social contract that had prized gentleness and diversity.

By the end of this week, issues 1 and 2 will have been successfully addressed. The challenge before us and our new executive director and the new executive you select following my resignation will be issue 3. Fair Vote Canada, as the largest group in Canada’s voting reform movement, will have to find a way to balance the need to provide a safe, stable working environment for volunteers that is free of harassment with the equally pressing need for an open organization in which newcomers feel welcome, one that can embrace a greater ideological and cultural diversity than it does today.

Because I am a poor fit for the Central Canadian culture of FVC, I will be making my contribution to the third issue in a different way. I will be working with Troy Lanigan, John Carpay, Stephen Broscoe, David Marley and others to build MOVE: The Movement for Voter Equality as an organization that pays special attention to the task of bringing conservatives back into the fair voting movement. We also hope to model a different, more consultive style of inter-organizational cooperation than other national and local voting reform groups that have recently appeared. We look forward to partnering with FVC and supporting our allies in their important work.

It is seventeen years since I co-founded the BC Electoral Change Coalition and chaired the first YES to PR referendum campaign in Canada. I am not exaggerating when I say that I love this movement. I helped to start it in its modern form when I was at my best. When I was at my worst, the movement took me in and helped to rebuild me not just as a political activist but as a human being, treating me with great gentleness and generosity. I owe so much to the fair voting movement. It (and tabletop RPGs, of course) have been the constants of my life, the communities that have been there for me wherever I have gone and whenever I have needed them.
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It has also been – and remains to this day – the cause of my life. The equal participation of all people in the governance of their society is the political value upon which all others must rest. FVC must never lose sight of this by falling into political paternalism or manipulating processes for predetermined ends. We are here because we trust the people. When PR loses a referendum or a vote in a legislature or convention, it is not because the people have failed us. It is because we have failed them.

Fair Vote has important work ahead of it. It will be a long time before we recover from the trauma of recent years; do not be too quick to pronounce us well. Let us remember that we are all healing and do what we can to rebuild the culture of gentleness our movement once exemplified. If a culture of gentleness could arise simply from individuals being nice on an ad hoc basis, the evangelical movement would have transformed society long ago. If a culture of gentleness entailed tolerating the intolerance of misbehaviour of others, George Galloway and the Respect movement would be the way forward. But neither of these is the solution. A culture of gentleness entails doing what reformers do best: thinking systematically about big groups of people and how they relate to one another and then making positive, systemic changes.

Let’s move forward together in doing just that.

Stuart Parker,

Founding Director, Movement for Voter Equality

PS For the time being, I will be staying on as a director of my local chapter, Fair Vote Vancouver

Miscellaneous Articles | fusangite | September 24, 2013

Announcing My Candidacy for the Board of COPE

Thirteen years ago, give or take a week or two, I left the field of partisan politics in BC after losing the leadership of the BC Green Party, after seven years, by a 114-86 vote at a convention in Squamish. Had I been able to bring another 29 people to the meeting or sway 15 who voted the other way, things might have turned out differently in a few areas of my life. But, by the grace of God, they did not because I badly needed perspective and a life outside politics; and even more, I needed a break.

In the past thirteen years, I have been able to turn my attention to things other than partisan politics, from doing non- and multi-partisan activist work in the voting reform movement, to obtaining a BA, MA and PhD in history, to taking time to work on my physical and mental health. As a result, I was able to celebrate my fortieth birthday last spring as a happier person than I could ever have hoped to be, had I been burdened with the wrong kind of political success.

And it is not as though the skills and contacts that came from being a politician went to waste. I served as a director and judge for the annual awards for excellence in role playing games at Gen Con thanks to my expertise in voting systems design. My capacity to produce a stream of seemingly well-informed verbiage landed me as a regular panelist on CTS Christian TV’s open line show in Ontario and as a repeat commentator on Battlestar Galactica on the Space Channel. My skills at organizing conferences yielded the small, elite gaming convention, Giant Space Telescope Con at Algonquin Radio Observatory. And my abiding affection for and interest in weird people with weird ideas turned me into an expert on Mormon history and cosmology, on which I have spoken at conferences across Canada and the US. On the strength of that, Kofford Books, a Mormon Studies publisher is releasing my first book, History Through Seer Stones later this year.

But as I have lived the past third of my life, mostly out of partisan politics, aside from a near-miss at winning the NDP nomination for a provincial byelection in Toronto, it has become increasingly clear to me that, according to my own abilities, I cannot fully contribute to the struggles against the upward redistribution of wealth and the destruction of planetary life support systems from outside of electoral politics.

Since moving back to Vancouver, it has become abundantly clear that the kind of politics in which I was involved in the 1980s and 90s is desperately needed in our city. I was one of the people who celebrated when Gregor Robertson was elected as mayor and who supported many of the people and policies associated with Vision Vancouver.

The magnitude of the betrayal of the people of this city by the mayor and his cronies cannot be overstated. Vision reports a decline in homelessness because they have changed the way we determine who is homeless; now, only those who slept on the street last night are homeless. Vision reports an increase in affordable housing because they have changed the way we determine what housing is affordable; now, any space you rent – no matter the cost – is, by definition, affordable.

Here is the reality of our city under Vision Vancouver: our civic government has financed massive corporate tax cuts by imposing and increasing regressive user fees on those who need to use community facilities. Today, Vancouver taxes corporations less than any other city in North America; meanwhile, seniors, children and low-income people pay some of the highest user fees when they try to access basic services. That does not worry our current city government, however, because these are people who cannot afford to keep living here leave and are not around to vote in the next election. The people whose money is transferred through children’s swimming lesson fees at their local community centre to finance a tax cut for Walmart are outside the political calculus because Mayor Robertson is betting that they will be living in Surrey by the time he is up for re-election.

Our current civic government is presiding over a bonanza in rezonings that destroy affordable housing, affordable grocery stores, interesting cultural venues and affordable restaurants and leave in their place an undifferentiated mass of Bikram, Starbucks and Donnelly pub group franchises with Westbank and Aquilini condos piled on top of them. The speed and rapacity of this destruction is unequaled under any previous regime, including Gordon Campbell in the 80s and Tom Campbell in the 60s.

Meanwhile, our city proudly unveils essentially meaningless, symbolic efforts to make our city seem to be a world leader in sustainability and social justice. The ever-increasing private parking capacity under new developments, the overcrowded, unreliable, unaffordable bus system: we are distracted from these things by bike lanes and green roofs.

Vancouverites who are sensitive to questions of social and environmental justice are, for the most part, paralyzed by this turn of events. Villainous hypocrisy on the scale we are seeing it is something I have not seen in BC in twenty years, not since, as a young man, I watched a similar government of educated, ecologically-minded, clever people we had all been rooting for launch a blistering assault on the most vulnerable people in our society.

Then as now, the main reaction is denial. Andrea Reimer spent most of her political career as a Green. Gregor Robertson sat as an NDP MLA. Geoff Meggs was a tireless worker for the Communist Party. “How can it be?” we ask ourselves, that this government is pursuing an agenda to the right of the Non-Partisan Association? The answer is that this is the only group of people who can get away with this. Westbank and Donelly could never remake the city on this scale by cutting big cheques to the NPA because then, progressive people would not be paralyzed. They would not be in denial; they would be fighting back.

I am not a political genius. I am not a person made for or called to every political situation. But I do know what to do when a group of smooth-talking fake progressives decide to wage war on the vulnerable on behalf of vested interests and then defend themselves with meaningless greenwashing and Third Way Newspeak. I’m pretty sure I know what to do about that.

And so, I am using this blog post to announce, formally, that I will be standing as a candidate for the executive of the Coalition of Progressive Electors at the organization’s Annual General Meeting on April 7^th. That meeting will be the first in a long series of battles between those willing to stand against the mayor and his supporters and those on the left who find themselves caught in an endless cycle of political cowardice, toadying and denial. From now until the end of business on Thursday, you can purchase a COPE membership[1] and join us in the fight to take back our city. I really hope that you will.

[1] Those who live or work in Vancouver, of all ages and income levels are welcome to join COPE. Visit them here at www.cope.bc.ca

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Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite | March 5, 2013

Prime Minister Mulcair and the Politics of Masculinity

Sometimes I feel shame when reading posts by my fellow NDP members about how great our party is. “Why can’t I do that?” I sometimes wonder. I really do want people to vote NDP next time. Obviously, there is something good enough about the party that I continue to support it despite a rocky relationship with it these past twenty-eight years. And I’m sure that some people will see this post in light of that likely-to-continue track record of disappointment, insubordination and occasional despair. But I honestly am writing this to express my enthusiasm for our leader and to emphasize my view that he has a real shot at becoming Prime Minister in 2015 — even without an electoral cooperation deal with the other opposition parties. Admittedly, I think that shot goes from about 35% with cooperation to about 8% without it but still…

Tom Mulcair has a real shot at becoming the first NDP Prime Minister because he, not Justin Trudeau, the Liberals’ inevitable future spokesmodel will actually tap into the force that elected Justin’s dad in ’68 and re-elected him in three times thereafter. And the contrast he presents to Justin — and yes, I am using the first name rather than surname technique typically used to demean female politicians here (more about that shortly) — will actually aid him in channeling that legacy.

When Mulcair won the leadership of the NDP, Canada’s political class waited with great anticipation to see what ads the Harper attack machine would run against him. The consensus, before the “risky theories” ads came out, was that the Tories would go for the most talked-about of Mulcair’s supposed character flaws, an angry, bullying, gruff nature combined with a short temper. And yet the Conservatives have made no mention of it; instead they have sought to portray him as professorial, secretive and distant.

For the same reason, I don’t expect to see any future attack ads using the December 5^th 2012 footage of Mulcair bodily interposing himself between an enraged Peter van Loan and his house leader in the floor of the Commons. From the footage, it is clear that Mulcair is cussing-out van Loan and informing him that he would be only too happy to lead the next day’s news cycle being dragged out of the House for personally beating him to a bloody pulp in front of his chicken hawk Tory colleagues.

The last thing that the Tories want is to draw attention to what continues to make French Canadian men a potent force in English Canadian politics, even as the electoral relevance of Québec declines.

English Canada fell in love with Pierre Trudeau in 1968 because he angrily seated himself in the direct line of fire of bottle-throwing separatists, not with calm and decorum but in an obviously enraged response both to the separatist rioters and to the handlers who sought to whisk him off to safety. Trudeau’s healthy libido, ability to shamelessly date (and even marry) mentally unstable women less than half his age, his willingness to order the assault of protesters and roll out tanks in the streets of Montréal and his expressions of contempt, punctuated with the odd obscene gesture endeared him to crucial voting blocs in English Canada.

It was the actual Trudeau legacy that gave Jean Chretien three back-to-back majority governments, and would have given him a fourth if the Liberal Party constitution had allowed him the option of handling Paul Martin’s challenge through a single combat rather than a convention vote. It was not Chretien’s association with the Charter that won him all those seats in Ontario; it was his ability to beat intruders senseless with soapstone sculptures, joke about pepper-spraying people in unconstitutional mass arrests and put protesters in chokeholds that won him the respect of so much of English Canada.

It was not the intellect of Trudeau or the savvy political tactics of Chretien that made these men such towering figures in late twentieth-century Canada. These guys were elected and re-elected, first and foremost, for their public performance masculinity.
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Since first wave maternal feminism gripped English Canada in the Victorian Era, our patriarchal authorities have come to a different cultural accommodation between ongoing rule by a male elite and the demands of feminists than those in French Canada. While both cultures remain patriarchal societies in which women fight to make inroads into the financial and political elite, the on-the-ground manifestation of this is very different.

In English Canada, men’s eligibility to join the elite is conditioned, in large measure, by their capacity to reflect the Victorian ideal of manliness exemplified in Upper Canadian culture. Like Hawaiians, Upper Canadians build their patriarchal culture around understated theatrical demonstrations of restraint, physical, emotional and sexual. Elite English Canadian men are not to shout; they are not to brawl; and, if they must engage in it, they keep their promiscuity invisible. Just ask the mayoral candidate who could have saved us from Rob Ford, Adam Giambrone, felled by what Torontonians called a sex scandal and what Parisians wouldn’t have called anything.

While I would never suggest that restraint and sensitivity have nothing to do with elite masculine status in Québec, I will suggest that they have much less to do with it. To non-elite men and women in English Canada, the relative freedom of powerful Québecois men from these standards is a powerful force, especially for non-elite men descended from Southern European immigrant communities that struggle to identify with the smallness and coldness of Anglo nuclear families and the disturbing bloodlessness of the surrounding culture. For Anglo chickenshits like Harper, aggression is often celebrated but when it is, it is always “serious business,” an exotic phenomenon; it takes a Chretien or Trudeau to indicate a real comfort with it by joking about violence (e.g. “I put pepper on my plate…”).

We remain a culture that is rooted in millennia of patriarchy. And generally, Canadians only hand majority governments to a party when one leader is able to embody the multiple definitions of masculinity that, together, comprise a majority, while the others are not. And, overall, the more bellicose, less restrained kind masculinity we find in French Canadian culture has resonance with more people in more places. It has resonance amongst working class Anglos in industrial towns; it has resonance on reserves; it has resonance in immigrant communities not yet domesticated to the passive-aggressive, restrained masculinity of neo-Victorian elites with its slut-shaming and excessive concern over female modesty. Really, the only place it doesn’t sell especially is Québec, where people are more used to it and, consequently, a good deal more tired.

But to us Anglos, a Trudeau, Chretien or Mulcair is a Tarzanesque figure, a creature from a world of which we know little, who has swung in on a vine to right wrongs and expose the hypocrisy, emptiness and veiled rage of the smug, little chess club patriarchs like Harper who run Anglo society. He can slam his fist on the table and threaten to break Peter van Loan’s nose if he steps an inch closer to Nathan Cullen — you know, that nice, mild-mannered House Leader, half a head taller than Mulcair and nearly a generation his junior.

Now, I’m sure some people will suggest this post secretly celebrates patriarchy through Mulcair and the other Francophones for whom, repressed, bourgeois Anglo men like me enviously vote from time to time. Others might suggest that I’m insulting my party and its leader by suggesting that we’ve turned against feminism. Neither is the case.

As Leonard Cohen wrote, “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” Just as Trudeau presided over the largest expansion of women’s rights and opportunities since the achievement of suffrage, I have great hopes for the NDP when it comes to stopping the decline in women’s fortunes under Harper and creating the kinds of material innovations that lead to real gender equality, like the nationalization of Québec’s public childcare program. It’s just kind of funny that our best shot at that in our history comes from the fact that our leader, in the eyes of more and more Canadians, “knows how to be a man.”

Canadian Politics | fusangite | January 23, 2013

The Logic of Vision’s $10,000 Fine For Homelessness

Today, the Vision Vancouver majority on my city council has tabled a motion to enact a new bylaw to fine the homeless $10,000 for sleeping in the streets. Obviously, there is no expectation of the fine being paid. Instead, I imagine there is a belief that there is a better chance of imprisoning the homeless for repeated defiance of orders to pay fines.

Two quotations come to mind in response to this travesty of justice. The first is by Anatole France, a quotation that many housing activists are circulating today, “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

The quotation most applicable to his piece, however, comes from Tom Wayman, describing the Social Credit Restraint program of 1982, “we were not to notice that in the air, a sour odour was leaking as if from a refinery upwind. It was a stench of sulphur, of worn dollar bills, of half-digested steak, belched through false smiles at the poor. Soon everyone could smell it. Some people pretended it wasn’t there.”

The reason Vision Vancouver can get away with the brutal war they have waged on affordable housing, destroying thousands of affordable units through sweetheart rezoning deals with their donors, the reason they can get away with this new bylaw, the reason they can get away with redefining homelessness to exclude every homeless person who did not sleep on the street last night is simple: they are a coalition of Greens and New Democrats. They are, by definition, as a matter of identity, progressive.

As I said in my piece of Third Wayism and the Downtown Eastside, modern “progressives” remain relevant and useful servants of capital because they can more effectively de-mobilize people who would otherwise be outraged by such measures. When Mike Harcourt’s government cut welfare rates from $547 per month to $500, prohibited job-seeking migrants from obtaining welfare for their first three months in the province, prohibited refugees from either working or receiving welfare and cut welfare for over ten thousand disabled people by 16% month, he could institute these “reforms” with few consequences. Many trade unionists, anti-poverty activists and other leftists bit their tongues and those who did speak out were marginalized within the NDP for their disloyalty.

Once this kind of silence was established, his government went on to deliberately overturn the advice of local police in 100 Mile House and turn a small farm occupation by a handful of First Nations activists into a military incident, complete with tanks, land mines and over ten thousand bullets fired at the protesters, wounding one young woman and terrorizing the other dozen protesters. Every day of the Gustafsen Lake siege, the NDP’s pet polling firm, Viewpoints Research, was in the field, testing to see how voters liked the hard line the party was taking against the Indians. When voters indicated they liked the siege but wanted an even harder line, the Attorney General ordered further escalation. Hence the BC government using land mines on its own citizens, even as Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy negotiated the international land mine ban treaty in Montréal.

Punitive actions against poor and indigenous people by wealthy social democrats have a consistent logic that, when successfully applied, helps to connect them to working class voters whom they fear might abandon them.

Living paycheque to paycheque is terrifying, as is losing your affordable shabby apartment and being forced to move to Surrey or pay $1200 per month for one of Vision’s “affordable” new bachelor units. For more and more working class, Vancouverites, Vision has gone from being the party who moderately inconveniences them by installing bike lanes that cut their pizza delivery job tips by reducing the number of deliveries per hour into a real threat. They have become a party that is systematically destroying industrial employment by rezoning and annihilating the affordable housing stock at an accelerating rate, faster than any NPA regime that has ever governed this city.
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When you’re living paycheque to paycheque, facing eviction from your apartment, the sight of homeless people on the streets is disquieting, one thinks to oneself, “could that be me one day soon? I still haven’t found a home I can afford. What if I don’t find one by the end of the month?

Mike Harcourt and Gregor Robertson rely on the votes of people who look at their homeless fellow citizens with anxiety. And to keep their votes they need to do two things. First, they have to reduce the visibility of homelessness and other frightening forms of poverty. Hence the project of incarcerating the homeless.

But their second line of approach is even more dangerous. They attempt to make homelessness seem pathological and criminal. They reassure the working poor that homelessness is not something that happens to regular, law-abiding, healthy people; it is something that only happens to people who were crazy or criminal all along. They seek to transform the homeless into an alien species, a type of vermin. Hence Harcourt’s famous speech introducing his reforms, promising to crack down on those “welfare cheats, deadbeats and varmints.” By describing the very poor as a kind of law-breaking vermin, he helped to reassure the working poor that they couldn’t become homeless because they homeless were nothing like them, not even the same species.

Most hard-working people pride themselves on being law-abiding, so if every homeless person they encounter is, by definition, a criminal facing incarceration in the near future, they feel safer; they can believe themselves to be different from the homeless because of their law-abiding nature. Similarly, the conflation of pre-existing madness with homelessness is reassuring. Many homeless people are mad but that is often because madness and homelessness are mutually reinforcing phenomena. I know I’d go crazy if I lost my home. Right now, I’m crazier than I was a few months ago because I’m not entirely clear on where my rent money is coming from next month.

Persecuting, incarcerating, blaming and pathologizing the homeless, then, is an attempt to reassure the working poor that they cannot become homeless, first, by rendering the homeless less visible, and second, by defining them as intrinsically unlike those who still have homes.

That is why these attacks on the very poor are part and parcel of Vision’s mass renoviction strategy. Vision received the votes of 70% of the city’s renters in the last election. To maintain that support, it is crucial for them to reassure people living paycheque to paycheque that, by virtue of their nature, they could never end up begging on the street or sleeping under a bridge or in a shelter because they’re not crazy criminals. As long as people believe that homelessness is caused by character defects.

And so, Vision hopes, they feel mildly reassured as our mayor flashes his pearly whites while the homeless are dragged off to jail, out of sight and out of mind. And we can reassure ourselves that nothing too bad has happened. After all, this policy is being implemented by a team including a former NDP MLA, Canada’s first Green school trustee and a longtime Communist Party activist; it must be progressive.

Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite | January 10, 2013

Political Geography of Community – Part 3: Communities and Neighbourhoods: Conflate at Your Peril

Recently, events in the organizations in which I am most involved these days have brought two crucial questions to the fore: (a) what is a community and (b) how does a community achieve representation? As the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) seeks to rebuild itself, as Fair Vote Canada struggles to deal with a fight over municipal voting reform in Toronto that threatens to engulf an entirely national movement in an ugly parochial schism, they avoid these fundamental questions at their peril.

Community, in my view, is an experience, a set of interactions that bind a group of people together. Communities are contingent upon continued interaction and interrelation; their composition is in constant flux and individuals’ interactions shift, based on their interests, location, time, tastes, politics and a host of other factors. Individuals, corporations and governments can decide to try and create communities but their success in doing so is never guaranteed because community is not prescriptive; it is descriptive of something that is taking place in the present. In other words, community is something that is done, not something that is declared.

Every day, we participate in community. Our workplaces are sometimes part of that, depending on where we work, how we work and what our colleagues are like. Similarly, depending on the kinds of families we have, this, too, is often but not necessarily a locus of community for many of us. Those of us who are part of racialized minorities are often in communities constructed along racial lines, sometimes in shared self-defense, sometimes in celebrating a history of struggle. Religious affiliation is also a major locus of community-making in our culture. Often, the communities with which we most enthusiastically engage are communities built around aesthetics, ideology or shared recreational pursuits. In my life, some of the most important communities are based around a shared appreciation of old school Doctor Who and Asian fusion cuisine, a commitment to proportional representation and to fighting poverty and climate change.

When one looks at community as a lived experience, it is hard, in a dense, urban centre, to find people who would rate their neighbourhood or their street as a major locus of community. I certainly do not. I have no shared day-to-day experience of fellowship and commonality with the overwhelming majority of people who live near me. That’s not to say I don’t care about them or that I won’t experience community in the future. But it does mean that when I do experience future community with them, it will likely not be because we are engaging around issues to do with our surroundings but because it turns out that, coincidentally, they are part of one of the communities that is real for me, because they turn out to be fellow socialists, environmentalists or Doctor Who fans.

The reality is that I experience more community, in a week, with a college instructor in Maricopa County, AZ, I have never encountered in person, whom I met through a friend of a friend of a friend in a Facebook discussion about the US 2010 midterm elections, than I do with either of my next door neighbours.

That is not to say that neighbourhood identity is not an important part of experiencing community for some of my fellow Vancouverites. In a handful of places, there exists a real sense of geographic identity and neighbourhood solidarity. But the experiences of people in places with the most intense neighborhood consciousness, the Downtown Eastside, Commerical Drive and Shaughnessy are generalized at our peril. People who live in those places are generally pretty special people who have, unlike the vast majority of Vancouverites, decided to make significant sacrifices and difficult life choices to situate themselves in one of the handful of places in the Lower Mainland where neighbourhood identity matters.

There is another group of people who experience neighbourhood as a significant form of community. They are the local — and excuse the pejorative tone of the term but nothing else will suffice — busybodies. They are people who have decided to be unlike the majority of their neighbours and get involved in organizing ratepayers’ associations, local civic festivals and government planning processes around transportation and development. But these groups should not be mistaken for people typifying or representing their neighbours; they are people who draw solidarity and generate community, who develop affinity with one another, precisely because of how unlike their neighbours they are. A residents’ association activist in Dunbar has far more in common with a residents’ association activist in Fraserview than she does with a Dunbar resident who never attends neighbourhood-focused events.

Neighbourhood activists, then, are not so much people whose experience of community is based on their neighbourhood as they are people whose experience of community is based on a shared set of political and aesthetic commitments about what neighbourhoods should be. These commitments, furthermore, are not located in the present. Neighbourhood activists are aspirational or nostalgic in their politics; they either celebrate an imagined past of neighbourhood solidarity and community or they look forward to creating such communities in future, often allied with the hundred mile diet, slow food movement, etc. While neighbourhood activists often deserve accolades for their work against gentrification, overdevelopment and a host of other ills, I do not believe we should compliment them with the concession that their theory of neighbourliness is true in the present for most people, because it simply is not.

These questions of community would merely be academic if they did not so profoundly taint our politics and the ongoing project of seeing voters represented by officials they choose, who reflect their concerns and priorities.
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When I vote, I want to be able to pool my vote with people with whom I actually experience community and I want others to be able to do the same. I want my vote to be counted with people who share my environmental concerns, whether they live on Boundary Road or Oak Street; I want my vote to be counted with people who share my concerns about poverty and issues of affordability, whether they have a view of the Fraser River or Burrard Inlet. And I would be very happy for us to be represented by the same person or people in City Council.

The last thing I want is for an arbitrary polygon containing about 61,000 people to be drawn around my apartment and to be told “this is your community; your interests are those of the other 61,000; and you will all have a single representative on city council to reflect the consensus of your community.” What consensus? What community? Benedict Anderson wrote of nations as “imagined communities.” Municipal wards aren’t even that. They are imaginary communities.

How the people chosen to represent these false, nonexistent communities are chosen is of no interest to me because conceding this makes a mockery not just of community but of representation and democracy.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, forward-looking people in England came to recognize that the old voting system they had designed in 1215 to represent medieval communities, which were profoundly geographically structured, had run its course and the “limited vote” system was instituted to give the residents of the ascendant market and industrial towns a form of proportional representation, so that communities in overlapping geographic areas could enjoy concurrent representation in parliament. Unfortunately, as the nineteenth century wore on, those reforms were chipped away and people were once again shoehorned into false communities of neighbourhood as the English elite took measure to prevent the rise of labour politics and the emancipation of the working class.

The deliberate and coercive conflation of “neighbourhood” and “community” in a political system is a fundamentally conservative project. It seeks to displace voluntary and real forms of community with coercive and hypothetical forms. It alienates the majority of the populace from participation in government by ensuring (a) that they are “represented” by someone for whom they did not vote and (b) that they are alienated from elected officials with whom they might share ideological, ethnocultural or other genuine forms of community. Neighbourhood consciousness seeks to erase real cleavages in terms of ideology, class, wealth and status and replace them with a romantic myth of community that never existed. It helps to render our political conversations incoherent and to turn them away from real debates about the fundamental questions that determine the kind of city in which we live to focus on intersection signalization and potholes.

Now that is not to say that single-member wards are the worst thing that could happen to a city. It may well be that the current rigged, majoritarian, at-large system in Vancouver that can allow a party to sweep all 27 seats with only 43% of the vote, as happened in 1996, is actually worse. But having lived in Toronto with its hyper-parochial neighbourhood politics, it is not that much worse. But much more importantly, in both of these cities, we can do a lot better; we can create a voting system that actually empowers communities, that actually represents people, that facilitates, instead of repressing political debate.

It is for this reason that I have taken the position I have in the Fair Vote Canada referendum currently underway and it is for this reason that I am working hard to have COPE update its electoral reform policies and return them to the platform on which we ran in 1999.

In a future post, I will talk about some alternatives that could move us towards a civic politics that represents communities. In the interim, as I encourage you to look at the two reports I co-authored on civic democracy in Toronto in 2005 and 2008.

Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Politics of Identity | fusangite | January 8, 2013

Finding the Good Side of the Georgia Viaduct

Now that I am paying more attention to civic issues in Vancouver, it’s easy to get caught up in producing an endless barrage of criticism, given the reliably disappointing set of policies and processes coming out of our hip, shiny attractive city council.

One such policy I could spend today’s column railing against is the plan to demolish the Georgia Viaduct overpass system and replace it with – you guessed it, more condos with the usual mix of designer clothing stores, Donnelly Group pubs, Starbucks coffee shops, marble-countered ice cream parlours, yoga studios and noodle houses along the ground floor. Now, far be it from me to say something bad about a new noodle house but surely, we can’t really be thinking that what Vancouver needs is more of the identical, sanitized landscape we see radiating out from the Olympic Village.

Often the case for such a move is founded on spurious environmental arguments. “Eco-density,” now rivals “clean coal,” when it comes to greenwashing bullshit terminology, or more politely, the BC dialect of Newspeak. Demolishing perfectly good infrastructure and laying down a bunch more asphalt and fill is not an ecological pursuit, nor is building a bunch more condos with a bunch more underground parking and filling them with a bunch more people. This kind of thing doesn’t save the Lower Mainland from suburban sprawl because the people buying family-friendly townhomes in Langley are not considering sea view micro-condos on False Creek or vice versa.

Nevertheless, anyone wandering through Andy Livingston Park and environs can see that Vancouver is not making the best use it can of the space around our viaducts and Skytrain guideway. So here is where I get positive.

Map of Chicago's Multi-Level Streets — Courtesy of Wikipedia, a map of Chicago’s multi-level streets.

For some reason or other I kept getting stuck in Chicago this year and while I was there, I spent a good amount of time wandering around its downtown, which contains twenty elevated streets, like North Michigan Avenue. North Michigan is the land of blue chip stores, head offices and ultra-pricey hotels, or at least that’s what is on the top layer. But underneath it is a whole separate street grid with lower-rent, more interesting establishments, establishments that help to keep downtown vibrant because their rents and taxes are lower thanks to being, literally, in the shadow of North Michigan. Because that’s one thing an overpass or viaduct can do in the centre of a city; it can create a rent shadow, an island of affordable rents in the middle of downtown.

North Michigan's Billy Goat Tavern — This business would not be possible on Upper Michigan Avenue but it’s exactly the kind of business we see underneath it.

Approaching North Michigan — North Michigan doesn’t look pretty from every angle. That’s kind of the point.

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For a more local example, you can look at New Westminster’s Front Street, at least for now. Like Vancouver, New West is proposing a bunch of eco-density in place of its Front Street overpass, a real tragedy. Low rent commercial space near a downtown commercial hub is hard to create and can give rise to beautiful things. When I used to walk along Front in the 90s, it had a wonderful mix of vacant storefronts and businesses that had no business existing in a modern capitalist economy, storefront churches, galleries of unpopular and peculiar art and protracted yard sales dressed up as antique shops.

New Westminster's Front Street — There was no plan to make Front Street an interesting commercial space yet that is what it became thanks to a viaduct.

Greater Vancouver’s downtowns are rapidly losing commercial space where interesting things can happen. Musical venues and gallery spaces for artists who are not already established, experimental businesses, the very things that we supposedly love our cities for are being hunted to extinction by municipal governments who have lost sight of what actual makes for creative, vibrant urban space. And it is very rare, once the forces of gentrification begin marching, to turn that around.

But that is precisely the opportunity we have with the Georgia Viaduct. The city has the opportunity to build unconventional commercial and industrial space under the viaducts, all by ourselves, and rent it out to businesses that otherwise wouldn’t be anywhere near our downtown. This is something our government can do, all by itself.

Granville Island remains a testament to what a government can do to create good places. We didn’t contract Granville Island out to developers; instead, the government managed public land with a goal of creating something more interesting than a profit-driven private developer could, mixing industrial, artisanal and commercial space.

Imagine if, instead of knocking down our viaducts, we built under them, creating short-lease gallery space for shows and installations, light industrial artisanal and craft cooperatives, non-profit office space and other projects approved by a citizen board with a mandate to keep our downtown weird and interesting.

City councilors like Geoff Meggs have done us a favour by starting a substantive debate about our viaducts and overpasses. And they are quite right that this space is not delivering for Vancouverites. But the solution is not to destroy that space; it is to act with creativity and frugality to make it into something worthwhile.

Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite | December 7, 2012

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