Why Vancouver’s NPA Lost Badly Today

Because I like to make electoral predictions, I guessed that the NPA would elect 5 people to various councils in Vancouver. It turns out I was generous. They got 4 in, unless more official results in the coming days alter that.

This doesn’t really prove that the NPA is dead. Corporate donations will keep the NPA or some future clone alive forever, regardless of the fact that the 4 NPAs elected will likely never cast a meaningful vote in the next 3 years. This is good because I’m quite tired of Ken Denike. But that’s another story. Ask me over a beer at the Public Lounge some time. Even if Kennedy Stewart were right and they were totally wiped off all councils, they’d still be back, strong as ever with their corporate cash.

Here are some of the stories that made for today’s COPE/Vision/Green win, in their order of significance:

Populism!

North American politics are populist right now. Obama, the rise in the federal NDP, the federal Liberals’ inability to raise more funds from more people than the federal NDP, and the mobilization of people rejecting apathy to join Vision Vancouver–all these show that citizens matter. The NPA is like the federal Conservatives and Liberals: complacent, corporate-friendly parties that have never felt the need to <irony>pander</irony> to human beings for money and volunteer support, while relying on corporate cash to use the media to encourage enough voters to drink their Kool-aid.

The progressive win in Vancouver is a testament to grassroots mobilization. And as much as the Republicans demeaned Obama as being a community organizer, that’s exactly what got him ahead of Hillary Clinton and into the White House, and what got the NPA machine out of Vancouver city hall.

This is also why the BC Liberals’ recent Whistler convention was demonizing the NDP all day, all the time: they’re afraid of being tied in the polls, they’re fiscal neoliberal Milton Friedman worshippers during the biggest global economic crisis in capitalism in a century, they watched Obama get elected and Harper not win a majority [despite calling the election for before the US election, knowing he'll never get a majority after Obama wins], and they know that even with the soft fascist censorship of Bill 42, they are screwed because they are as unable to mobilize human beings to vote them into a third term in May as the NPA was in recent weeks. [Exhale. Sorry for the long sentence!]

The right always loses to mobilized progressives who get out the vote by shedding the apathy we’re lured into by the cynical right wing. And the provincial NDP just successfully ran its third dress rehearsal for the May 2009 election [working on the federal election, the 2 Vancouver by-elections and the munis]. Obama has a database of 3 million contributors. He will not be throwing that away now that he’s elected. He’ll mobilize it. The NPA and the BC and federal Liberals and Conservatives will never have that. But progressives do.

Red States, Blue States

The map of mayoral votes: can you say red states, blue states?

OK, even with no guarantee of data quality and with some oversimplifications, if you know anything about the rich and poor in Vancouver, this map makes perfect sense. Where do the rich and/or conservative live? Yaletown, Point Grey, south of 16th and west of Main, the bedroom community/pseudo-suburb of southeast Vancouver. No surprise, all red for the NPA. Coal Harbour would go NPA if it weren’t largely filled with empty condos owned by thousands foreigners needing a Vancouver home.

Where do the not so rich or conservative, and/or working class and/or immigrants who didn’t buy their citizenship and/or young and/or single live? Everywhere else, where people outnumber the NPA voters and voted Gregor green.

The $100 Million Olympic Village Elephant

Peter Ladner and so many others commenting on the $100 million problem with loaning the Olympic Village development with our cash still don’t get it. It’s not about how certain things happen in-camera. It’s not about whether councilors were fully informed before voting. It’s not about the privacy of businesses. “It’s the economy, stupid!”

Here’s how. Stephen Harper’s sweater vest didn’t save him from demonstrating how out of touch he is with most Canadians when he said the global economic meltdown is a good time to invest in some bargains in the stock market. Heck, even the CanWest toxic waste machine is laying off 560 workers in part because of the global meltdown and their share price dropping 90% this year. They’re sure a bargain, but the better bargain will be in watching them implode so that we can dilute the corporate concentration of media in Vancouver and Canada with more competition and less autocratic control of news…and, frankly, better jobs for the journalists forced to work for the Aspers.

But the $100 million problem is about how the International Olympic Committee and VANOC are not transparent organizations. They are secret, above democracy, and the IOC is even above countries. They’re designed to be unaccountable to us even though they are spending billions of dollars of our tax money while people die in the streets and on surgery waiting lists. Shameful.

Ladner is so out of touch: “It’s completely irresponsible and ridiculous to think that we could do all this in public and still protect the taxpayer….Why would the Olympics be different? The scope is bigger but the framework of the deal is the same. The city does this stuff all the time — it has done this for years.” But when you mix this repulsion with the secrecy of the Olympics oligarchy, you get one pissed off electorate. Whoops.

And he doesn’t even get the irony about how little the taxpayer is being protected in any of this Olympics deal anyway. The solution would have been to explain how in-camera works, then come out and say that when it’s out of in-camera, they’ll explain to people all the details. No, wait. They can’t do that because of all the Olympics secrecy. That’s the bigger whoops. Like it or not, the city is symbiotically embroiled in the grand, global secrecy regime of the Olympics. Watch your wallets, folks.

Plumping

Ellen Woodsworth was elected in a very small part from plumping. Plumping works. Some COPE supporters who were frustrated by the nature of the deal with Vision and Green–and others–voted for only COPE members and not for others on the slate from Vision. Ellen Woodsworth got elected to the last city council spot by 1023 votes over Kashmir Dhaliwal [the only Vision candidate for any council to not get elected] as of 10:24pm Saturday night. I doubt all those votes were from people voting for her and avoiding voting for Vision candidates to keep one or more of them from getting more votes than her. But with not too different arithmetic, the plumpers would have made the difference.

Privatized Police

Korina Houghton didn’t get elected to city council for the NPA even though she had a full-page ad in 24hrs on Friday. Part of her plan was to “combat crime through continued support of the ambassador program” meaning the Downtown Ambassadors, the partially city-funded, private pretend cops designed to criminalize the <irony>unsightly</irony> people from business areas. If 11,300 more voters actually wanted a private police force created by business owners and not transparently accountable to the public despite their public funding, she would have beaten Ellen Woodsworth for the 10th spot on council. Thankfully those 11,300 people don’t exist. And while we’re at it, let’s de-fang the Ambassadors and get them back to helping tourists get from the art gallery back to the cruise ship terminal. And I’ll leave out all that business about Kanman Wong’s campaign literature saying one thing in Chinese and another in English. He’s had his political career maimed enough already…remember David Emerson?

Wasting Votes for the Liberals

To the editor,

Regarding “Liberals have a worthy leader in Stéphane Dion” by Fiona Hughes in the October 1, 2008 Courier newspaper:

I appreciate Ms. Hughes’ fine exploration of the toxicity of Stephen Harper as prime minister of a minority government and how awful it would be for the rapidly privatizing Canadian culture if he were to become the leader of a majority government.

The reality, thankfully, is that centre and right-wing Canadians are almost evenly split between the Liberals and Reform/Conservatives and the polling numbers have barely budged since the 2006 election. The USA is similar with a near even split between red and blue state voters.

Because of this voter split and since the Bloc is doing so well in Quebec, we have little chance of seeing a majority government again in the near future, or ever. This is good, since majority governments are inherently tyrannical.

But what Ms. Hughes fails to point out is that Dion’s Liberals lacked integrity and provided Harper a de facto majority government every time they abstained on a vote, allowing the toxic Harper to behave like a slightly moderated autocrat.

And since the Liberal caucus has their knives out for Dion once he doesn’t deliver a Liberal majority, the party’s cohesion has been eroding since the election was called. So a vote for the Liberals is a vote for a fractured party with a conflicted sense of self-identity on the verge of yet another leadership race.

It is no coincidence that the NDP has been rising steadily in the polls and has behaved as the de facto official opposition in the last parliament. When it comes to a party that speaks for Canadians, the NDP has stood up to the Reform/Conservative Party and the Liberals, who have been afraid to crash Harper’s parliament because they were never ready to have an election. They still aren’t, which is why Harper had to crash his own parliament.

And the Liberals still don’t deserve our votes. As much as the Democrats in the USA are Republicans-lite, so too are the Liberals: slightly more socially progressive yet just as fiscally hyper-conservative as the Reform/Conservative party.

And as for voting for Wendy Yuan in Vancouver-Kingsway, there is no hope that the Reform/Conservative Party’s attempt at a candidate will win the riding. He is the president of Reform/Conservative’s Delta-Richmond East constituency, and like Ms. Yuan, doesn’t live in Vancouver-Kingsway, but owns a home in Richmond (though last fall Mrs. Yuan rented an apartment in Collingwood). David Emerson also didn’t live in the riding.

So strategic voting in Vancouver-Kingsway is unnecessary. Vote for the principled NDP and let the Liberal Party continue its implosion because they will not be a cohesive force in the next parliament any more than they were in the last one.

Stephen Elliott-Buckley
Vancouver

Shirley Bond is Desperate for Re-Election

If anyone has any pretense about being an effective school board trustee in British Columbia come this November 15th, read this piece from our Education Minister.

If you do not fly into a focused righteous rage at the insanity of it and your mission to destroy the provincial government’s anti-human, anti-social agenda, step out of the way for those who will.

As Bond pretends to have nothing to do with boards of education closing schools, my jaw hangs in shock at her gall and offense to anyone connected with the 177 schools closed under their watch since 2001.

Boards of education are arms-length blockers for a government out to privatize education as they gathered $10 billion in surpluses in the last 3 years. To avoid doing the nasty work, the Education Ministry strangles the budgets of school districts forcing them to enact Campbell’s “tough choices” in his “new era.”

Neighbourhoods of Learning is a fascinating solution to the problem her government created, but it is a solution implemented in the 1990s by the NDP government. The fact that it is showing up now indicates its effectiveness and the fact that Bond et al have realized they are behind in the polls with an election looming. Absolute cynicism.

Neighbourhoods of Learning as a broad philosophy could have been used to put in more subsidized childcare space to empty classrooms to avoid closing any schools. Since the ministry knows the declining enrolment is but a blip, when numbers rise again and our facilities will not be able to accomodate the capacity, expect provincial subsidization of private school infrastructure, just like last October’s announcement of provincial subsidization of private child care infrastructure. It’s all part of the crisis creation in the privatization agenda.

Shirley Bond: desperate for re-election, about to receive her termination notice.

Source: Nanaimo Daily News

Boards, not government, decide to close schools

Published: Friday, September 12, 2008

I’d like to take this opportunity to clarify some misconceptions that may
have been created by an editorial on education that appeared recently in
your newspaper.

Our government has not, in fact, directed boards of education in British
Columbia to close or sell schools. Those are decisions that have been made
in good faith by locally elected school trustees — the people we believe
are in the best position to make them.

Over a decade of declining enrolment has led boards to close under-utilized
school spaces in various parts of the province. However, I must point out
that the trend of school closures did not begin under this government, nor
is it limited to B.C. Declining enrolment is a nation-wide occurrence and
many provinces are considering solutions that include incorporating more
community usage of school buildings so that valuable assets don’t sit empty.

The Neighbourhoods of Learning concept announced by our Premier last week is
just such a plan – encouraging the development of community solutions to
fill excess space in our schools and create community hubs where services
are co-located within underutilized space.

This is not a new direction — our government has encouraged community use
of underutilized space through the School Community Connections program
since the beginning of our mandate and our rapidly growing StrongStart B.C.
program has continued in that vein. Our recently announced school closure
and disposal policy requires boards to consider such usage, as well as
potential space needs for early learning programming, in their future
planning.

It should also be noted that despite a decline of more than 50,000 students
since 2001, our government has increased overall education funding by 23% –
to a budget this school year of nearly $5.7 billion. That clearly dispels
claims of underfunding made by the president of the Nanaimo teachers’ local
that appeared in a recent letter to the editor in your newspaper.

Per-student funding in the province has risen to an estimated $8,078 this
school year, up nearly $1,900 per student since 2001. We have the highest
budget for education in B.C.’s history, despite a significant loss of
students over the last decade.

Shirley Bond
Minister of Education

Recipe for Assassinating the CBC

1. Start with an ideology that opposes communitarianism and public ownership and worships the market’s capacity to create “the good” even if the market is far from freely competitive. The federal Liberals and Conservatives have well demonstrated this.
2. Choke its funding.
3. Appoint corporate leaders who wouldn’t dare come up with an original idea to guide CBC as a core part of the ever morphing Canadian culture.
4. Fail several years ago to come up with the cash necessary to secure continued rights from the NHL to broadcast Hockey Night in Canada, the core brand of MotherCorp and the closest thing we have to a central icon of Canadiana.
5. Cancel shows like This is Wonderland just as they receive a plethora of award nominations.
6. Murder the CBC orchestra.
7. Intentionally bungle securing the rights to the theme song to Hockey Night in Canada.
8. Let bake for several years at 43,500 degrees.
9. Don’t turn off the oven so that the whole concoction burns to a crisp: strangled of cash, free of its flagship show and cultural icons.
10. Turn off the oven after it’s too late, take out the burnt carcass and say it can’t compete with CTV, TSN, Global and the Americans; put a bullet in its head.
11. Toss it in the garbage and instead of auctioning, give away at fire sale prices the broadcast frequencies that MotherCorp held for generations to the strongest of corporations in a bizarre corporate welfare pitch in an arena where Big Media wants to take away a nation-wide network of frequencies that up until a few years from now were owned by the (fucking) people.
12. Pretend you don’t know what oligopoly means.
13. Worship Rupert Murdoch and Leonard Asper.

Gordon’s New Hoax: Informed Climate Change Policy

Hot on the heals of Steve in Ottawa, Gordon in Victoria is trying to look like he knows what he is talking about with the climate change thing.

Embracing the Gateway Project goals that link in with the North American SuperCorridor, worshiping the car and pretending to care about transit while removing democracy from the TransLink board are pretty cynical.

But worse is Gordon’s idiocy when he was being interviewed by Vaughn Palmer on theVoice of BC TV program last fall almost bragging about how he just made up a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions without any real scientific backing. He should have at least read George Monbiot’s Heat. Here is how Palmer described it in his column on January 16, 2008:

It has been almost a year since the throne speech announced the premier’s goal of reducing greenhouse gases by one-third.

Where did he get the target? I asked him a while back.

“I don’t want to pretend that I went out and asked a scientific panel about how to get there,” Campbell replied. “I didn’t.”

Rather he picked the target out of the air, then set his officials the task of determining the means and cost of hitting it.

It’s clear that window dressing is important as Gordon traipses around the left half of the continent signing non-binding memoranda of understanding with various other jurisdictions on fixing the climate change problem…while twinning our bridges and building more roads.

But today, when my email Inbox received Steve’s crazy treaty ratification nonsense, I received Gordon’s announcement [and below] that he’s going to actually try to come up with some science from a new wonderful scientific panel to back up his desire to be the green premier with the brand new Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions.

Not trusting the fellow at all, I watched his government flip from promoting racist policy towards First Nations with a treaty referendum which facilitated open discrimination, to one that uses treaties to skim land from the Agricultural Land Reserve. Now our leader is trying to come up with some semblance of expert backing for his whimsical climate change solutions.

Despite not trusting the premier, I expect that there is a chance that this Institute can actually come up with some real contributions to the issue. I worry, though, that its creation–being significantly political and optical–may confine its work to solutions that will allow the climate change deniers and avoiders, as well as the rich and SUV-lovers to keep driving on our smoothly paved, privatized toll roads and bridges.

And in the end, the first sentence of the announcement just made my stomach spin. The province will seek legislative approval for the Institute. It’s almost as if folks in Victoria and Ottawa co-ordinated their press releases to capitalize on the idea that legislative oversight actually matters. BC signed a new corporate bill of rights combined with a de facto economic union with Alberta in TILMA after secret negotiations and won’t allow the agreement to be ratified in the ledge. BC has removed democratic accountability from TransLink, but they are promoting how important it is to get legislative approval for building this Institute.

It’s just too much to bear in one day.

And to rub in the gall is the constant reference to the role of the private sector in the Institute. P3s are so sexy these days for neoliberals. Governments, academics and the private sector: nice. What of labour, NGOs, environmental groups, the rest of civil society? No need. In the privatized commons view of Gordon’s neoliberalism, the business sector is sufficient.

And quite frankly, I don’t want the private sector to have anything to do with the kind of socio-behavioural change required in our society to avert climate change disaster.

Premier’s Office PREM:EX wrote:

January 25, 2008
B.C. to Fund World-Leading Climate Research

Vancouver – The Province will seek legislative approval for $94.5 million to create the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, which will bring together top scientists, researchers, governments and the private sector to develop innovative climate change adaptation and mitigation solutions, Premier Gordon Campbell announced today.

“British Columbia universities have some of the top climate scientists and researchers in the world,” said Campbell. “This institute will bring together those academics, along with others from around the world, with business and the private sector to develop new policy alternatives, to find ways to educate and encourage greener lifestyles, and to develop new, green technologies into products that can be used by consumers around the globe.”

The Institute will be a unique joint collaboration between the province’s four research-intensive universities – the University of Victoria, University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University and University of Northern British Columbia – the private sector and government. It will bring provincial, national and international climate researchers together to work with governments and the private sector to develop ideas that can be applied and transferred to government, industry and the public.

Besides providing research support and developing innovative alternatives such as new energy systems, new forms of transportation, alternative technologies, and socio-behavioral change, the Institute will also provide the public with information and ideas on how to reduce individual greenhouse gas emissions through public forums, publications and online information. It will provide education, training and outreach to business leaders, government staff and non-government organizations via workshops, short courses and publications.

The Institute will be founded on four pillars: Research on climate change impacts; assessment of mitigation and adaptation options, including technology development; education and capacity building; and outreach through knowledge management and technology transfer.

The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions will be hosted and the collaboration led by the University of Victoria, utilizing existing space. The proposed funding will be used to support research projects, staff salaries, graduate fellowships and internships. The endowment will ensure the Institute will operate in perpetuity.

“Linking British Columbia’s climate researchers together and with other national and international researchers will help us develop and apply knowledge to British Columbia situations,” said University of Victoria president David Turpin. “It will also ensure that research is meaningfully transferred to government, industry and the public and secure B.C.’s leadership in this important area.”

“Developing technologies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions represents not only a challenge, but an economic opportunity,” said Environment Minister Barry Penner. “We have at least 18,000 people working on leading-edge technological solutions in B.C., which we can market to the world.”

Advanced Education Minister Murray Coell said the Institute will build on existing climate research initiatives currently operating in B.C., such as the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium.

“This will serve as a linchpin for a Pacific regional network that includes key scholars from B.C.’s four research-intensive universities, major Alberta universities, and universities from Washington, California and others,” said Coell. “The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions will be a valuable resource to government and the private sector by providing access to the considerable climate change expertise found in British Columbia’s universities.”

The Institute will be governed by a consortium of British Columbia’s four research universities and will receive advice and guidance from an advisory board made up of public and private sector stakeholders.

The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions’ mission will be: ‘To partner with governments, the private sector, other researchers and civil society, in order to undertake research on, monitor, and assess the potential impacts of climate change and to assess, develop and promote viable mitigation and adaptation options to better inform climate change policies and actions.’

The Institute will stimulate and promote the development and commercialization of world-leading climate change solutions and assist government and the private sector in selecting the best possible solutions to be applied to mitigation and adaptation. It will support and promote societal change and use the synergies of a broad collaboration to leverage funding coming into the province. The Institute will also be a key partner in providing education and training opportunities for graduate students, both in British Columbia and globally.

British Columbia is legally mandated to reduce B.C. greenhouse gases by 33 per cent below 2007 levels by 2020; reduce emissions by at least 80 per cent below 2007 levels by 2050; and make all provincial government operations carbon-neutral by 2010.

Link to More Information:

Backgrounder — B.C. Founds Cutting-Edge Climate Solutions Institute

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