People who have read my previous election posts will not be surprised that I want to start by talking about political signs.
The operatives of most political parties apparently believe that signs, preferably lots of signs, influence people to vote for their candidate. So they place them in bursts on the verges beside the highway and at prominent intersections. I believe this practice seriously underestimates the intelligence of voters, so whenever I had input into NDP campaigns I argued that signs should go on lawns, showing who was voting for the candidate and party. And that was (mostly) what we did and continue to do.
One time we even placed a sticker on the candidate sign,”This family votes for...”
Of course most of us don’t know the people who have taken the sign. No matter. Because what the sign actually shows is organization: this party has identified who many of its supporters are and has a crew who will erect their sign for them. That’s a powerful message, one that smart politics doesn’t dilute by placing random signage just anywhere.
The local NDP sign campaign, led by Wayne Youde as usual, didn’t disappoint.
In the past federal elections in Campbell River the NDP sign campaign left all the others behind. Not so much this time, because the Conservatives had Downey signs all over our neighbourhood, very shortly after the election was called: it’s almost as if they were entirely prepared well in advance!
Of course, they had help: there has been a “Forestry feeds My Family” campaign involving lawn signs and bumper stickers here for some time, recently amplified by the Fairy Creek blockade, especially since it morphed from a campaign to protect one valley into one that calls for the end to most logging on the Island. So it wasn’t much of a surprise to those of us who have been paying attention that when the election was called these issue signs were replaced by Conservative signs.
The other issue that played into Conservative hands here erupted when the Liberal Fisheries and Oceans Minister announced an end to open-net fish pens in the Discovery Islands. That decision was supported by our NDP MP, and it became a plank in Ms Downey’s campaign to point out that MP Blaney was married to Darren Blaney, Chief of the Homalco Band, who was one of the architects of the ban. Campbell River is home to many fish farmers and their families; Campbell River City Council even made a point of being outraged on their behalf.
In fact, they were so outraged that they voted to install an enormous sign at the corner of Hilchey and Dogwood. I’m assuming that Council made this decision well before the election call, and that they had no partisan-political intention beyond supporting forestry and fisheries, but it was installed about two weeks into the campaign, neatly echoing –– probably inadvertently but possibly not, and how were we to know –– Conservative literature.
The very worst verge warrior this time was “Dr Jennifer Grenz” of the Liberals. The signs looked good, easily visible from a distance, but I didn’t see any on lawns. This of course leads to the conclusion that they had far more signs than organization, and her final vote of just over 7,000, compared to nearly 22,000 for Rachel Blaney and just over 20,000 for Shelley Downey, rather proved that point.
The other note I would have is that the Liberal campaign didn’t understand the riding. Yes, it’s good to have an indigenous candidate, and we applaud her PhD accomplishment, but neither of those is a winning attribute in North Island-Powell River; rather, they’re more likely to be hurdles to be overcome. MP Blaney never talks about being married to Chief Blaney for a reason: she has read the room! (and of course commands an organization, so she doesn’t need to).
Jody
On my Twitter feed the GlobeandMail took a good deal of stick for printing three excerpts from Jody Wilson’s new book, curiously released in advance of its original publication date to coincide with the election campaign. Robert Fife particularly took pains to try and find something scandalous to report. In the end, the only new accusation they could find was that she claimed the Prime Minister wanted her to lie, which is pretty thin gruel without any evidence.
David Olive of the Star wrote a particularly insightful piece on the controversy that ended Ms Wilson’s Liberal career. His conclusion: “Wilson-Raybould is an interesting example of bringing narcissism and absolutism together in the lab” As it’s behind a paywall, I’ll include just a few highlights:
"Wilson-Raybould became obsessed with refusing to overrule the decision by the head of her ministry’s Public Prosecution Service of Canada (PPSC) that SNC did not deserve a DPA.
Wilson-Raybould was, and remains, self-righteous in depicting herself as a lone defender of legal principle, though she has yet to spell out what exactly that principle is.
DPAs are widely used in major economies, including the U.S., the U.K. and much of Europe. Canada added the DPA process to its judicial system in 2018.
A DPA is an out-of-court settlement in which an accused company pays a large fine, cleanses its corporate culture of every last vestige of unethical practices, and submits to a probationary period to ensure it is adhering to the highest standards of corporate governance.
DPAs give prosecutors an additional tool to resolve cases, in an expeditious way that also reduces costs in the judicial system.
As it turned out, SNC quietly reached a negotiated settlement with federal prosecutors in December 2019, with no involvement from the Trudeau government.
SNC pleaded guilty to a single charge of fraud, rather than a potentially more damaging bribery charge. It agreed to pay a sizable $280-million fine, roughly equal to the company’s average annual profits over five years. And it submitted to three years of court-monitored probation.
Wilson-Raybould’s actions were and remain quixotic.
She evinced little interest in SNC or DPAs to understand the larger context of her actions.
Not knowing better, Wilson-Raybould staked her political career on defending a nascent PPSC, created by the Harper government, that is disdained by some top Liberals as a clique of impractical legal purists. They have a point, given the PPSC’s obstinance on the SNC file.
Wilson-Raybould has little to say about the accomplishments of the Trudeau government in which she served. On Trudeau’s Canada Child Benefit, for instance, which has lifted about 300,000 children from poverty.
Wilson-Raybould did, however, trouble to disseminate a lengthy list of her own achievements as justice minister on being demoted from that post.
Wilson-Raybould knows she is an important person. She expected Trudeau to fire advisers in his PMO more seasoned than herself who had communicated with her about SNC. She has equated her treatment by the PMO to the “Saturday Night Massacre,” a shocking episode in Richard Nixon’s manoeuvres to subvert the U.S. Constitution.
Trudeau’s reminder to Wilson-Raybould that “there are differences between pressure and direction” went over her head. (Pressure is guidance; direction is an order.) Wilson-Raybould still doesn’t grasp that she was insubordinate and was getting away with it."
I’m not in the footsteps of my Twitter people when I say I think the Globe ultimately did us a service by publishing the excerpts, even though it was pretty clearly a political decision designed to hamper Liberals. I thought the last excerpt, in which Ms Wilson describes her relationships with her cabinet colleagues, particularly enlightening. In it she complains that she frequently told other ministers what to do when confronted with an indigenous file or issue, only to be rebuffed! Imagine!
Clearly she imagines that as an indigenous person she innately had a better grasp of the file than a person whose job it actually was. No wonder she was unhappy, and no wonder she was fired.
I guess we could make excuses if she actually did the job she was assigned. But no, critical files stayed on her desk and didn’t get done. She went through 3(?) Executive Assistants in her brief tenure. As for her handling of the Justice file, she didn’t advance the agenda at all: ask any defence lawyer who has indigenous clients...
Nonetheless, she has her fans in North Island. She apparently has a home on Quadra, although she lives in Vancouver and represented a Vancouver riding (just reclaimed by the Liberals, by the way) She endorsed MP Blaney, and the former BC Minister of Highways, our former MLA, Claire Trevena, lauded her on Facebook for “telling truth to power”.
I don’t have the stomach to read the book, though.
Justus
We’ve been involved in local NDP politics since we lived in Quesnel when I was a beginning teacher. Sometimes very involved. Consequently we always have an NDP sign on the lawn; our neighbours would certainly wonder if we didn’t. So by now everyone knows that when we vote, we vote NDP.
Except that’s not true, and that fact came home dramatically when I discussed the election with my brother on Saltspring, who really does (I believe) always vote NDP.
I hated our federal campaign largely because Singh was unable to expound on even one plank of the platform without bringing up “Justin Trudeau” and his record of talking a good game but never doing anything.
(According to Singh; not my opinion at all.)
Anyway, I realized that if I had to vote in Saanich-the-Islands, as my brother does, I’d vote for Elizabeth May to avoid electing the Conservative. I’m very much not a fan of the Greens (although May is a remarkable retail politician, and I do admire that). In other words, I wouldn’t vote Green except to avoid a Conservative.
That’s the penalty we pay in Canada for our “first-past-the-post” electoral system.
I realized that the first time I voted I was actually living in Saanich. The MP was a Progressive Conservative of the old school, called George Chatterton. I don’t remember an NDP candidate; whoever it was would not have been a contender. But the Liberal candidate, the one I voted for, was David Anderson, who not only beat Chatterton, but later became an exemplary Environment Minister in a Liberal government.
I’ve always been proud of that vote, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
Happily, I live in North Island, and the candidate to beat the Conservative has always been an NDPer, for almost as long as I can remember.
