Letting her run

The case of “Appadurai vs BCNDP” has revealed some very interesting misconceptions, the most galvanizing of which –– to me, at any rate –– is that many commenters apparently believe that the leader sets party policies. (Because if it’s recognized he/she doesn’t set policy, what’s the point of her campaign? Destruction of the BCNDP? Catharsis?)

I don’t know much about the inner workings of other parties, but that notion is demonstrably not true of the BCNDP. 

Actually, I suspect it isn’t true of most parties, ie UK Conservatives, who have recently turfed two leaders elected by the party membership over policy differences with their own Caucus, whose members could smell personal political defeat in the air. It’s also not true of the CPC, whose Parliamentary Caucus removed Erin O’Toole for less-obvious but similar reasons. As for Danielle Smith of the UCP, whose members appear to have temporarily fallen into line with her craziness, that jury is still out, but stay tuned: they haven’t yet faced the Alberta Legislature with her at the helm, and there’s a May election coming right up.

That’s why the leadership ambitions of an obviously talented and charismatic would-be leader of the BCNDP were always doomed to failure, even if she and her Dogwood friends had signed up enough “members” to win the contest. 

The BCNDP is built on its constituency associations. Besides electing candidates for Provincial election, those associations elect representatives to attend regular Provincial Conventions, where BCNDP Executive members are elected and provincial political policies are debated and created. The mechanics aren’t important here, but the fact that the Constituencies control the membership and consequently most BCNDP financing is crucial, given that in BC political parties are exclusively dependent on personal donations. 

As far as I know, Ms Appadurai has no local Constituency behind her; her members identify as former Greens, Dogwood members and followers, and disaffected, former NDPers. Would they have stayed around long enough to complete the process? We’ll never know, but we do know, from previous elections, that Green Party members don’t fund the “backrooms” and candidates of their party the way the BCNDP does. They don’t organize campaigns the same way either: they simply don’t have the resources or manpower.

So let’s engage in a bit of fantasy, and imagine that in spite of the odds the Appadurai campaign, were successful and she were elected Leader. She has no seat in the Legislature, so she’d have to try to direct things from afar until she had achieved one. Not very effective, and, because she ran a campaign literally against the Caucus (from her publicity: “Views + positions may not represent those of the BC NDP, Caucus and Government.”) she and her team would find some steep hills to climb, not the least of which would be, who would represent her in the Legislature in the interim, almost the entire Caucus having declared for Eby? Then she’d have to find a seat to contest. Would she run in any vacant seat? Would a sitting member offer up his/hers? Would their Constituency Association concur without a local nominating convention? Would the Provincial Executive parachute her into a constituency without constituency consent? Could she possibly be successful, assuming everything else (funding and manpower, principally) was in place? (The BCNDP isn’t the BCLiberal Party, where Christy Clark, already Premier at the time, having been defeated by David Eby in Point Grey was able to bribe her way into a seat in the Okanagan. ) 

To dive even further into fantasy: assume she has won a seat and therefore a place in the Legislature. Does the Caucus follow her in implementing her promises: stop Site C, stop fracking in the North-east, stop LNG Canada and the pipeline that supplies it, stop all old-growth logging, including Fairy Creek, etc.? No, the Caucus does not, because that’s not NDP policy, and in any case the Premier doesn’t set policy. Her platform was the Green Party’s platform, and they have a caucus of two.

So, never going to happen. The Appadurai campaign was a clear attempt to skip around conventional parliamentary democracy and get the government of the day to bend to a very small minority of BC electors.

Had they been successful, they would have destroyed the infrastructure of the BCNDP and made it unelectable in BC. 

        And they wouldn’t have done the Green cause or Ms Appadurai any good at all.

 

Defeating the Trojan horse

    This morning all NDP members received an email from David Eby, the new leader of the BCNDP. I thought it excellent: just the right tone and content; absolutely without any sign of triumphalism; no condemnation of either Anjali Appadurai or the people who supported her bid; apparently sincere hopes that the new members would go on to become dedicated NDPers.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that this attempt to take over the BCNDP to make it, in effect, a clone of the Green Party was driven by a coterie of very dedicated fanatics, who will undoubtedly ensure that the smell of their attempted coup and its abrupt conclusion will linger for some time.

(Aside: for those of you still unfamiliar with the details, I recommend a Twitter feed by Rob Shaw: https://twitter.com/RobShaw_BC/status/1582548584808882176 

And for commentary, Vaughan Palmer’s column on the subject: https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/vaughn-palmer-report-stuffed-with-evidence-against-anjali-appadurai-campaign)

This encounter with the Trojan Horse of radical environmentalism is not, I think, as problematic as it might be at first glance. I think I detect the problem. It’s inherent in the BCNDP’s processes and procedures. 

I make that analysis because we experienced, in North Island, something similar, so as a former activist I’m well-placed to present this illustration: 

When Colin Gabelmann retired and Glen Robertson became the MLA, the North Island locus moved up-island and became much more directly union-influenced. So some of us, me included, took the opportunity to follow Colin’s example and step back as well. That lasted also during the term of Glen’s BCLiberal successor, Rod Visser. We got seriously active again before the next election, during the drive to name a new NDP candidate to take Rod on. Brian Giles, who had been Colin’s constituency assistant, dropped out well before the vote, which left Brenda Leigh, Area D director of the Strathcona Regional District, and our candidate, Claire Trevena, a former Green who lived on Quadra Island and was new to NDP politics. 

By the time of the nominating convention, by all accounts and evidence, Brenda’s crew thought they had the nomination in the proverbial bag: they had solid union support and organization, North Island Constituency did not have a large membership, and they knew they had signed up literally hundreds of new members. 

Mostly $10 memberships, the minimum permitted by NDP rules. This fact turned out to be important in a convention nomination; they were both incredulous and indignant when Claire was declared winner. 

After Claire’s committee took over the constituency reins we discovered that North Island had acquired one of the largest memberships in BC, at around 1300. We also discovered that many were located in Area D, where Brenda was (and continued to be, until the recent election) a popular representative. When renewal time came round, almost all this new “membership” vanished; in fact, some people we knew in other contexts who had been signed up had no idea they had become NDP members: they thought they were just giving Brenda a few dollars to run her campaign.

And of course Claire beat Mr Visser, and won the next few elections until she retired in 2020.

I don’t think the Appadurai campaign would have had exactly the same problem that the Leigh campaign had; I think their new “members” were probably very motivated, and would have voted, given the chance. And they would certainly have been reminded. But they wouldn’t have been very representative of the rest of the NDP membership, and they would almost certainly have faded away shortly after, even if their candidate were successful.

So how do we prevent a future takeover event, now that Avi Lewis and his fellow-travellers have set the template?

Happily, a fix is not very difficult.

I think the world has changed, and with it the incentive to join political parties. Consequently, we need to dump the $10 minimum, which has evolved from being a socially-responsible policy to being an incentive for larceny. It doesn’t even cover the cost of administration for these new memberships! 

These days, $10 is a couple of cups of fancy coffee, and most of us think nothing of spending that much if we feel it’s worth it. So I suggest $50 be the new $10. That’s enough to make people think, not enough to dissuade the dedicated, and if anyone genuinely needs to pay the lower sum, that need is easily accommodated, just as we have always accommodated people who couldn’t pay $10.

We really admire John Horgan and the present government and, although we’re both past active participation in the Party, we have high hopes for Premier David Eby’s leadership. He has been an excellent Minister on a number of difficult files.

        Would be nice if he occasionally showed that sense of humour that he’s hidden so thoroughly, though! 

Letter to my MP: housing mailer

 

Dear Rachel,

I don't know who prepares your mailers, but he/she let you down.
You know Prime Minister Trudeau isn't responsible for housing or rental costs.
Yes, those are appalling costs for many people, but certainly not most. And if any government is at fault, that would be the various provincial governments, in whose bailiwick housing falls.
Of course you already know that too.
And you also know that our provincial government is very committed to dealing with this issue. It is not responsible for the problems either, and regularly confers with the federal government, seeking assistance for provincial initiatives dealing with housing costs and availability.
The mailer issued under your name isn't helping.
At the moment, the only thing that endears me to our federal party (which appears so desperate to distance itself from the government that it distorts important issues) is that it's helping what is essentially the second-best federal government I've seen in my lifetime pass some very socially-responsible legislation.
Of course I have no problem with you; you've been a good MP. Except that your caucus keeps dropping these clunkers on us: it's become a regular topic of conversation when we older NDPers get together.