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.