In our society citizens are rapidly being re-framed as consumers. We need to seriously question just what democracy means to us. Politics is not an event that a bunch of us take part in every few years at an election. It is something that happens every day. If we choose to ignore politics except during elections, that itself is a political decision.
So on Saturday, December 1, Vancouver’s Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) held their 2007 Ideas Conference, “A Vancouver for Everyone.” With panelists and discussions focussing on our increasingly disastrous symbiotic relationship with our environment, transportation and transit, safety and housing, several dozen members and non-members addressed the issues with a focus on defeating the highly neoliberal and fully partisan Non-Partisan Association (NPA) in Vancouver next November.
The NPA wants to think of us all as consumers. Their neoliberal agenda presumes we are individuals and as their goddess, Margaret Thatcher, has often proclaimed, “there is no such thing as society.” For as individuals, we act in our own self-interest so the market can provide all we need.
Contrasting with that (literally) anti-social philosophy are the recently famous Antarctic emperor penguins where patriarchy oddly does not rule and more importantly, daddies shelter their eggs over the winter by huddling together with all the other daddies, cycling from the centre to the periphery of the huddle to keep warm during the -60 degree Antarctic winters.
Humans, however, are more like the emperor penguins than Adam Smith’s vision of entrepreneurial man (and Mrs. Thatcher).
So COPE, not the party of corporate funding, has explored the reality of community, society and populist politics. Citizens should not view politics as they do a movie in a theatre: we cannot be passive consumers. We must be involved. We don’t all have to run for office, but we do all need to realize that our democracy needs us to engage. That can be attending the Ideas Conference or attending a friend’s living room some Friday evening for coffee to talk about a new car-free festival in the community next summer, or what the new #1 Kingsway community centre should provide in programs for pre-teens.
Highlights from the Ideas Conference can be fodder for any civic discussion among neighbours or friends: a do-it-yourself political meeting that takes no real effort beyond the desire to be a part of our floundering democracy.
Ecologically, Vancouver, is embracing the 19th century model of social planning. We have not yet even conducted a study on the impact on Vancouver of a 1, 2 or 3 metre rise in the sea level. We could become like Venice unless we quickly and drastically reduce our contributions to global warming and mitigate the effects that are already in the pipeline.
Mitigation? How about increasing the height of the dykes that protect our large cities and vulnerable small communities from sea level rises. How about all the dump trucks clogging up Main Street with the fill from underneath Cambie Street in the privatized SNC-Lavalin Line (I’ve just stopped calling it the Canada Line altogether)? Those trucks are dumping the fill into the sea. Did we think ahead to shore up the dykes? No.
In the 19th century, progress was god, just like in Gordon Campbell’s BC where we’ve got a hopelessly inadequate climate change plan and TransLink being turned over to corporate appointees to build more bridges and highways for cars and trucks and the NAFTA Supercorridor’s local network: our Gateway project. We need a transportation agenda for people and the environment.
Our worship of the car shows up with a subsidy from public funds of over $5,000 per year per car while each transit ride is subsidized by $5. A transit commuter’s subsidy, then, is worth only $2,500 per year.
The wildly popular car-free festivals on Commercial Drive over the last 3 summers will take place in 5 Vancouver neighbourhoods next summer. If 5 more neighbourhoods in 2009 join in, we could shut down much of the city to cars on these days by the end of the decade. On the Drive, at the end of the car-free days, people felt displaced and annoyed by the presence of cars again, stealing their space.
And throughout the Ideas Conference we were signing a petition to turn the defunct and squandered Storyeum into a shelter. But prime space like that and other boarded up blocks in the downtown east side are instead being lined up for gentrification by Concord Pacific and other groups.
And in the era when the South False Creek lands no longer have any guaranteed social housing, when the NPA is using creative arithmetic to claim up to 2,000 more social housing units when it’s far less than 1,000, we need to ramp up agitation.
There are 2,300 homeless people in Vancouver, up from 1,200 in 2005 and 600 in 2003. There are 10,500 in BC, up from 5,000 in 2005. Last year the provincial government had a $4.1 billion budget surplus. Next year’s provincial budget will largely pay off the debt and cut personal and corporate taxes, including removing enormous taxes on the big banks, who we all know are highly vulnerable to their net income dipping below $1 billion each quarter next year.
If you didn’t know this, you might be able to blame the most highly corporate-concentrated media in North America for paying more attention to their government, not their role as a free press in a democracy.
And as Jean Swanson and others have recently asked the UN for foreign aid for our housing crisis, officials in the UN say we actually qualify because of this issue, despite our nation’s wealth. Groups in Vancouver are planning on asking other OECD countries for aid for social housing.
If all this doesn’t pressure the anti-social NPA into recognizing we are more like emperor penguins than emperors in training, we all need to get political and work for the next 11 months to vote them out so those of us who actually believe in society can run it, instead of giving it away in cynical corporate welfare programs.
