Politics, Re-Spun

Which Politicians Think We’re Imbeciles?

When I try to infer the mental state of some politicians from what they say publicly, I can only conclude that they must think we’re too profoundly stupid that we’d not be able to think for 3 seconds to realize that they are full of shit. Let’s look at Kevin Falcon and Gregor Robertson.

Health Minister Kevin Falcon: “when we are making changes in health care delivery, it doesn’t mean it’s just a cut.” The provincial government decided to “change” the funding to the 6 health authorities in BC by negative $360 million. It’s certainly a change. To stress that it isn’t a cut means Falcon thinks the air coming out of his lungs is worth forming into these words because there is some value to it all, that enough people will believe he has achieved plausible deniability of cuts occurring.

Vision Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson: “The core traditions of the Olympics are very powerful, and we lose sight of that with all the corporate sponsorship, Olympic bylaws and the gigantic scale of the event.” What a nuisance, hey, so let’s get over our criticism of the following and just get that lovin’ feeling!

1. VANOC has bought ALL the outdoor advertising for Olympic corporate sponsors.
2. Corporations are going to wrap ads as mammoth building condoms around the tall buildings all over the place, with video ads broadcast on buildings–think Blade Runner.
3. BC neoLiberal MLAs and cabinet ministers get to use swanky private boxes in stadiums to watch events…paid for with our tax dollars.
4. VANOC has set aside $30 million for bonuses to ostensibly keep their employees WHO ARE ACTUALLY PLANNING THE OLYMPICS from quitting before the big show–hard to imagine; $30 million works out to around $23,000 for each of the 1,300 employees, though I doubt it will all be distributed equally.
5. The IOC business model requires communities to sanitize society of the ugly: homelessness, poverty, dissent; so, we have broad, sweeping legislation that threatens our civil libertiies.
6. The IOC will not allow women’s ski jumping regardless of domestic courts ruling the action unconstitutional.
7. Provincial legislation will allow law enforcement to come into my home to seize anti-Olympics signs, under penalty of up to 6 months in jail and $10,000/day fines, while neoLiberal cabinet minister Bill Bennett says that’s a reasonable thing to do when the Olympics are in town.
8. Officials can now round up the homeless and forcibly house/confine them during the games; this, in the context of massively neglecting effective social housing for the whole decade.
9. $1 billion to be spent on security with 5,000 imported rent-a-cops and military, not to mention the black helicopters that were buzzing the downtown east side this morning, with much more of that to come.

So what core traditions is Gregor Robertson waxing on about as he gets on a plane to go to Greece for the flame lighting? Nobility, competition, purity of athletic competition? Is that what the Olympics mean now? Or is it special rights for global corporations using the Olympics for a marketing bonanza at the expense of democracy, domestic constitutions and court rulings, and civil liberties?

People are coming around to the reality that the Olympics stink, that they aren’t worth the social, political and economic costs and that with the overwhelming majority of Canadians unable to acquire or afford tickets to the actual events…people are starting to feel duped. A recent survey shows only 9% are very excited about the show, while 71% or not very excited or not excited at all.

This is showing up in not enough people volunteering, signing up to rent out extra bedrooms to rich Olympic tourists, or applying for the scut jobs needed to make the whole thing function.

Well. I told you so.

As did the entire No Olympics campaign years ago. And now we all get to eat it…with the black helicopters flying overhead as I test out my remaining civil liberties as I wear my “I am a free speech zone” t-shirt wherever I can. I also have a “Democracy is Nice” sign I carry on the end of my hockey stick. I wonder which of those will be a security threat.

I Am a Free Speech Zone: No Mayor Can Waive My Charter Rights During the Olympics

Granted, I’m not a lawyer. I consider myself at best a pretend-lawyer [I prefer "lay-lawyer"] so when I dispense legal advice I add a standard disclaimer that I’m not real. We’re all lucky, though, that David Eby is a real lawyer, even those around here who have drunk the Olympics Boosterism Kool-Aid[tm].

But when it comes to my Charter rights, I don’t believe I need to be a lawyer to understand that former Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell doesn’t have the right to suspend my Charter rights, even if I gave him permission, which I would never do.

While the Charter includes right at the top a limiting statement making my rights “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society,” I don’t believe the intellectual and political sanitation of communication to appease the International Olympic Committee is a reasonable limit or a part of a free and democratic society.

So as I’m following the dance of lawyers and cops around what kind of free speech zones I’ll be able to express myself in, I found David Eby’s piece today interesting, particularly in that it informed me of the [sadly not isolated] grand act of hubris of Larry Campbell in pledging to the IOC that I don’t need all my Charter rights at all times in all places during the Olympics:

the 2003 contract signed by Larry Campbell waiving Charter rights in Vancouver for the Games, and the bylaws passed recently by Vancouver city council giving that contract effect.

via A tale of two papers: Olympic bylaw coverage | David Eby.

Check out Section 47 at the bottom of page 23 of the Vancouver-IOC Host City Agreement to review such limitations. And read Eby’s piece on Section 47 here.

I simply don’t accept this.

Free speech violations as part of a sanitization campaign for global PR is not an acceptable limitation of my Charter rights.

This is why I am asserting that I am a free speech zone. And I’m proud that as I read David Eby’s piece today, I also received today my order form for the “I am a Free Speech Zone” t-shirt and underwear from COPE.

So it’s time now to order your shirt and undergear to remind yourself and others that you won’t tolerate the Olympics Sanitation Machine to come to my country and tell me I can’t express myself when the world is watching.

And our test over the next 6 months is to wear these t-shirts to events where the thought police would have some interest in controlling expression: places where the premier or prime minister may skulk around, Olympic venue opening parties, you get the picture. It’s time to see if our Charter still means anything now that the IOC ghoul is haunting our communities.

So buy your t-shirts and underwear. And wear them proudly because the phrase is part of the creative commons, something the IOC would never understand.

Fixing Vancouver’s Homelessness: A Survey With Teeth

Welcome to our Community Consultation Survey on Homeless Solutions and the Howe Shelter

via City of Vancouver Homelessness Solutions Survey.

In a time where Vancouver city council may or  may not have the will to oppose a provincial government they seem to be cozying up with, they issue a survey to see what the citizens think of addressing homelessness and the Howe Shelter.

Even if they do the wrong thing with this, asking for our input is better than an NPA council will do.

Even if the province ignores it all, this is a survey to take part in, especially if you live downtown!

“I Am A Free Speech Zone”: A T-Shirt for the Olympics

“I Am A Free Speech Zone”

Let’s put it on t-shirts to let VANOC know that citizens are in charge in a democracy!

What if we all wore them all around town during the Olympics as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card? Would it be like when I used to hand out copies of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to my grade 9 students upon their arrival in high school, and watch them stroll through life calling bullshit?

Maybe it’s more like an inoculation against the emerging police state.

Read some of the nonsense here: http://tinyurl.com/2010Daphne then go make your t-shirt!

A Sad “Vision” of Billboards

Vision Vancouver is going to suffer from billboards for quite some time to come.

“The Olympics are prime time advertising and the city might be offering it to Vanoc at the regular market rate,” the Richmond mayor said.

“But all of this has been discussed at closed meetings, so I really can’t go into the details.

“The details will be released soon, perhaps within the month.”

via Mayor questions Vanoc ad deal.

We now have some new insight into the visual ad pollution of billboards in Vancouver, courtesy of Richmond’s mayor Malcolm Brodie.

Not only has VANOC acquired access to all the billboard space in the Olympics universe for its official sponsors, the deals they’ve made for rates are part of closed municipal meetings.

This is no surprise since VANOC, much like a vampire, does nothing in broad daylight. Don’t hold your breath on anything related to VANOC being released ever.

A couple months ago, Vision Vancouver cynically killed municipal plans to take down the billboard pollution around the city that contravenes rules about how far away from homes they are supposed to be. With 2 billboards within 60m of my living room window, I’m eager to see them gone–and their repulsive car and horror movie ads that have caused more than a few neighbourhood children turn away in fear.

But as Charlie Smith featured weeks ago, Vision Vancouver voted to drift those plans into a bureaucratic purgatory.

Smith noted how Vision’s Geoff Meggs is connected to Glen Clark who is connected to Jim Pattison whose name is on many of the polluting billboards. Connecting the dots allows us to see a rather transparent motive and example of what Vision Vancouver’s vision actually is.

But Richmond’s Mayor Brodie has now also reminded us that these are not ordinary times. The Olympics gold rush means we CANNOT risk taking down even one billboard, despite how heinously it may contravene muncipal by-laws.

We see the VANOC vision again appearing as our masters.

This is very bad news for Vision Vancouver. As a new party, with little stable ideological roots and now only months of governing history, its identity is still in the fetal stage.

Its membership swelled with the Obama bump. It had dozens of prospective candidates vying for nominations, many of whom were very progressive, but some were temporarily out of the NPA.

They’ve had policy meetings, but those mean little until they get a chance to actually enact policy through governing. And now we’re seeing what they are like: Jimmy Pattison, billboards, VANOC.

And like many new political parties or movements, their membership will dip when renewal time comes. But for Vision, their membership will plunge as people realize that the amorphous hint of progressiveness they robed themselves in ends up lacking anything solid.

A political party walks its walk. If it talks a different line, people who pay attention to the walk will see the gap and act accordingly.

Real progressives currently in Vision will have to make a decision very soon about whether their vision of Vision is shared by the ones in charge. If not, they’ll have to move on.

Olympics Bring CCTV, Not Solutions for the Homeless

David Eby, from BC Civil Liberties, told the COPE AGM on Sunday of his concerns about the Olympics not so much being a lever for solving homelessness, but an excuse for a reduction in civil rights.

It seems he got it right.

When the provincial government floats examples like the Bard on the Beach as being a place for CCTV, to the surprise of the Bard organizers’ reflection that theirs has never been an event worthy of surveillance, we know this is just spin.

Despite written assurance, several councillors including COPE Coun. Ellen Woodsworth–the lone dissenting vote on council–raised concerns about the “temporary” nature of the CCTV plan and the potential erosion of civil liberties.

…

But last Friday’s provincial government press release told a starkly different tale.

Vancouver, it read, will receive $400,000 for a “re-deployable CCTV unit for special events and emergencies.”

via City admits surveillance cameras here to stay.

Vista Video Arrives!

Politics, Re-Spun is intricately connected to the dgiVista.org nexus of expression. As much as my audio podcasts have been terribly fulfilling and well received [with hundreds of hits/month since mid-2006], it’s time to move into video.

My audio podcasts have been audio versions of my editorials as well as interesting chats with people I know being/doing/thinking/feeling interesting things.

And now that bandwidth restrictions are virtually passe, video podcasts are just so simple now. All my audio and video podcast conversations have extensive indexes of topics. See below for the first two video podcast chats to watch.

You can review past audio podcasts through searching here: http://politicsrespun.org/?s=podcast

You can also access past and current audio and video podcasts at the following sites. Even though iTunes isn’t terribly oppressive, I’m prefering Miro lately, as it’s open source:

iTunes

Pick it up straight in your iTunes at itpc://dgivista.org/pod/Vista_Podcasts.xml.

Miro

Click subscribe below to keep up in Miro, the new wave of open source bliss:

The first video podcast chat is with Colin Mills and Ameena Mayer, followed by Rachel Marcuse.

June 2008 conversation with Colin Mills and Ameena Mayer, topics:

Introductions: Colin Mills, Ameena Mayer, Stephen Elliott-Buckley

Colin on…

- the process on his photography
- perfect versus meaningful art and paralysis
- accepting failure
- learning curves
- the problem with money in art
- 1 of 1 versus mass “production” and paralysis
- Stephen on the new Karsh self-portrait stamp
- truth is bullshit
- Princess Sophie as a beautiful person or a focus of security guards, and what is true
- painters’ freedom versus photographers’
- photography is not about truth
- impressionist photography
- Flickr mode
- Stephen on the Classical Joint in Gastown 20 years ago and watching/listening to jazz without glasses on and seeing a different colour aura over each musician’s musical contribution…and how it’s like Colin’s impressionist photography
- truth as crispy and blurry
- deciding how to photograph concerts in the moments and anonymity
- on Utah Phillips dying at 180

A critique of the absolute lack of community in North American culture by Ameena…

- GM popcorn sucks, organic popcorn is good
- disconnecting social networks
- let’s blame capitalism, the internet and our lack of valuing relationships [excepting romantic ones]
- and it’s not just her, it’s endemic
- addictions, social alienation undermining our tribal nature
- the growth of capitalism and globalization, the isolation of the individual consumer, workaholism, hyper-individualism, less selflessness
- Colin suggests we may be creating capitalism because we want to live this way: greedy; with some manipulation from Madison Avenue
- Colin on the 1972 40-ish hour documentary “The World at War”: fewer material possessions with depression followed by war
- friendship as less reciprocal
- younger adults are more workaholic than in earlier times
- we are busy because we have a hole in our lives
- Colin asks whether economic anxiety may be a social reality, not a choice
- technology and the internet are replacing more “traditional” human interaction, like the phone or having coffee with something
- we don’t make the luxury of time by choosing to forego distraction
- a tangent is vetoed
- it returns
- Colin on the self-consciousness of believing he grew up under a microscope
- difficult figuring out how to reconcile my relationship with the rest of the world versus self-obsession
- college students live in a fishbowl too, or is it just our trained narcism?
- the iPod generation is symbolic: I, I, I
- why don’t we have a sociologist in the room tying all this together

- beer break

Lack of community, continued…

- self-absorbtion is against our intrinsic human nature
- the nuclear family is bad
- we need ways of seeing the world beyond our solipsism
- our elders are also noticing less mutual human consideration
- Colin on CHiPs, Disney and Hymn Sing: how choice contributes to narcism and narrowing of awareness
- Stephen on why my.yahoo.com is bad, ultimately the celebrated entrenchment of ignorance
- freedom = ignorance
- hyper-specialization of interests leads to social dislocation
- wearing headphones in public
- how we actually talk to our neighbours on snow days
- socially, we are now less interdependent
- romantic relationships might be economic arrangements
- or is it avoiding alone-ness
- our absence of extended family cripples us as a spouse can’t fill all the needs that an extended family could
- yard sales as community building
- intentionally spending time with friends
- [drifting into the next topic, the Follies of Technology]
- female body mutilation, extreme makeovers, etc.
- all the flavours of feminism [many of which are mutually exclusive]
- What Not to Wear: fashion and sincere self-concept counselling, but is it feminist or anti-feminism?
- the Lululemon world
- how women’s poor clothing choices sadly can hamper their career success
- recognizing we can’t control other people’s impressions of us
- Ameena asks the boys how much sexual attraction motivates the desire to have a relationship

Ameena ties it all together: feminism, social isolation, community, marriage, different values, loneliness…

- the challenges to meaningful relationships create a desperation to be noticed [Letty agreed]
- communities of ideas have replaced communities of propinquity
- why arranged marriages can work, unlike how much we need to try so hard
- LavaLife: the solution to arranged marriages?
- folk versus popular cultures and how they affect us as individuals
- reflections on cyberpaths: socio/psychopaths stalking women in dating websites
- why Colin argues that we should be focussing blame more on individualism than societal features
- the cats show up: aren’t they precious

Technology, Facebook and video podcasting

- Ameena argues that video podcasting is kinda pathetic
- Colin argues that we don’t lament the absence of writers in our rooms when we read
- then we try to define what video podcasting IS in our culture, and what it is supposed to be
- we get a bit judgemental, I’m afraid
- what do Facebook “friends” mean to human connections?
- Facebook friends versus networking usefulness

December 2008 conversation with Rachel Marcuse, topics:

Rachel Marcuse, December 28, 2008, Foundation restaurant on Main Street at 7th Avenue in Vancouver.

- Coalition of Progressive Electors, a Vancouver municipal party

- youth engagement and facilitation

- grassroots community and political organization and development

- the whole Obama thing: top down versus people-centred; concern about overblown expectations and lack of populist follow-through; being a blank slate of “change”; participatory democracy and accountability; packaging over substance;

- reforming the political process in Vancouver, BC and Canada: ideas instead of personalities; re-framing citizens’ views of what politics is; apathy versus irrelevant effort; apathy versus electoral disengagement and indifference; apathy in middle aged people as opposed to the youth; why proroguing is not well understood

- break: the arrival of chocolate fondue

- beat boxers are so talented, Thundering Word Heard, Montmartre Cafe, Cafe Deux Soleils, the poetry slam, George Bowering versus T.Paul Ste. Marie

- democracy’s arrival in Canada with the end of majority governments: how this isn’t a constitutional crisis but a constitutional flowering, Stephen Harper’s lies about how the parliamentary system works in order to scare citizens enough so he can keep his job, anti-Quebec racism in western Canada, the Bloc Quebecois helps Quebec flourish as a culture without needing to focus on separation, the ease of stereotypes

- political populism, hope and progressive growth in Canada, Vision Vancouver, COPE, BC NDP, Venezuela: people deciding to lead; Jack Layton’s outside chance of becoming prime minister last month; Dion and Ignatieff; the Liberal ruling birthright/arrogance; electoral reform in Vancouver [ward system] and BC [proportional representation, BC-STV]; decentralizing politics to communities; electoral reform needing to happen at the right time; Social Credit in BC; Obama at the 2004 Democratic Convention and timing

- social change through speaking to people’s self-interest in improving society: livable communities; improving society can’t happen with sound bites but by engaging people and introducing a new paradigm; Gordon Campbell pulling a Shock Doctrine response to the meltdown as if he used Naomi Klein’s formula; shopping to save the economy is unsustainable; re-education people out of blind obedience to Milton Friedman

- how do we mobilize and catalyze people to becoming more socially engaged: building relationships and visions; mobilizing youth and adults; Disney sweatshops; working with young people as a way to confront cynicism; youth who care about social change and resent previous generations’ mistakes they must live with; Craig Kielburger; how young people are disempowered, doubly so when they work for social change; losing builds resilience; David Chudnovsky; social change requires celebration to keep us going; work-life balance in activism and saying no; hope, common sense, pacing and self-knowledge; Greenpeace, protests, martyrdom; CCPA and Check Your Head and mentorship; Fraser Institute indoctrination programs

- the future: indulging imagining a functioning utopia and what we want our communities to look like; capitalism is not eternal, particularly because of finite resources; spanning communities to synchronize work for social, political and economic change; focussing on change that really matters right now while keeping a long-term plan; the value of being interdisciplinary; there is no real failure when groups engage with each other; the Open Space workshop model, its advantages and frustrations; Open Space as a metaphor for empowering citizens’ involvement in politics; Don Davies, Jack Layton and a community meeting at Collingwood Community Centre on politics and the economy;

- how the Foundation restaurant’s expansion is a good sign for culture and community on Main Street in Vancouver.

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?

Plumping the Municipal Election

There is no grand prevailing wisdom about how people should vote. It’s hard enough to get people to show up at the polls as it is–and for many good reasons. But once people show up, there are competing views about how we should cast our votes: in this case, to plump or not to plump.

This is particularly important with municipal, district and school board elections on Saturday, November 15.

Voter turnout for local elections in BC is traditionally well below 50%. Add to this the recent 20 month US presidential election soap opera, another minority government election in Ottawa last month and for many in Vancouver, two provincial by-elections also last month. More on lessons from these later, though.

When we look at how to vote in local governments, it’s critical to understand how the “at-large” electoral process is different from voting provincially, federally and in the United States. In fact, understanding the at-large nature of local elections motivates a greater number of people to actually vote.

The at-large system is in some ways opposite to the first-past-the-post system in the provincial and federal elections. At-large means there are no ridings or constituencies within the municipality or regional district. Aside from casting one ballot for mayor, voters will vote from a pool of candidates anywhere from one to however many sit on each local council or school board.

This is where plumping comes in. If there are six spots beyond mayor on your city council we can vote for up to six candidates standing for election. But why not vote for one? This is plumping or bullet voting, where we target one or a small number of candidates to focus our vote on without diluting the effect of our vote by voting for other people who could end up beating our preferred candidate(s).

Many object to the spirit of plumping for some good reasons. They argue that it undermines the value of at-large voting where we get to vote for more than one candidate, unlike in provincial and federal elections. It can also undermine one view of the spirit of voting: if we are allowed six votes, we shouldn’t waste any of them.

Fans of plumping argue that most people are not familiar with enough candidates running to be able to cast completely informed votes. So many people want to avoid casting ballots for people who aren’t necessarily deserving of that vote.

Plus, our electoral system is broken, so we should make the best of it when we get that pencil in our hands. This is a tired refrain for many of us, but it is something you should be braced to hear much more of in the future as there are broad movements to fix our electoral process.

I won’t even go into the complications of the US Electoral College, that great 18th century relic that skews the popular vote to elect a president, but the provincial and federal systems are equally irrelevant.

First-past-the-post worked quite well a century ago when there were typically two parties running for government. With only two candidates in a riding, the winner will get more than 50% of the vote and wasted votes were always less than 50% of those cast.

But today, with five viable federal parties (even with the Bloc only in Quebec) and more than two viable parties in most provinces, first-past-the-post ensures millions of votes are wasted across the country.

Dreadfully, in 1988 Brian Mulroney was reelected prime minister and rammed his Free Trade Agreement through government when 43% of Canadians voted for his party, which perversely allowed him to get a majority government. Considering that voter turnout was only 72%, less than one-third of eligible votes actually voted for free trade. Now we need to clean up that illegitimate mess.

The electoral reform referendum almost passed in BC in 2005 and likely will this spring, even though a similar referendum only got around 37% support in Ontario’s election last fall [see the comments below]. But then again, Ontario has often been pivotal in Liberal and Conservative governments for all of Canadian history, so they likely aren’t eager to move to a proportional representation system and lose their inordinate electoral power.

Also, our system typically produces majority governments for parties that earn less than 50% of the popular vote, where federally, voter turnout has declined in almost every election since that disastrous free trade election in 1988.

With five viable federal parties, a voting system designed for a two-party system is obsolete, as are majority governments. So people have responded with coordinated vote swapping systems on the internet, and some rather complicated strategic voting schemes.

All this means that our electoral systems are up for debate.

When it comes to your municipal, district and school board votes on Saturday, ask yourself how many candidates you are capable of effectively evaluating. Search the web, check your municipality’s website. Get informed.

Then ask yourself how many of them you can truly support with integrity. And then vote responsibly. This will likely end up meaning that in Vancouver many COPE, Vision and Green supporters will likely only be voting for their own party’s candidates, despite the electoral agreement. The agreement does not outlaw plumping, after all.

And while you’re fighting off the strain of so many elections, look into BC-STV. That referendum will be on the ballot again on May 12, 2009 during our provincial election. It’s not a perfect proportional representation system, but it makes our current system look like the largely inadequate attempt at democracy we’ve been stuck with for our whole history.

So plump if you want to, but by all means make your vote matter–at least to yourself.

Challenging the Myth of Non-Partisanship and the NPA’s Stability

Two nights ago during dinner, one of the candidates for the Vancouver Park Board phoned me. He is running with the Non-Partisan Association, the NPA…a group that I have written before [see "The Lie of Non-Partisanship" from July 8, 2005 at http://PoliticsReSpun.org]. In fact, the NPA is anything but non-partisan, being all conservative and neoliberal. And it turns out that partisanship is the theme of this article.

Now, I won’t go into who from the NPA ranks phoned me the other night, mostly because I block out trauma, explaining to him that I would never in a million years vote for the NPA. He was jovial, wanting to engage with me despite our differences of opinion: a total waste of time.

He said he phoned me because my sister gave him my number and that I would consider voting for him, so he should call me. Right. I have no sister. Maybe the woman he said who came into his store and gave him a phone number wrote it down incorrectly and this hapless fellow phoned me. Or maybe the NPA candidates are cold-calling people in the phone book because that’s where they’re at now.

The phone book seems to me to be the best explanation. It reflects how desperate the NPA is, poised to lose all their seats on city, school and parks boards as they are, what with the COPE-Vision-Green coordinated slate. Well done Mayor Sam Sullivan, destroying the NPA brand in but one term.

But the synchronicity arrived this evening at dinner time when a pollster phoned. It was Innovative Research Group, another group I’ve written about before [see "Racist Survey Questions on a Survey about Multi-Culturalism" from October 15, 2007 at http://PoliticsReSpun.org]. A year ago I wrote about one of their omnibus online polls that asked me many things, including to rank how I felt about a variety of racial groups living in our multi-cultural Canada, on a scale of 0-10 on whether I have a favourable or unfavourable impression of each race. I included a screenshot of those poll questions in my article last year.

Tonight’s IRG poll asked about my awareness and voting intentions in the Vancouver election. And while the poll wasn’t as offensive as last year’s, it did ask one question that bothered me: was I concerned about the number of Vision and COPE school board candidates who have been education union members.

The poll didn’t at all ask how I felt about the number of business owners or candidates with corporate connections in any of the parties. This reflects an ongoing, ingrained mentality in our society that there is a “normal” group of people, and then there are the special interest groups, like unions. This is the same mythology that the NPA has perpetuated for decades, pretending that they are neutral, objective or somehow not beholden to any ideology or group. This is nonsense. Everyone has a bias. Pretending you don’t is a lie.

And while it was far from clear that the NPA commissioned tonight’s IRG poll and loaded it up with that union question, the presence of the question indicates a mindset that special interest groups are treated as marginalized.

Now with the global economic meltdown in full swing and former US Federal Reserve Bank Alan Greenspan testifying before Congress this week that deregulated, neoliberal capitalism doesn’t work, I think that questioning people with corporate connections should be fair game.

An interesting twist came this evening when I swung by the website of Innovative Research Group: http://InnovativeResearch.ca. It turns out they’ve gone off the radar. Here’s a screenshot of their website tonight:

When you click on the image you can see that their entire website consists of one page saying “Welcome to the future home of www.innovativeresearch.ca. This Page is currently under construction.”

Maybe it’s semantics, but honestly, they used to have a full website functioning at that location. Thanks to the marvels of the Way Back Machine, you can see various incarnations of their past websites at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://innovativeresearch.ca. There could be lots of reasons why they’ve gone under the radar, no longer promoting the coverage of their polls or letting people easily contact them. But their lack of presence, especially because they used to have one, just looks fishy to me.

Pitying the Conservatives in Vancouver and Nationally, But Not Really

So now I’m thinking NDP-Bloc coalition federally. More on that below, but first…

The Vancouver NPA, multi-generational vanguard of pretend non-partisanship has finished nominating its candidates.

One significant note here: Kanman Wong is the final NPA council candidate. Remember Kanman? He ran a modestly respectable campaign for the January 2006 federal election as the Conservative party candidate for Vancouver-Kingsway. He got a famous 18% of the vote while David Emerson won the riding and within hours of his victory was fielding calls from John Reynolds to cross the floor to Harper’s side.

So here’s Kanman again, working up the public service thing. And strangely Wendy Yuan, who was displaced from her candidacy in Vancouver-Kingsway when Prime Minister Paul Martin parachuted in his star candidate in 2004–one David Emerson–is now again running as the federal Liberal candidate in Kingsway, though she still owns her house in Richmond while renting a place in Collingwood.

It’s quite surreal. It’s almost as if the David Emerson Experience [with apologies to Jimi Hendrix] has hit an unfathomable pause button on the lives of two would-be politicians, who are now free again to pursue office after their trip to the electoral Twilight Zone.

So back to civic politics again, the Green/Vision/COPE coalition is in shape with COPE’s solid endorsement of its deal with Vision. The campaign will be odd, with common themes, yet distinct wedging for competition among the endorsed candidates. But it will also mean cut-throat jockeying for getting those coveted rationed candidacy positions.

And once the election ends with the hated, anti-social NPA unlikely to have any majority on the councils or boards, the coalition will have to live its three years through its own growing pains, like Blade Runner replicants trying to build up a lifetime of emotional experiences in but a few years. Depending on the flavour of which Vision candidates get nominated, and then elected, we will see Vision function in office as a centre-left bloc or a centre/centre-right bloc of opportunism over intent. Time will tell. And if it drifts rightward, expect a fair amount of defections back COPEward over the next 3 years.

But back on the federal side of the things, Layton being ahead of Dion in the leadership preference polls has serious traction. The NDP have been the de facto opposition for 2.5 years especially as Dion’s gang has abstained their way to greener electoral pastures that never emerged. In fact about a year ago, federal parties were polling almost identically to their results in the federal election 18 months earlier. It’s no different last month.

So now the Conservatives have announced that they’re campaigning against the NDP and the Greens. This means they will preemptively concede a majority by not trying to defeat the Bloc in Quebec, as if the Reform Party [ok, called the Conservatives now] can actually get Quebecers to vote for them without moving to the oil patch first. It also means that by announcing they aren’t competing against the Liberals, that the barely cohesive Liberals should become wary of 1992 when the Progressive Conservatives [remember that party that existed before the Reform Party took over?] were decimated to 2 seats.

But it’s all game theory. Whatever the Conservatives say is designed to cause ripples that they can then surf.

But wait, there’s more. In trying to figure out who is even running for David Emerson’s “Conservative” seat, I’ve finally discovered that it is Solomon Rayek, or Salomon Rayek, depending on who you check with. The Conservative Party website lists the candidate as Solomon, whereas the fellow at SalomonRayek.ca spells his name with an “a.”

Maybe it’s a typo, maybe it’s an irrelevancy. Whatever the case, you’d think they’d try to keep their story straight. And even though they may address this inconsistency some time soon, I wonder how it will be spelled on the ballot. In the end, it presents the feel of this being a throw-away riding, though for the life of me I can’t figure out why the Conservatives would think they have no chance of keeping this riding. Oh ya, David Emerson.

And that brings me back to Kanman Wong…right, he’s running municipally.

But as much as Wendy Yuan is more at home in Richmond, Salomon Rayek is reported as president of the Conservative Party’s Delta-Richmond East constituency association, a position he is still holding according to their website, he is the president of Jewish Advocacy for the Conservative Party, he has also sought the party’s nomination in Burnaby-Douglas, it seems for this election as well. So it appears that he is a candidate in name only in Vancouver-Kingsway as he doesn’t seem to stuck on location. I wonder if he’ll rent an apartment in the same Collingwood building as Wendy Yuan. He owns a home in Capistrano townhouses in Richmond. That would be awkward elevator conversations.

So it seems that we have the Liberals running someone from Richmond who rented an apartment in the riding, against someone for the Conservatives deeply involved in a Richmond riding as well, but who calls Kingsway his home, perhaps only because his youngest son was “born and raised” there. I wonder how much the Vancouver-Kingsway voters will feel like theirs is a proxy riding for a Richmond turf war.

Oh, and some of Salomon Rayek’s published letters to various newspaper editors are here.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the Georgia Strait reports that Ryan Windsor is running for the Green Party though its website says this today of Vancouver Kingsway. Maybe they actually have a candidate but wish to keep it a secret:

Vancouver Kingsway

Nominated Candidate – Candidat(e) nominé(e)

If you would like to be a candidate or volunteer for this riding, please contact the Electoral District Association listed below. If there is no Electoral District Association in your riding contact your Provincial Organizer, Rob Hines, Office: 604-689-9200, Cell: 778-689-6666, rob.hines@greenparty.ca

There are many ways to contact us, from e-mail and snail mail to simply walking into our office at Get Connected

And in case you care about recent history, I received this email below as part of a mass mailout on July 9, 2008, showing that the Greens were at least looking to begin setting up an electoral presence in the riding then. And as of today, the website says there are still about a dozen BC ridings without Green Party candidates, including a bunch without constituency associations yet. Unless of course their website is hiding them too. But in the end, they’ll run a candidate even without a constituency association…wild!

The Green Party of Canada is currently seeking to engage individuals in your riding. We support local grassroots democracy and there is no better way to become involved than at a local level. We’re trying to start a local association of the Green Party of Canada in Vancouver Kingsway! The local association, called an EDA (Electoral District Association) has the power to raise funds, issue tax receipts, hold events, elect officers, nominate candidates, and so much more. In fact, the Green Party of Canada is the only national political party that allows EDA’s to have fundraising capabilities.

The local association is the vehicle through which party members organize. The GPC office in Vancouver provides assistance to EDA’s to help organize them. Contact us for any questions regarding what to do next.Once an EDA is registered the GPC automatically starts sharing funds. It is an excellent way to start saving and investing for the next election. Setting up an EDA is easy!

We’re also looking for a candidate to step forward in the riding. The Green Party has run a full slate of candidates in the last two federal elections and intends to do the same for the next election. Even if there is no local association we will have a candidate running.

For more information on how you can get involved today call the BC Organizer, Rob Hines at 778 689 6666 or by email at bc@greenparty.ca. I’ll help you navigate through the process of establishing an EDA, attend your inaugural meeting, and provide ongoing support and training.

–
Rob Hines
Organizer BC & North
Green Party of Canada

bc@greenparty.ca
F 604 689 9200
T 778 689 6666

301-207 W Hastings St
Vancouver BC V6B 1H7

So in the end, The Greens’ website reports no candidate, the Conservatives and Liberals are running folks from Richmond and the NDP have Don Davies. Whew, representation lives!

COPE’s Ideas Conference and Re-Inspiring a Robust Democracy

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.