Tagged: Non-Partisan Association

#occupyvancouver: Picking your targets wisely

Occupy Vancouver protesters disrupted the first major mayoral debate of the civic election, shouting down Vision Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson and Non-Partisan Association Coun. Suzanne Anton

-Vancouver Sun

That a movement dedicated not only to shining a spotlight on the economic imbalance in our society but also the restoration of our democratic system would choose as it’s 2nd major target a democratic function is a damn shame and an own goal, in my opinion.

You might feel – with some justification – that both Gregor Robertson and Suzanne Anton unhealthily represent the interests of real estate developers. You might feel – with absolute justification – that debate moderator and Vancouver Sun editor Fazil Mihlar is a mouthpiece for the Fraser Institute. But it’s irrelevant: a candidate’s debate is an exercise in democracy regardless of who the participants are, and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that a democratic movement would seek to squash it. It makes is seem you are attempting to suppress what little democracy we have left rather than restore and enhance it.

If it had been any event other than a debate. A speech. A fundraising dinner. And so on. There is, in fact, significant sympathy in the mainstream press. The Globe now has an ongoing series, and just yesterday Pete McMartin had a very sympathetic column. If this is truly a movement “of the 99%”, then don’t piss away some of the 99%’s good will. A truly mass movement will require compromises. For example, secular Egyptians made common cause with the Muslim Brotherhood, and vice versa.

Every #Occupy movement has it’s issues unique to it’s city. Every #Occupy movement seems to be developing it’s own flavour. What are the key issues facing Vancouverites? Homelessness. Housing affordability. Stagnant Wages. A moribund electoral system. Less so some of the issues with the banking sector that, say, New Yorkers righteously have. Let’s face it, Vancouver is not a centre of finance. So while I don’t mind the first action #occupyvancouver took – occupying a TD Bank – I don’t think it will strike a chord here.

They need to choose their targets for maximum relevance and maximum effect. (And hey, maybe the Olympic Village is appropriate here…)

Earlier I worried that #occupyvancouver might simply be an exercise in “the usual suspects”. So far it seems to be playing out that way. Old techniques. Ancient grudges. Same old, same old.

I truly hope to be proved wrong.

UPDATE: A proposed code of conduct for #OccupyVancouver, and it’s not bad!

UPDATE 2: The #OccupyVancouver twitter account (whoever that is) denies this was an official action:

Brett Mineer:

It seems more likely someone from the camp went down with a few Occupiers on their own (this would later be confirmed when a few protesters

Vancouver, Kingdom by the Sea

“If you want to get stuff done, you hang around people with money. I’m not going to hang around with people who can’t make stuff happen.”

-Sam Sullivan, Citizen Sam

Frances Bula has an excellent article in Vancouver Magazine recounting the history of civic political party, the Non-Partisan Association.

Born as an anti-Communist coalition in 1937, the NPA has dominated Vancouver post-war politics.

Bula’s article is ostensibly about the NPA’s chances in the upcoming election this November, but I found it very informing. I’ll cut to the money quote:

Insurgent movements like TEAM and Vision don’t get what politics in this city is all about, [Mike] Francis says. They think it’s about ideals and reform and missions. They don’t understand that the NPA has been able to rule for so long because it perpetually attracts people who want to make connections with the city’s most powerful. An election campaign allows a 25-year-old to work alongside a Rob Macdonald or a Peter Armstrong. “The core of it is upwardly mobile yuppies. It’s just their home, and there’s lots of them.”

That’s the NPA in an NPA insider’s own words. It’s not about an underlying ideology or a set of policy goals – even today’s right-wing, free-marketism. Those – and progressive ideas – will be adopted and discarded as necessary. It’s more basic.

It’s raison d’être is power. Access to for supporters and maintenance of for backers.

It’s almost feudal.

The squires pay homage to the knights, the knights serve the lords, and the lords maintain their grip on the land.

Help help, I’m being suppressed!

Bill Tieleman has a story in the Tyee: A Tale of Two Attack Ads from BC Libs, NPA about the emergence of negative campaigning from the right-wing parties in both the provincial and civic arenas. Now Bill is a loud and proud partisan guy and and always wants to portray his opponents in the most unflattering light possible, but this is more about strategy…the strategy of negative campaigning (which Tieleman feels is a mistake on the BC Liberals and NPA’s part). I think he’s pretty much 100% right about the BC Liberal’s decision to go after BC Conservative Jim Cummins.

But what about the other half of the equation?

In support of his argument, he cites this checklist, from a Democrat political consultant, of when to go negative:

  • When you are taking on an incumbent;
  • When you are being significantly outspent;
  • When there is irrefutable information that your opponent has done something wrong;
  • When your candidate has little name recognition.

Tieleman then checks the boxes above in relation to the NPA’s recent “Chicken and Wheat Fields” radio ads. The check marks aren’t as strong as those with the BC Liberals, but they’re still there enough to make you wonder what the NPA is thinking. But there’s more to Bill’s cite than the above, and it makes me think there might be method to the madness. Now it’s from Wikipedia, so caveat emptor and all that, but it kind of struck me…the entry carries on…

A subsequent study done by Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar in 1995 corrected some of the previous study’s flaws. This study concluded that negative advertising suppressed voter turnout, particularly for Independent voters. They speculated that campaigns tend to go negative only if the Independent vote is leaning toward the opponent. In doing so, they insure that the swing voters stay home, leaving the election up to base voters.

And then I was reminded about something Frances Bula said a few days ago (in a different context):

Elections are not just about winning votes. They’re about suppressing votes for the other side.

So while the NPA is taking on an incumbent…they’re not being outspent, they can’t really point to something they’re opponent has done terribly wrong (the Riot is close, but I personally am not convinced the majority of the public sees it in partisan terms…yet) and Suzanne Anton, as Tieleman says, has gotten lots of press over the last few years…well then….what does that leave?

Is it really their strategy to turn off independents and the non-decided enough they’ll stay home on election day?

It’s moments like this I find politics very, very depressing.

The chickens strike back!

A week ago Sean Holman at his Public Eye Online posted a “leak” outlining the Non Partisan Association’s social media strategy. Much of the subsequent discussion on this was about the use of “proxies”. Somewhat interesting, not really revelatory – proxies and rent-a-crowds have been staples of politics since, literally, ancient times. However, my takeaway was the NPA was attempting a pivot and trying to run a more positive campaign. NPA’er Scott Harrison:

“A lot of the dialogue (online) is really personal and vicious and I hate to see people do that because I think, in the spirit of Jack Layton, we need to elevate everybody’s talking online and I’m trying to encourage people to stop doing it. If individuals want to do it as people that’s one thing. But having politicians responding to mud – I don’t think it helps anybody at the end of the day and I think it lowers people’s interest in politics.”

While maybe too little, too late I thought it made a bit of sense. According to polls Vision Vancouver is losing support…but it’s going to the left-wing Coalition of Progressive Electors while the NPA’s support remained static. And, as Jack Layton knew, women, left-wing and centrist voters are really turned off by negative campaigning and clearly attacking chicken coops and labelling youth programs goofy wasn’t working. Hence, pivoting towards more positivity. Or something. What do I know?

Now chickens are back.

I’m confused.

Dear NPA: Take the purge and witchhunt challenge!

NPA School Board candidate Fraser Ballantyne is doubling down on what should now be considered the official party line that there has been gross impropriety in the hiring of Kurt Heinrich. Kurt has The Tainttm. Patti Bacchus must step down and the Minister must investigate! Oh my, pass the laudanum!

His “tough”, “fair-minded”, “principled” stance is, er, undermined by the title of his piece:

“Patti Bacchus must step down as Vision hack hire investigated”

Classy. But, okay, stripped of the juvenile name-calling and the pre-judgment, it’s a position one can take, if one wants to take the principle of the non-partisan civil service to an extreme level – one that was never applied under previous governments. Speaking of which, I wonder if Mr Ballantyne ever donated or volunteered for a political campaign in his long career in education1.

But let’s play along and take it all completely on it’s own terms. We must thus revisit Candidate Klassen’s unambiguous statement from 2010:

The next government’s job will require a merciless house cleaning of anyone with direct ties to Vision Vancouver. If you’ve handed over a donation to Vision, like for example Lesli Boldt in the city’s Olympic communications, or worked on a Vision campaign like the new Director of Communications Ryan Merkley (who by the way was late for work on his first day according to this photo), then don’t count on being kept on.

There’s something that jumps out in Klassen’s statement. Can you spot it? Is it that only one political party is mentioned? Why yes, yes it is….

Surely if you were truly concerned about the principle of a “non-partisan” civil service you would have said something more along the lines of…

The next government’s job will require a merciless house cleaning of anyone with direct ties to a political party. If you’ve handed over a donation to Vision Vancouver, the Non-Partisan Association, the Coalition of Progressive Electors or the Green Party, or if you’ve ever worked or volunteered on a political campaign, then don’t count on being kept on.

Now pardon me while I wipe my ass with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Okay I added that last bit.

I look forward to Suzanne Anton’s upcoming press conference announcing all of this.

<crickets chirp>

1. Question posed to illustrate the potential of hypocrisy. I don’t actually care. More power to him if he did, in fact. If you care about your community, you get involved.

Rhetoric and Collateral Damage

Okay, here is a real pet peeve of mine. Criticizing policy and questioning spending priorities of government programs and initiatives is, of course, the duty of an opposition party. But if you do, it’s also your public duty to criticize the program or initiative accurately. And when you start labelling something “goofy”, you better be damn sure, especially when a third non-governmental party is involved.

We, alas, have a case of rhetorical collateral damage with Vancouver civic party the NPA’s heaping abuse on a $5000 grant to something called “Lawn to Loaves”, run by the Environmental Youth Alliance. I’m not going to argue the merits of this program. I’m not because the NPA doesn’t. Mayoralty candidate Suzanne Anton has labelled the program “goofy”, as has Daniel Fountaine at City Caucus. Both describe the goal of the program as “whether it’s feasible to grow wheat on the front lawns and boulevards of Vancouver homeowners.”

Actually the goals are:

  • To successfully cultivate a hundred pounds of organic spring wheat within the city of Vancouver
  • To engage our progressive city in a thought experiment regarding what defines a farm and to symbolically challenge the dominant scale of grain production
  • To overlook traditional notions of efficiency and productivity for a moment in favor of the power of symbolism
  • To teach, engage, and excite all those who encounter this project at any and every stage

In other words, it’s not about actual food production which the NPA characterizes it time and time again, it’s about education.

“This is not going to replace the wheat belt, by any stretch,” said Ms. Bellamy, who planted wheat next to a community garden and the West House, a sustainable laneway house formerly showcased at the 2010 Olympics. “It’s a symbolic gesture, and hopefully getting people to think.”

Still, that hasn’t stopped them from tweeting or retweeting how a cup of flour will cost $333/cup or a loaf $1250. No monetary value attached to the educational component, etc. If they want to change or distort the nature of a program, that is their prerogative. It’s all too common in politics. But I just don’t know if they realize when they take to the pages of the Sun, the Globe and 24hours and label something “goofy”, they aren’t just attacking the Mayor and the Mayor’s party. They’re attacking and publicly mocking the people behind “Lawn to Loaves”. They’re attacking Revel Warkentin, Andrea Bellamy,& Julia Smith. And they’re not being accurate doing it.

Still, maybe they’re fine with all that. I would like to think maybe they haven’t thought it quite through. I hope so, because mocking in the media sincere motivated youth who are walking the walk on their beliefs – even if you disagree with them – is kind of mean. Kind of really mean.

Sadly though, it’s not isolated. Daniel did the same thing to the YMCA’s plan for a community garden on Sunset Beach – a plan part of initiative to help immigrants acclimatize to their new country.

Our enlightened intellectual discourse: Are we still talking about crustaceans?

In a post about the NPA’s electoral chances in the upcoming civic election, Fraser Institute alum Kathryn Marshall writes:

It’s up to the NPA to drive the agenda and make this election about ideas and better policy.

This is, of course, why the NPA and their boosters are still talking about Vision Vancouver councilor Heather Deal enjoying a lobster dinner that was served to her by her hosts in Halifax, heartland of lobsterdom. Unknown at this time is whether Marshall consulted the dead for this blog post. Alex Tsakumis1 weighs in with his usual schtick – first describing how highly he thinks of the person under discussion before telling us how they are history’s greatest monstertm

But Heather’s idiotic, let me repeat, ENTIRELY IDIOTIC comments while away in Halifax this last weekend at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities were beyond the pale.

For there is no greater crime than accepting a meal at a conference and then publicly acknowledging how much they enjoyed said meal and their host’s gracious hospitality. But wait, this story is national! Global TV’s Marisa Thomas’s report went on air across the nation, therefore it is important, because she is a professional journalist. Journalism you see remains an important craft even in the Age of the Citizen Blogger, for journalists with their fancy journalism degrees serve as the gatekeepers of our national conversation filtering the important topics, like a politician’s meal, out from the white noise, like homelessness. I don’t know if Marisa Thomas ran this story in retaliation for allegedly being put on a media blacklist, or whether she was allegedly put on a media blacklist for running stories like these – a sort of chicken and egg kind of zen koan. Nevertheless ipso facto.

Not that Vision Vancouver would ever listen to a schmuck like me, but one could imagine an imaginary discussion where you could point out how awkward this subject could end up being for those that raised it. You know, in a jujitsu kind of way. The Twitter being filled with a certain NPA candidate’s tweets on the qualities of expensive wines. I had never thought those particularly noteworthy or containing some deeper meaning beyond what they appeared to be on the surface – an individual acknowledging enjoyment of one of life’s simple pleasures – but now I know the truth. I could point out the many comments – left on both his blog and elsewhere – by a wealthy businessman turned citizen-blogger of the cigars he’s enjoyed made in Communist sweatshops, or how fine wine is wasted on an untutored palate.

It might make them seem…extremely hypocritical. Perhaps, dare I say, petty.

Alas, it is apparently “awkward” and something to “regret”.

1. No links to Alex’s. You can find it yourself…