Parties are a killer

The passion of Mel Gibson leaves behind a poor imitation of art.

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

Party politics in Vancouver are in a complete shambles. The Committee of Progressive Electors, or COPE, which is currently the party affiliation of five members of Vancouver City Council, blew itself apart over an inability to reconcile principled leftist standards formulated during years of opposition with the pragmatic centrist exigencies of actually governing.

Vision Vancouver (VV), formerly known as The Friends of Larry Campbell, is the affiliation of three councillors and the mayor, Larry Campbell (who has announced his resignation effective December this year when a successor is elected). This is what blew out of the COPE explosion after it had elected eight councillors and the mayor last election. The Non-Partisan Association remains in disarray three years after ungraciously dumping mild-mannered Philip Owen, getting nearly shut out of Council in the ensuing election, and then seeing the bulk of its campaign donors in the intervening time flee to VV. Vca-TEAM only registers with voters as a party that used to elect councillors sometime decades ago. The Green Party is barely a party at all, at least at the municipal level.

The timing couldn’t be worse. Especially at this moment in its history, the City of Vancouver needs confident and capable leadership looking up over the edges of the trenches. There is an array of frightening forces gathering on all the international, continental, national, regional and provincial horizons, forces that need to be understood, anticipated, and planned for.

At the top are international economic gyrations as world oil production tops out and begins to decline, leading to ever-spiraling gasoline, food, and transportation costs. Unlike the 1973 and 1980 oil price spikes, the current one is not due to any temporary supply conditions but rather reflects conditions that will now only become always more challenging, leading to ever more expensive energy costs. For a city designed around cheap private car costs, there is a terrible price to pay when fuel for cars hits $2, $3, and even $4 per litre.

Popular demands for gasoline tax cuts could deprive this city of mass transportation infrastructure funds at the very moment more people rely on that system for work, school, entertainment and shopping. Fewer suburban workers will be able to afford traveling into Vancouver, possibly leading to labour shortages in the city in some sectors and pushing up the wages companies need to pay. As fuel for necessary trips eats up more disposable income among all households in the region and among firms that rely on shipping, less will be available to spend on restaurants, entertainment and shopping—the core industries that fuel the Vancouver economy. Pressures today to improve congested infrastructure for private cars and trucking needs may lead to investments that will prove to be wasted in a few short years as congestion goes away on its own because of more expensive fuel.

All these entirely predictable effects have serious and far-reaching consequences for planning, social services, policing, hospital, transit and roads issues that come before City Council. There is added to these pressures a whole range of other considerations stemming from the meltdown into fear, greed, and desperation that may well occur to our continental neighbours, the United States.

Not only is the American economy more exposed than ours to the immediate pain of heightened and ever-climbing fuel costs, but it is also more precariously balanced atop enormous trade deficits almost entirely financed by foreign governments that are not always friendly, particularly those in China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, any of whose whims could crash the US dollar and deprive Americans of all imported goods, including many foods. Vancouver’s economy is inextricably tied to the commodities extraction industries of the interior of the province. A collapse of the US dollar will not only wind down the US economy, but will also price our commodity exports out of the US market. The corporate head office sector of the Vancouver economy, which provides so much of the City’s tax base, will suffer a beating such as it has probably never experienced. Lay offs will hit the whole province leading to streams of economic refugees flooding the city from the interior towns just at a time when the city loses the resources to deal with the social problems it already has.

Nationally, the retreat of the federal government into a narrower range of activities nearly entirely restricted to defence, security and tax collecting, will leave the city denuded of tax revenues, unprotected by an already absent west coast defence presence, and set upon by a predatory and cancerously growing security industry. This city only exists because of the waves of immigrants who continually wash ashore and keeps on flourishing only because of an extraordinarily open and tolerant mentality that sweeps up into its spirit all newcomers, from across the country as well as from around the world. Increased border surveillance, new identity cards, more US police presence here, speedier and less caring refugee rejection rules, and new incarceration and deportation laws will reduce the openness, tolerance, and welcoming spirit upon which Vancouver almost wholly depends to be a city at all. A renewed civic spirit to restore and sustain the qualities of openness and tolerance so important to the city is required from City Hall, but no one currently sitting on Council seems even vaguely aware of these threatening conditions.

Provincially, there will never be a restoration of financing taken away from cities nor will responsibility for services downloaded onto cities be reversed. The only credible opposition party provincially won surprising success at the polls in the last election precisely by quietly endorsing the brutal financial cuts and unfair downloading of responsibilities effected by the governing party in its previous mandate. For the foreseeable future, either party in power spells more financing cuts and more downloaded responsibilities. There has not yet been a strategy developed at Vancouver City Hall to deal with the reality of these conditions over the course of one provincial mandate; how well is the city prepared for an unrelenting series of cuts and downloads over several mandates held by different governing parties off into the future? Not very, is the answer.

Instead of looking out at this impressively complicated horizon and making plans to deal with the looming new realities it promises, the NPA has become expert at sowing discord among its members and capitalizing on its enemy’s demise; COPE has become expert at rooting out ideological error within its ranks; VV is quickly developing an expertise in party financing tactics; VcaTEAM has become proficient at ferreting out small missteps and minor mistakes made by those actually elected; and the Green Party seems a mere lifeless arm of the moribund dead weight of the virtually leaderless provincial Green Party. Chronic political party infighting in all camps is interrupted only by sporadic skirmishes between parties; none can forge agreement even within themselves let alone among the parties. Deliberations on council are virtually non-existent beyond the most facile and innocuous matters to do with things like traffic lights and potholes. The world outside Vancouver is rushing past in brilliant splendour and terrifying din, but the paralyzed party system lays like a thick woolen blanket over City Council blinding all who get there and leaving Vancouver without confidence, without competence, and without leadership when it needs all of those more than it ever has.

This city did not get to where it is today by blind accident and without competence or leadership. It was guided here by confident leaders able to anticipate the near future and lead the city through the shoals and swells of an always-impending reality. City Hall cannot get back to its tasks so long as council is dominated by one, two, or three different parties because it is the parties themselves—the party structure—that has delivered to the city its disturbing lack of leadership in the first place, leaving the city dangerously vulnerable to an unforgiving reality bearing down upon it. For the time being, and until the party structure of politics somehow rejuvenates itself and generates renewed civic responsibility and leadership within the competing factions within that structure, it is necessary for Vancouverites to spread their support out wider among the independent candidates making themselves available from outside the party structure.

One, two, or even three independent candidates elected to City Council this fall would stun the executives of all parties and force them out of their back rooms and into the light of day to find out why voters had rejected wholesale their slick, well-financed, highly polished and machine-like electoral campaigns in favour of the rudimentary and under-financed campaigns of independents, just as Chuck Cadman had stunned the Conservative Party nationally. They would be forced to learn from voters why candidates from all parties had been rejected, and they would learn it was because party-endorsed candidates show no leadership skills, offer no spirit of deliberation, and appear entirely ill-suited to the tasks of communication, on both the listening and the speaking sides.

Most of all, they would learn that the people of Vancouver are way out in front of anyone the parties had been offering up as candidates to City Council, and that they already well understand the risks to the city of international, continental, national and provincial realities, and are waiting for the parties to learn about these risks also and catch up with the people.

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