Sam he is

In letting slip that he’s a Milton Friedman disciple, the new mayor reveals a dark pedigree

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

Weeks prior to the October 2004 referendum on wards, then-Councillor Sam Sullivan phoned me and invited me down to a Yaletown waterfront restaurant for lunch. I was suspicious but intrigued by what lunch is in this crystal gift shop of a neighbourhood.

The last time I had dealings with Sullivan was years earlier when he had written me a letter complaining about how I perpetuated a false myth of an historic west-side bias at City Hall. I reprinted extensive parts of the letter in my next column, including the sentence where he wrote that it was private and not for publication.

The bridge apparently not burned, I parked my fifteen-year old Toyota around the corner to avoid jamming the pleasing view afforded this triple cream lunch crowd. Sam rolled toward me finishing a phone call in Cantonese before expansively sweeping his arm over the landscape and greeting me with a “Welcome to my neighbourhood!” cry. This from the man who was about to lead the charge against wards because it would tend to make representatives think too much in terms of their own neighbourhoods.

A joke, no doubt, just like the joke he made in his first media appearance after winning the mayor’s elevated chair at Council Chambers. On a Sunday afternoon radio show, he said that he replied to Tim Stevenson’s assurances of a strong opposition that he would be “flipping his microphone off.” I thought it a grand way to launch a new era as mayor presiding over what may be the most divisive and polarized council in history. What a card.

He wanted to tell me over cress salad that he saw his role on council being to tie down his peers with “pot-hole and traffic light” issues so that fellow Councillors don’t get their hands on anything to do with policy and development. That job, he explained to me carefully, is best left to the City bureaucracy free of elected officials’ interference. This had been the way Vancouver had always developed under a string of NPA-dominated councils, and that was how this city got to be the number one city in the world. That, he said, again sweeping his arm over the picturesque False Creek view on that tranquil summer day, is how all this came about.

Back when he was aw-shucking it over his stunning defeat of Christy Clark to win the NPA mayoral nomination, Sullivan told the Vancouver Sun that he is a staunch disciple of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics. It was that school that gave refuge to Leo Strauss in 1939 when he escaped German Nazism only to father the freakish neo-conservative movement in America that recently engineered a coup of the US Republican Party, and the White House with the 2000 ascendancy of George W Bush, another aw-shucks neo-con front man.

Readers may recall that the late Allen Bloom, also a product of Friedman, Strauss, and the Chicago School, narrowly escaped murderous Black Panthers in 1969 by slipping into an academic seat at safer University of Toronto. From there, Bloom spawned a generation of campus neo-cons who spread virus-like across Canadian university political science departments, most notably the one at University of Calgary, and to a lesser extent, UBC, as well documented by University of Saskatchewan’s Shadia Drury in an excellent Globe and Mail article three years ago. Barry Cooper, a professor at U of Calgary, and leading Canadian neo-con, writes the Western View column for the Globe and Mail, and is currently busy setting up the new Calgary office of the Fraser Institute.

Focus on the Family, the seminal Christian fundamentalist political action group that acts as the tool of Machiavellian, and thoroughly secular, US neo-cons, has recently set up offices in Ontario, Alberta, and now Langley, where 130,000 Canadian subscriptions to its magazine are fulfilled. Their stated objective is to infiltrate conservative political organizations here the way they did in the US. But unable to get hold of power in Ottawa through their instruments known as the federal Reform, then Alliance, then Conservative parties, they are instead focusing on the more grass-roots levels. Like municipal councils.

Sullivan may not even know that to mention Friedman is to broadcast a coded message like a radio homing beacon to every twisted fundamentalist cell lurking in the shadows of this slowly changing country. But check out who he’s having lunch with nowadays. Betcha they aren’t arriving in busted up old Toyotas. First they take Vancouver, then they take Ottawa.

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