July 26, 2006, Vancouver –
As the Sam Sullivan-led City Council comes up to the summer recess after it’s first half-year in office, it’s true shape and nature has finally come into focus. At one time (when he was only a quiet, unengaged, second-tier councilor), Sullivan’s unusual interpretation of the role of an elected City Council was only an oddity, the easily dismissed musings of a loner outside the mainstream of civic thought.
But after a series of unforeseen accidents moved Sullivan from the back bench of civic politics into the Mayor’s office, his vision, previously unexamined, is now midway done re-engineering the
very democratic core of civic governance. He has enjoyed the benefit of a particularly easy time of it too, as he has with a lot of his pet projects, because his opponents have always—as he himself admits—underestimated him.
It isn’t so much that he has always been underestimated, though, as much as his opponents have never really noticed him at all, and so never did load for snipe upon sight of him as they might have with a more extroverted and outspoken up-and-comer.
What has happened is a two-fold tragedy for Vancouver: an unexamined vision for wholesale
change in the genetic code of civic governance has begun to be implemented by a man who himself has never been fully examined. Sullivan has never been taken seriously and his vision has never been tested. Yet, we are now living increasingly in the product of that odd and untested vision.
One word best captures the essence of it: neoconservatism. When he was a Councilor, Sullivan said his role, as he saw it, was to distract Council as a whole with pothole and traffic light issues, so that Councilors would not have time or energy to poke their noses into the more serious business of planning and design of the city, which, according to Sullivan, is best
left to the technicians in the City Planning office. He pointed to Yaletown as a beautiful example of what the Planning office can carry out when City Council has been kept away from any important role in the planning and development process.
Now that he has fallen into the Mayor’s chair, that interpretation of the role of elected officials has metastasized throughout all departments of the City. It was Sullivan who, for the first time, cut the Province of BC out of the process of appointing new members to the Police Board, of which he is the chair, when he last week appointed new members of his choosing. The Police Board is meant to be a citizen panel completely independent of the police as well as City Council (hence the tradition of Provincial appointments), but now the Police Board is dominated by Sullivan and his hand-picked cronies.
The move might be what is behind a flare-up in relations between the Police chief, Jamie Graham, and City Manager Judy Rogers, an incident that is now being investigated. Graham left a shot-through target practice sheet of paper on Rogers' desk, with the note saying "A bad day at the range is better than the best day at work." It wouldn’t be a stretch to say the Police Board was previously dominated by the Chief.
It was Sullivan’s NPA-dominated Council that fired en masse the Board of Variance last month, a body comprised of
ordinary citizens with the power to hear appeals to decisions made by the City Planning office. His Council has replaced the Board with three people, including the chair, who have a professional background in planning, as well as two former members of the board, first appointed when the NPA last enjoyed a majority on Council.
Earlier in the year, Sullivan attempted to cancel all city advisory boards, a move not even all NPA councilors could back, and the attempt failed.
But the pattern is now recognizable: where Sullivan once thought it prudent to remove his fellow councilors from important issues so that the technocracy he favours in City Staff can get on with its work unimpeded by elected public representatives, now Sullivan is stepping up the effort to remove all his fellow citizens, not just their representatives, from important issues. He attempted to cancel in one fell swoop all citizen advisory panels. He has stacked the quasi-judicial Police Board with his own cronies. He has fired the quasi-judicial Board of Variance and replaced them with more cronies. And last year, he spearheaded the No campaign in the referendum regarding wards, which are recognized as more representative and democratic than the current
at-large system.
At every step, Sullivan has moved against the public to favour the technocrats in senior staff positions. Indeed, the quiet-spoken, sometimes mentally wandering (and ironically easily distracted) Mayor has scarcely shown any interest in any other facets of his job. You get the feeling, watching him at work, that his main motivation for running for Council and eventually for Mayor over his unremarkable 10 years in civic politics was only to keep those seats away from anyone else who might have some ideas about what to do with them.
This is the essence of the neoconservative philosophy. Born in the mind of Leo Stauss, a German-Jewish émigré to the University of Chicago in the late 1930s, it was this philosopher’s conclusion that while a believable façade of democracy was necessary to keep an educated middle class content and productive, behind the scenes, and known to only selected initiates, a real government of efficient technocrats would make the decisions that really count. In this view, initiated politicians would understand that their role was to play the part of democratic representation while remaining careful not to truly impede the real and well-hidden agenda as developed by the efficient
technocrats.
Properly speaking, the more famous neoconservatives infesting the US national government are not neoconservatives at all; the first order is to remain largely secret and behind the scenes, something American neoconservatives have failed spectacularly at. It is also a philosophy not naturally given to making war around the world, as neoconservatives in Washington have done under the blithely passive George W Bush White House. Indeed, it was Hitler’s war that inspired Strauss to warn against the potential hazards of true democracy. (Hitler was initially democratically elected).
Take away the mouthy belligerence and war drums from the prominent American neoconservatives and you have Sam Sullivan-types. Quiet, non-activist, given to pseudo-intellectual airs, deferring in all important matters to the wisdom of efficient technocrats, paying lip service to the importance of democracy but careful to systematically undermine it whenever it should erupt, and seeking public office as a way to keep away from power anyone who is genuinely activist or truly democratic, Sullivan is neoconservative through-and-through.
It is important to note that the real neoconservative agenda cuts across traditional political divides. Many of the prominent American neoconservatives were originally Troskyites. Often incorrectly derided as rabid right-wingers, there are just as prominent left-wingers among the neoconservative cadre, like Senator and Democratic vice-presidential candidate Lloyd Bentson, former CIA director
George Tenet, originally appointed by Democrat Bill Clinton but kept on by Republican George Bush, and Labour Prime Minister of Britain, Tony Blair. Likewise, Sullivan ran in strong opposition to the activist agenda of his challenger for the NPA mayoral nomination, the ex-provincial Liberal right-winger Christie Clark, but less strongly against developer- and planning department-friendly left-winger Jim Green, running on the Vision Vancouver slate for Mayor in 2005.
The very first act at the very first meeting of the new Board of Variance on the afternoon of July 26, was to essentially overturn a decision made by the previous Board. This came just one day after the new Board was appointed by Sullivan’s Council, and one day also after City Staff lawyers successfully argued to the BC Supreme Court to let the indiscriminate firing of the old Board of Variance stand. This comes even though the laws state that no Board shall overturn a previous decision, and no appeal shall lie from a decision of the Board.
And on what grounds did the new hand-picked stooges of Sullivan’s Council overturn a decision of the previous Board of Variance? Jurisdiction—the very grounds NPA Councilors like Peter Ladner had said were behind the firing of the old Board. (It was a perceived overreach of jurisdiction by the Board that inspired the unprecedented firing—an alleged overreach into the domain of the City Planning department.) And on whose explicit instructions did the new chair of the Board of Variance, Marguerite Ford, close down discussion and vote to dismiss the
very first appeal brought before it on the grounds that jurisdiction had been overreached by the previous Board? Why, City Staff of course.
A citizen board is fired en masse and replaced with stooges of the planning department by the Mayor’s office; the new Board then overturns a decision of the previous Board, on the advice of the planning department. The move completes the transformation of the Board of Variance from a genuine panel of citizens overseeing planning department technocrats, into a rubber-stamping panel of stooges meant only to maintain the appearances of democratic oversight while having no intention of delivering true democracy at all, as per instructions straight from the Mayor’s office, currently inhabited by a man who runs for democratically-elected public office for the express purpose of keeping democratic power out of the hands of those who wish to use it.
Could there be a more clear case study of neoconservatism trickling down from the international level, represented by the Bush-Blair partnership, to the national, in the manifestation of Stephen Harper, to the provincial, in the person of Gordon Campbell, and into the civic, when neoconservative poster boy Sam Sullivan wheeled freshly into the Mayor’s office last fall? No. The eagle has landed. |
