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Vancouver
Councilors, speak up already!
Strike raises fundamental questions of democracy
By Kevin Potvin
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What role should elected officials assume during crises like protracted public sector strikes?
In the current City of Vancouver civic strike, the unions have scored something of a direct hit by convincing the public that the NPA-dominated elected Council is playing an insufficient role. Tactics such as placards reading “Sam’s strike” and public comments zeroing in on the conspicuous inaction of specific councilors and the Mayor have not been met with any effective counter swings from management to pass blame onto anyone else.
For Council’s part, the Mayor has famously referred to the strike as “not a priority” for him, a terminal George Puil-moment that even George Puil has publicly condemned. He suffered his ignominous defeat for similarly aloof comments during the transit strike of years ago while he was Chair of the Translink board. Though it’s unfair to criticize star NPA councilors Peter Ladner and Suzanne Anton for taking out-of-town vacations during the strike, the optics look as bad as Iraqi legislators scramming to Jordon for holidays while war ravages their country.
Though it doesn’t happen often, there is an established track record throughout the Council’s 121-year history of Council directly contradicting firm advice from City staff on issues that are perceived by the public or the Councilors as big enough or poignant enough to warrant such meddling.
Mayor Sam Sullivan is firmly entrenched in the school of thought that holds that elected officials’ role in virtually all matters that come before them is to intelligently query staff and enact what staff need and to meddle otherwise not at all. His whole raison d’etre to run for Mayor was more to deny the pilot’s seat to anyone else with a more activist intent. This is why criticism of him as a Mayor with apparently no purpose in mind once the election was held is not only fair, but doesn’t meet with any resistance from him. He would agree with the critique, only he would portray his lack of minute engagement as a virtue, not a vice.
Though he is an extremist in this philosophy of government by no government, the point of view infects his NPA colleagues and brings Council as a whole along in that direction. The result has been one of the more intractable strikes in recent history that languishes in a sea of unconsummated ideas.
But surely the general tenor of relations between senior City staff and workers, particular during early contract negotiations and in the lead up to strike votes, is among the more important matters that Councilors could ever deal with. For even the most hands-off daddy-knows-best type Councilors who, like Sullivan, almost always defer to advice from senior staff, there are still a few big issues where the public expects and demands Council to take the lead and to make the decisions, where a hands-off stance is perceived as tantamount to dereliction of duty.
Relations between management and workers and general terms of a half-decade long contract is surely one of those meta-issues in which Council must take the lead in, or there would remain no good argument for even having a Council, other than to provide a deceptive façade of elected democratic oversight where none actually exists.
Yet typically even labour-endorsed elected officials step back from the task like it was a flaming bag on the doorstep. The reason has strictly to do with the narrow career interest of the individuals who happen to be in one of the 11 hot-potato seats when a contract comes due, and nothing to do with the public interest the Councilors are sworn to concern themselves with.
Prominently taking sides in a public sector management-union dispute for an elected official must look like the classic no-win proposition. By the time a strike is resolved, and they are all resolved at some point, both sides have moved a long enough distance off their opening gambits that anyone on record endorsing that opening position will be left behind. So even if a Councilor picks a side in the fight that wins, they’ll still lose. And if they pick the losing side, they come off even weaker.
So while it is dereliction of duty and it is an act of placing self-interest above the public interest, still, Councilors, at least of the kind who imagine they have a long career in politics, will go on shutting up just when those who pay them—like us, the unserved public—want them most to speak up.
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