Centrism: The thousand and one flavours of bland

The list of declared and possible mayoralty candidates from Vancouver’s three main municipal parties continues to grow: Mayor Sam Sullivan, Peter Ladner, Alan de Genova, Raymond Louie, Gregor Robertson, David Cadman. What difference is there among them?

All would characterize themselves as “green.” All would claim socially tolerant small ‘l’ liberal social values. All would support the breakneck suburban redevelopment of downtown Vancouver, though each with some proviso regarding the need for regulation. All would proclaim shock at homelessness and none would offer a plan for dealing with it (beyond donating a few tiny plots of city-owned land). All would accept the police force carrying on as it currently has: chasing drug users and small time growers, brutalizing minority populations, and bilking tax payers. All support the status quo, though each grasps at some way to construct an identity apart from the others (Mayor Sullivan, for example, has chosen the “ecodensity” brand). All of them loudly embrace the centre of the political spectrum, some a bit to the right of centre, others a bit to the left of centre. You’d need a magnifying glass to detect the differences in their platforms.

Vancouver has a long history of oppositional politicians: Helena Gutteridge, Lyle Telford, Harry Rankin, Tim Louis, Fred Bass and Anne Roberts. Where are the oppositional voices today? Gutteridge demanded housing for all and she didn’t squeak, “Gosh, can we get four social housing units here, or six over there?” Rankin put forward many concrete proposals that would have both regulated development and captured some of their city-sanctioned windfall profits for Vancouverites. For example, Rankin suggested requiring developers to pay a tax on the profits gained by re-zoning city lands. At considerable political cost, Louis stopped his then-colleagues in COPE (since departed for Vision) as they sought an order that would have cleared the way to evict homeless people from the vicinity of Science World. The only oppositional candidate so far, Betty Krawczyk, is marginalized by a media that refuses to speak to her, and by the high-stakes poker game called “civic elections” that requires a cool million dollars to be dealt a hand.

And that is the crux of the matter. The centris that exists at all levels—municipal, provincial and federal—of our political system is dictated by those who pay for the elections, the big time donors, all of whom represent large business interests. The blandness dominating our polity is the same homogenizing force reducing the city to a resort-suburb-by-the-sea. At the municipal level these monied interests are the large developers, real estate lawyers, landowners, financiers, and entertainment and gambling interests that overwhelming fund the municipal campaigns. Qualifying for their donations requires politicians to submit to the business vision of what they think Vancouver should be: a heavily policed, upscale consumer-oriented utopia, with an economy focused on tourism. The homogeneity on the municipal political scene parallels an increasingly homogeneous, disciplined city.

Learning from Vancouver: Dubai and Vancouverism

As reported last fall in MacLean’s Magazine, the Crown Prince of Dubai sought the services of the ex-head of Vancouver City Planning, Larry Beasley shortly after he stepped down from his position with the city. Beasley in turn enticed five senior staff members from Vancouver’s planning department to join him in assisting the Kingdom in planning the “new” Dubai, under construction on the banks of the Persian Gulf. What sort of a city is under construction there? And,what does it say about Vancouver that Dubai sought out its local planners to help construct it?

A safe haven for oil booty situated in the middle of conflict and chaos in the Middle East, Dubai epitomizes the city as pleasure dome: an endless spiral of fatuous, unfulfilled desire. With only 1.5 million people, Dubai is currently the world’s second biggest building site. In his essay “Sand, Fear, and Money in Dubai,”,Mike Davis portrays Dubai as a Disneyesque fantasy world of outrageous megaprojects in various stages of planning or completion, including an artificial “island world,” the Earth’s tallest building, an underwater luxury hotel, giant replicas of carnivorous dinosaurs, a domed ski resort and a “hypermall.” But, “in every dream house a heartache,” as the old song goes, and Dubai’s heartache, like so many in neoliberalism’s consumerist paradises, arises from its relationship to labour, also known as the poor. Dubai’s gilded elites depend upon a vast international immigrant indentured working class. Like Vancouver, much of the low wage employment requires imported labour, largely from Asia. In some cases lodged in crowded bunk houses without proper sanitation and with little potable water, Dubai’s workers are poorly paid, subject to racism and to sexual abuse and lack basic rights. The condition of Dubai’s working class, writes Davis, illustrates a key point in understanding luxury consumption: “Monstrous paradises . . . presume sulfurous antipodes.”

Vancouver’s planners offered Dubai their experience in constructing a faux urbanity and of creating a resort dedicated to luxury consumption that can afford to export the social problems it creates—savage inequalities, homelessness, pollution—beyond sight, outside city limits.

US housing crunch casts a shadow over BC

As reported in the Vancouver Sun, BC Finance Minister Carole Taylor warned that the housing woes south of the border could cut up to $1 billion from BC’s forestry royalties over the next few years. Our economy is highly dependent on construction and housing, both for export earnings but also for employment and consumer spending. Speaking on CBC, the President of the Council of Construction Associations said that in 2002 there were 92,000 construction workers in BC, and in 2007 about 185, 000. But that may be an underestimate.

Writing in the Sun recently, reporter Brian Morton stated there were 210,000 construction workers in BC in December 2007. Peter Simpson of the Greater Vancouver Home Builders’ Association told Morton that 20,736 housing starts in Metro Vancouver translated into 58,000 full-time jobs. This figure would not include the huge number of jobs created on highways, Olympic facilities, transit lines, and other non-housing related construction. And it is unclear that these figures include all the other construction related jobs: for example, jobs related to providing mortgages, retail employees at lumber and hardware stores, on-site security guards, truck drivers dropping off loads of lumber and concrete. The linkages to the construction industry are deep and wide ranging. Watch out when this merry-go-round slows down, as it surely will.