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Front Page » Archive » Vol
2 No 47 » here
What's the autopsy say, Larry?
COPE found its leader in Larry (DaVinci's Inquest) Campbell. But has
Campbell found his brand of followers?
by Karin Litzcke
The Republic
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| Coroners routinely weigh dead bodies. |
The consensus among the pundits seems to be that COPE, Vancouver's left-wing civic
party, has finally found itself a credible, possibly winning, mayoralty candidate
in Larry Campbell.
The question is, has Larry Campbell found himself the right political home?
Campbell states that he chose COPE because COPE was not exclusionary. In a speech
given at a COPE forum on September 10, he said that in COPE you didn't have to worry
about being ridiculed if you had different ideas.
He didn't test that tolerance. It was pretty clear at the forum, which featured nine
of the ten people vying for the COPE school board slate, that Campbell is uncritically
following his directions from the party. His comments stuck precisely to the COPE
education platform, and posed no threat to the big elephant lingering in the room.
That elephant is the fact that COPE's education agenda is to preserve unionized jobs,
and not to deliver effective education to children.
The elephant was clearly visible when most of the COPE slate hopefuls called for
the reinstatement of services that never offered anything of educational value to
children before they were cut. They spoke of being accountable trustees, yet in nine
candidates, nine speeches, and ten written statements, the word "read" never appeared
once.
Anyone who has ever alluded to this elephant, or dared to try to prod it off the
stage, has quickly learned that COPE people are in fact prone to ridiculing ideas
that are different.
The problem with having elephants on your party platform is that they limit your
range of motion. People in public office who are accompanied by elephants are simply
unable to get to all the ideas and options that might be available to address a particular
problem.
It is the presence of this wildlife that has caused the political fortunes of the
whole left wing--national, provincial, and civic--to flat-line in recent years.
It's not that the right wing has no elephants of its own. But the left wing seems
to have more of them, and is not as good at managing them once they become visible.
The left wing seems to believe that an aggressive pretense will convince the public
that the elephant really isn't there.
Campbell is not stupid, even if he is somewhat clumsily profane, and his concern
for the downtrodden of the city has appeared, to date, to be sincere.
But he is likely to perceive sooner rather than later that he can't move around much
on the COPE platform. When he does, will he play the party game and try to pretend
the elephants aren't there?
If he doesn't, the honeymoon between Campbell and COPE may not last through the election
campaign. If he does, he won't be the credible, possibly winning, mayoralty candidate
that the pundits have him pegged as.
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