We all know one week is an eternity in politics.
But the BC NDP can’t take many more, even any more, weeks like this last one.
Eternities like that eventually place you in the afterlife.
If the BC NDP were a human being, and we were its therapists, it would say it has problems at work and problems at home. And we would say one cannot function in the former if the latter is not functional.
The at-work problem became quite clear Oct. 15, when across the province municipalities swung away for the most part from the NDP flavour of civic government and took control of the mayoralties and councils in dozens of communities.
It was clear voters had had enough of the encroaching left-leaning priorities into what ought to be more neutral management of cities, towns and villages. Voters demanded back-to-basic municipal governance, street safety and orderliness, tax stability and less focus on long-range missions of climate change and social justice that, after all, are jurisdictional obligations of senior levels of government. Civic politicians who were play-acting as international politicians had it coming.
Which is not to say the BC NDP will be applying the big lesson. It’s a tricky manoeuvre for a party whose members often demand police defunding and even absolution for crimes of poverty to become the law-and-order option on the ballot. It’ll be tougher, too, if the lesson of fiscal prudence is coupled with it, because we’re most likely heading into deficit territory as a province.
The second problem for the BC NDP is in-house and, for the time being, in-its-face, the much broader debacle that disturbingly dispatched Anjali Appadurai last week as a leadership candidate improbably pushing to victory. This is a dysfunctional family all of a sudden, no matter what Mom and Dad say.
Owing to some debatable (but not conclusive) membership-selling techniques, Appadurai was disqualified – but far too late into the leadership campaign to let it be a race or to even let the membership much less the electorate choose the 37th premier. It meant David Eby was coronated with what could be construed as a poisoned chalice to carry on what John Horgan stressed last week was the time for a steady ship and not the time to rock the boat.
Still, the likely Queen is dead, so NDPers can cry long live the King.
Anyone who believes Appadurai’s following will evaporate or integrate is foolhardy. Her upstart candidacy drew way, way more new memberships than did Eby’s establishment campaign. He took her about as lightly as the Blue Jays took the Mariners around the fifth inning a couple of weeks earlier and, like the Jays, got a spanking that will make it tough to sit without wincing for some time.
She will fight on in the court of law or the court of public opinion. And even though quite a few of her sign-ups stand to be disqualified, too, there are enough remaining NDP newbies in her flock to have infiltrated riding associations under the rules, so Eby could have NDP candidates in 2024 not of his choosing. Unless, of course, he does to them as premier what he did through the party to Appadurai.
In the short term, they will make his life merely miserable. In the longer term they will wait for his fall to install her or a facsimile – somewhat in keeping, one might note, the way Eby was hovering over Horgan in 2017 – because he can’t possibly please them on anything approximating their terms.
While we’re discussing the letters N and P in a party, we should make mention of similar familial troubles for Vancouver’s municipal NPA, the Non-Partisan Association (disclosure: I ran for it in 2014 as the mayoralty nominee).
The venerable NPA was disrupted in 2019 in much the same way as the BC NDP has been in 2022: As a private club that set leadership rules (in the NPA’s case, concerning the board’s election and its discretion to expand) sufficiently porous to permit even semi-clever people to hijack it. And they did. And that begat the race to the bottom, orchestrated by a ragtag board that couldn’t raise funds, attract members, organize on the ground or, as is the case with the BC NDP, take the chance of a real race for its mayoralty nomination.
It is not a stretch to say that, based on its performance as the last-place finisher electorally last week, the Vancouver party that has elected more mayors than any has elected its last mayor, probably its last anyone.
There are two main messages for political parties in these two fiascos.
The first is that it makes sense that something as valuable as a leadership race be determined by people who have volunteered, donated and done the work for a party, not people who abruptly adopt someone and flee the scene if there are no coattails to ride. We have seen membership process complaints in the last year with the provincial Liberals, the federal Conservatives and now the provincial NDP. It would make sense to set different seismic standards to avert the regular tsunami’s damage.
The second is that it’s long past time to listen to what younger people are telling the political institution: That the feedback loop of setting priorities to serve older voters who elect them to be served by their priorities is an exclusionary practice that ultimately goes kerboom.
Justin Trudeau and Barack Obama activated younger engagement in politics, albeit temporarily before realpolitik set in. But the issues that matter to young people don’t count because they don’t vote because the issues that matter to young people don’t count.
These age-related political loops are problems, as is the distortion of democracy through the strange membership and board rules that can furnish us a premier without a stated platform (until he became the official leader) for the next two years and decimate a civic party, both with a very narrow say.
Kirk LaPointe is publisher and editor-in-chief of BIV and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
