Posts from our progressive community

Here, on how a narrow focus on pursuing a seemingly safe path to a bare majority government may have contributed to the B.C. NDP's stunning election defeat this week.

Needless to say, there's no lack of other commentary on the election, with Alice Funke, Sixth Estate, Michael Stewart, Paul Ramsey and Thomas Walkom all reaching conclusions relatively similar to my own. And while not a lot of observers can claim to have identified the problem in B.C., Dan Tan and Leftdog look to have earned at least partial credit.

[Update: Let's add David Climenhaga's take to the mix.]

But I will take issue with Chantal Hebert's theory as to the effect of the B.C. election on federal politics. While the NDP surely wants to build its reputation as a governing party, I don't see the provincial election as substantially weakening the case for federal office in 2015 - and indeed voter remorse under another term of Christy Clark may well play to the party's advantage.

This could explain why the Prime Minister's Office told Duffy to refuse to cooperate with the forensic audit into his expenses.  Not only was Duffy pocketing tens of thousands of dollars in living expense allowances but he was also claiming expenses while on the campaign trail for the Conservatives.

The reason Sideshow Steve Harper appointed Duffy to the Senate, in addition as payment for services rendered during his last few years at CTV, was to serve as party pitchman at fundraisers from coast to coast.  A mutual friend used to regale me with details of how tirelessly Duffy worked, not for the country, not for the senate, but to improve Boss Harp's fortunes in the House of Commons.  The Senate job, it seems, was a handy vehicle to get Duffy onto the PMO payroll.  Apparently, "sober second thought" was optional.

Claiming reimbursement from the public purse for services rendered, not to the senate but to the Conservative Party of Canada, certainly does seem to cross a few lines, the sort of lines the RCMP would be interested in.  In times past that came under the heading of "pillaging the peasants."

I suppose ordering Duffy to stay silent was better than directing him to respond to auditors' questions by claiming the protection of the Canada Evidence Act - but only so long as he didn't blurt out the details to all his pals in Ottawa.

Duffy certainly was Steve Harper's invaluable little piggy at the trough.  But Steve, being Steve, doesn't do this sort of thing without cutouts, minions to fall on their swords, to preserve plausible deniability for the capo.

I wonder if Steve likes roast pork because Duffy set himself on fire and I think he's just about done.

Tom Walkom's analysis of the BC election is interesting.  In the end, he writes, British Columbians were asked to choose between two negatives:

On Tuesday, B.C. voters were left with two negative questions: Did they hate the Liberals enough to get rid of them? Or did they fear the New Democrats enough to avoid them?
In the end, they chose fear over hate.
Fear seems to be the operative word these days. It was fear that was at the heart of Adrian Dix's campaign. Like Stephen Harper, Dix didn't offer a vision. He simply portrayed himself as an incrementalist:

Throughout the campaign, Dix did his best to reassure voters that the new New Democrats had been thoroughly defanged. Unlike the NDP governments of Dave Barrett in the 1970s and Glen Clark in the ’90s, he insisted it had no plans to do anything remarkable.

This time, however, the NDP was determined to portray itself as bland. Dix may have been Glen Clark’s chief of staff during the tumultuous ’90s. But his campaign motto this time was minimalist: “one practical step at a time.”
His promises — such as one to ensure that nursing home residents receive two rather than just one bath a week — were underwhelming.
That strategy gave Stephen Harper a majority government. Now Canadian corporations are sitting on $500 billion of dead money.Tom Mulcair and Andrea Horvath should be taking notes. Canadians are looking for what the first President Bush called "that vision thing."

 

Golly. When I compared the Harper Cons to a cult last night, I forgot to mention one thing eh?

They're are a cult. But they are strongly influenced by The Sopranos .

Where if you get in financial trouble, Tony tells you to go see Vinnie in the back room, and he'll cut you some slack.

Or in the case of the Harper mob, you go to see Nigel at the PMO, and he'll cut you a big cheque.
Read more »

If you start at about the 5 minute mark, you will witness Harper's pet parrot Pierre, through endless repetition, parody a Member of Parliament actually answering a question and showing respect for Canadians' intelligence.

* Show an absolute absence of anything that could be even remotely interpreted as integrity. Recommend this Post

In a stunning upset of “Dewey Defeats Truman” proportions, the BC Liberals have defied all the polls save one and returned to power with a fourth straight majority government. No doubt, there will be much soul searching and wound licking over the coming weeks. I believe that five lessons — real, imagined, and not-quite-clear — will be gleaned from the experience.

1. Proceed with caution when predicting the future.

In last year’s US Presidential election, statistician Nate Silver made fools out of all those television pundits who privileged “gut feeling” over quantitative analysis. But sometimes even the data geeks get it wrong.

So what happened in British Columbia? Did voter support swing at the last minute? Did New Democrats fail to get out their vote? Were there methodological problems with the polling? All we can say for sure is that the political landscape is littered with failed predictions (albeit rarely so shocking as last night’s), and that in the future, partisans and non-partisans alike are probably better off displaying greater humility when speaking of what is yet to come.

2. Going negative works.

This is a very depressing development. Early on, NDP leader Adrian Dix admirably vowed to run a positive campaign, and although that strategy began to shift in the final days, his team never attempted anything on the scale of the unrelenting attacks unleashed by Premier Christy Clark and the Liberals.

While negative campaigning can sometimes backfire, it appears to have worked this time around, as the Liberals successfully tapped into the sizable block of BC voters susceptible to red scare tactics. All the Premier had to do was remind us of secret NDP plans to steal our hard-earned tax dollars and distribute them to greedy union bosses, or something to that effect, and BC’s “free enterprise coalition” dutifully flocked into action.

If I were inclined to ignore lesson #1 above, I would predict an NDP emulation of this campaign style for the next several elections.

3. Campaigning on the environment doesn’t work.

This is even more depressing — and not necessarily accurate. But in politics, it is perception that matters.

During this election, the NDP adopted a moderately progressive environmental platform. The strategy evidently did not pay off. Conceivably, the problem may have been that its environmental policies did not go far enough; perhaps a more stringent stance might have chipped off a few extra Green votes and energized the party’s base. But New Democrats are most likely drawing a different conclusion. I predict (again, with all due humility) that in the next election, the NDP will focus more on capturing the ideological territory of the Liberals than the Greens.

But there are different strategies to consider.

4. The NDP and the Greens must cooperate.

This call is likely to grow louder over the coming months and years, but electoral cooperation won’t be easy to implement. Green Party support comes from across the political spectrum — more so from the NDP than the Liberals, to be sure, but not overwhelmingly so. Plus, it is hard to determine exactly how Green and NDP transfers of support would break down on a riding-by-riding basis.

But while such a scheme is not guaranteed to succeed, neither is it guaranteed to fail. A pre-election alliance in targeted ridings is at least worth further exploration. And with Jane Sterk’s probable impending departure from the Green Party leadership, possibly to be replaced by new MLA Andrew Weaver who said he would prefer an NDP to a Liberal government, bad blood between the two parties may yet diminish.

5. It’s now up to civil society.

Regardless of what happens in 2017, BC will spend the next four years governed by a party that believes itself to have a mandate for pipeline ambiguity, LNG development, and climate inaction. Environmental and social justice groups must mobilize to demonstrate to the government that its priorities for the province are not embraced by the majority of voters who wanted someone else.

“Well, that was easy,” Christy Clark joked in her victory speech last night. It is now up to all of us to make sure that the next four years are anything but.

Filed under: BC Politics Tagged: Adrian Dix, Andrew Weaver, Christy Clark, election, Green Party, Jane Sterk, Liberal Party, NDP

The north pole is on the move and, according to scientists, it's moving because of climate change and the loss of Arctic ice.

From 1982 to 2005, the pole drifted southeast toward northern Labrador, Canada, at a rate of about 2 milliarcseconds —or roughly 6 centimetres — per year. But in 2005, the pole changed course and began galloping east toward Greenland at a rate of more than 7 milliarcseconds per year.

...underlying the seasonal motion is a yearly motion that is thought to be driven in part by continental drift. It was the change in that motion that caught the attention of [U. Texas geophysicist Jianli] Chen and his colleagues, who used data collected by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) to determine whether ice loss had shifted and accelerated the yearly polar drift.

GRACE’s twin probes measure changes in the Earth’s gravity field, which can be used to track shifts in the distribution of water and ice.  Chen’s team used GRACE data to model how melting icecaps affect Earth’s mass distribution. They found that recent accelerated ice loss and associated sea-level rise accounted for more than 90% of the post-2005 polar shift.

The results suggest that tracking polar shifts can serve as a check on current estimates of ice loss, says Erik Ivins, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. When mass is lost in one part of a spinning sphere, its spin axis will tilt directly toward the position of the loss, he says — exactly as Chen’s team observed for Greenland. “It’s a unique indicator of the point where the mass is lost,” says Ivins.

But, of course, we don't have to concern ourselves with this because it's about science and ice and stuff and that has nothing to do with pipelines and supertankers and bitumen and the things that matter.

Although he is addressing an audience in NYC, Cornell West's words are equally applicable on this side of the border. They seem especially important given the Harper regime's many efforts to tear down Canadian values and the obligations we have to one another as both citizens and human beings.

If you want to see his full address, you can access it here.

H/t Jack SaturdayRecommend this Post

Yet another demonstration of why there is no common ground between pro- and anti-choice.

When Kermit Gosnell was convicted Tuesday in the deaths of three babies, it might have been a moment for anti-abortion and abortion rights groups to come together over something they both opposed: a doctor providing bad medical care to women.

Instead, it was another moment of dissension. Anti-abortion groups warned that Gosnell was just one example of many doctors who carry out troubling late-term abortions across the country, while abortion rights groups said women went to Gosnell's "house of horrors" Philadelphia clinic because they didn't know what other options were available.

"I would hope that we could both rally behind the prosecution of someone who was providing subpar medical care to women," says Leah Chamberlain, administrator of the Philadelphia Women's Center, one of the first abortion clinics in the city. "[But] this situation seems to be drawing clear divisions between the two camps and there's a lot of yelling at each other rather than listening."Yeah, you'd think we could agree at least on that.

But no.

There is common ground, but it is occupied by pro-choicers. We already support all the family friendly, abortion-reducing things: affordable birth control, adoption, child care, comprehensive sex ed, financial and other support for pregnant women and families, and good health care for all.

There is no talking to, let alone compromising with fanatical fetus fetishists, and, thankfully at least in Canada, no earthly reason to.

Was this the leadership that the Harper Cons were praising Mike Duffy for -- having a well-connected friend willing to give him $90,000?
With no strings attached, of course.
On that basis, I'm ready to show that kind of leadership myself! I can send Mr. Wright the address where he can mail my cheque.

H/t Chris AndersenRecommend this Post

I am really angry this morning. Not as angry as I was last night (because I'm not drunk any more), but really angry. And if this were my other blog, I'd talk myself through that, but I'm in no mood to be rational. Because I'm scared. The LibCons just won another majority. Strong majority. And 48% of eligible voters just flat out didn't show up. Assholes. I hope it's their jobs that are lost.

What the fucking hell is wrong with people?! These are the assholes that gave us the HST, the HST that we got angry about and successfully repealed. Have we forgotten that? These are the pus-filled assholes that cut funding for the disabled OVER AND OVER AGAIN. These are the festering fuckholes who cut autism funding. Who made getting welfare even more demoralizing than it already is. Who sold BC rail under a cloud of scandal and RCMP raids on the legislature. Who utterly decimated the legal aid system. They are going to destroy the environment with fracking and a pipeline. They tore up contracts between the HEU and the government, creating a clusterfuck in the hospitals. Child poverty in BC is worse than in any other province. They don't even sit the legislature! These are the heartless sonsofbastards who cut funding for physiotherapy for injured poor people to once a month (I cried for hours when they did that, because I knew how much pain I would be in within a week. I was wrong. I was in more pain than I thought). And cut podiatry entirely, so you know, fuck the elderly poor people too. I could go on! And someone else did.

But you know, fuck the poor. Fuck the disabled. Fuck children. Fuck the law. Fuck unions. Fuck good quality wages. Fuck the environment. We want... I DON'T EVEN KNOW!

What are these fuckwads any good for? The economy isn't shit hot. They keep inflating it with schemes like requiring stratas to have depreciation reports so that they have to hire contractors in order to fix shit up so that they can sell. Yeah, that's wonderful for the contractors. Not so awesome for small stratas who were fixing things slowly on their own terms. Like mine. Two units out of 23 in mine are going to lose their homes because of the BC Liberal scheme. And I have to come up with $20,000 by June 2. Lucky me.

Honestly, what in the hell is the appeal of these assholes?! Low taxes? Are people that goddamn stupid? Our income taxes are artificially low because Medical Services Plan (MSP) is separate. We actually pay MORE tax if MSP is factored in. What a load of shit.

So yeah, this is the angry bitter lefty. FURIOUS about the harm these "Liberal" motherfuckers are doing to the poor and the earth. I hope each and every one of them gets exactly what they deserve.

edited to add:
In truth, I blame the NDP voters for a) not showing up; b) electing Dix as leader. What the motherfuck were they thinking? Oh, the Libs won't bring up that whole backdating a memo thing... I'm sure the electorate will have forgotten and just won't care. If Horgan had been elected, we'd be celebrating Premier Horgan.

CBC's Kady O'Malley sums up the Duffy audit/expense controversy quite nicely.

Why did Stephen Harper's chief of staff, Nigel Wright, cut a personal cheque to repay Senator Mike Duffy's controversial living expenses? Are all the Senators implicated in this controversy being treated equally in the process – or are the cases of Duffy and Pamela Wallin being handled differently from those of Mac Harb and Patrick Brazeau (who have both left their party caucuses and are suing over the issue of their committee-ordered repayments)? Why are any legal opinions on the residency question still not public? And if there is real expense fraud happening here, what's with all the fudging around who's job it was to call in the Mounties?

I had forgotten all about Pam Wallin, had you?   According to CTV's Bob Fife, it sounds as though Duffy did himself in by blabbering to all and sundry in Ottawa that Nigel Wright had covered the repayment, that the Harper PMO ordered him to not cooperate with the Deloitte auditors and that he was promised the government would go easy on him.

Isn't it hilarious when you watch an arrogant, privileged, fat little shit set fire to himself?

I have always been something of a reluctant warrior for the left. My reluctance was not motivated by lack of belief in principles because I really believe that corporatism and the rightwing ideology are spectacularly wrong and will lead to nothing but disaster. Furthermore, I believe that the only way forward for our race and our planet is a genuine pursuit of greater cooperation and equality. But my reluctance was motivated by the early realization that the majority of people not only tolerate their own exploitation and oppression, but they actually seem to revel in it. For reasons that I am sure I will never understand, the majority of people seem to actively court their own exploitation and want to cede power to those who will keep most people poor and powerless. And even when people work together to make things better, as when they form unions, they are surprisingly quick to create institutional frameworks that further solidify structural inequalities and  hierarchies.

Of course, on the other side of the argument, there has always been an indispensable group of tireless activists who have pushed back the tentacles of power and the only reason that we have any justice and generalized prosperity is because of these activists who have dragged the world forward despite the stupidity and reluctance of the majority.

But I feel like I have been fighting for a long time and on days like this I am looking into an abyss of depression and desperation. At least for now, I don't think I can fight any more. In my dark moments I just think that most people are stupid and probably deserve to be exploited and oppressed. If they can't act in their own interest (as the rich and powerful do all the time), I have to ask myself why I should bother.

With this in mind, I leave the rest of you to it, and wish you good luck. I am done.

BC #pollfail, in both senses, just as the Wildrose polling fiasco was beginning to fade from our memories. The Clark enviro-vandals are back in power, even if Christie herself is not, and the pollsters, once again, are left desperately searching... Dr.Dawg http://drdawgsblawg.ca/

Was there ever any doubt?

What happened with the polls? No one knows for sure.

But we just lost another whack of IQ points as a province.

A big ol'Fuck you to anyone who voted for the BC Lieberals, obviously you havent felt the pain so many of us have these last years. Masochism.

BC NDP leader Adrian Dix is a rare bird.  Or at least he would have been a rare bird if he'd actually won last night.   For that would have been his party's fourth win in the 15-provincial elections staged since they were formed in 1960.   As things stand this morning that puts the NDP at an underwhelming 3 for 15 in win/loss.

In a three or four-way contest, one out of five isn't great but it wouldn't be devastating, not necessarily.   But in a two-way contest that means your opponent has won four times as often as you which is awfully close to one-party rule.   And when you look at the gang of sots, crooks, manipulators and outright liars who have led the other team to their 12 for 15 win record it becomes even more remarkable - for them - miserable for you.

Dave Barret, Mike Harcourt, Glenn Clark (with unelected stand-ins Dan Miller and Ujjal Dosanjh) - that's it.  All of them one-term wonders.   Then stack that up against the rogues gallery of sots, crooks and liars who have so repeatedly trounced them.  Wacky Bennet, son Bill, Bill Van der Zalm, Rita Johnson (unelected), Gordo "one for the road" Campbell and now Christy Clark. 
Wacky was in for almost 20-years, son Bill logged more than ten, ditto Gordo Campbell and there is now ample reason to believe Christy Clark might have a decade-long run herself.

To today's Degenerate Red-Meat Right, British Columbians may seem to be a bunch of looney-lefties which is obviously a reflection of just how far to the radical right modern Canadian conservatism has strayed.

Or is it just us, the voting public.  On that score, I can't do better than this observation from The Sixth Estate:

"...it’s worth noting that so called “centre-right” political parties have correctly judged that the vast majority of Canadians are simply not interested in voting for anything other than a promise of budget cuts, tax cuts, and job growth, basically at the cost of anything else, whether it’s social services or accountability or even a minimal level of integrity and honesty in politics or the environment or our international reputation or anything else. ...These people will be basically evenly split between those who don’t bother voting at all and those who vote for whatever party they have a vague hunch will move in those directions."

Now, eat your gruel, there are fields to tend. 

There's been no shortage of things to do in Barcelona, we very easily filled 4-1/2 days, and we've skipped entire days of tourist destinations - Montjuic and Dali's Figuerres. This is a wonderful city, full of history, art, architecture, urban villages, great food, shopping - everything that makes a city great. Almost every sign is posted in three languages, and a huge percentage of people speak excellent English.

Today we went to La Boqueria, the main market. It is said that there has been a market on this site since the year 1210. The present one dates back to the late 19th century.

We love markets, and this one is huge and beautiful. The seafood stalls were especially amazing, offering an enormous variety of shellfish and fish. We must have seen a dozen different kinds of shrimp alone, along with giant, dark chunks of tuna, gleaming white salt cod, every manner of herring, sardine, and eel, calamari, snails, and on and on.

There were stalls selling 20 or 30 varieties of mushrooms, stalls with a dizzying array of dried fruit, cut-up fruit and batidas (fruit shakes), acres of ham. We were going to eat at one of the many food stalls, but ended up picking up tidbits as walked - empanadas, grilled shrimp piled on a wooden skewer, little dishes of calamari, spring rolls, figs.

The market runs off La Rambla, a long, crowded thoroughfare that used to be the city's main drag and is now a giant tourist trap. Time Out aptly says La Rambla exists only to separate tourists from their money, by any means possible, legal and illegal. It's extremely crowded and not very pleasant. We did negotiate it for a few blocks, to get to La Palau Guell, a mansion designed by Gaudi for the benefactors of Park Guell.

I went to this one by myself, and it's a good thing, as the 12 euro admission fee is overpriced. There are very few things to see inside. The main attraction is a roof terrace with a dozen or more chimneys covered in mosaics and topped with fanciful modernist fruit (See here.) I took a lot of pictures, and was glad I went, but it wasn't really worth 12 euros.

We then hopped back on the metro and got suitably lost trying to find the Palau Musica Catalana, the crazy modernist music hall, where we had an English-language tour booked for 3:00. We found the tour just before it started.

The construction of the Palau Musica Catalana was a point of great Catalan pride. It was paid for by public donations, featured all forms of music from classical to folk to popular, and has been (and still is) the home of the Catalan choral group, called an orfeo. It was the first choral group in Spain to admit women.

The hall is designed in a style that could be called modernisme on steriods - a dizzying array of mosaics and stained glass. But as the tour guide pointed out details, I saw a unity and a plan that I hadn't seen at first. The building was designed to let in a maximum amount of light in a very closed-in space, and features a giant, bell-shaped, stained-glass skylight. It was a good tour, worth doing if you want to see more interiors of modernist buildings.

We booked a table for dinner at El Bixto, the tiny place we enjoyed so much two nights ago, then went to pick up our laundry. It turned out the lavanderia was a very short walk from our hotel. D'oh! After dinner, perhaps we'll try again to see La Sagrada at night.

Tomorrow morning we pick up the rental car and head south to Granada. Adios, Barcelona.

PS, something I keep forgetting to say: would it kill the Red Sox to win a game while we're gone??? FFS.

Any politician knows that information is power.   Digital information is power on steroids at the speed of light.

Privacy is the best possible defence you have against enslavement and oppression.   America's founding fathers knew that all too well when they enacted the Fourth Amendment, the one against unreasonable search and seizure.   For when a government can freely enter you home or explore the most minute details of your life, your privacy is essentially gone.

The great British jurist, Sir Edward Coke, put it this way in 1604,  "The house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence as for his repose," in ruling the King and his agents were prohibited from warrantless search.

Today, of course, the King's men don't have to come into your house to sift through your papers.   They can go to your internet service provider or the telephone company or your bank or credit card company and lay bare your life, who you spend it with, what you buy, what you read and all your likes and dislikes.   In places like the United States with "total information awareness" phone calls and e-mails are automatically intercepted and computer monitored.

Today you can become a suspect not by your actions but by your profile built up, layer upon layer, from electronically recorded data then processed through computer software.   Who needs a long form census when you can electronically intercept all the good stuff anyway?

Information is not only power.  It's money.

The biggest mobile company, EE (for Orange and T-Mobile) has been selling on its 27m mobile subscribers, including calls made, location of use, downloads and sites visited. Quick off the mark, Ipsos Mori offered to sell on the acquired material to the Metropolitan Police. EE protested that its data was "aggregated and anonymised to protect its customers". Why then did the Met want to buy it? Everyone apologised.

Without a digital personality and a "verifiable" past, we will not be trusted by bank managers, employers, border guards, even spouses. Our teenage years will haunt us, perhaps rendering millions unemployable. Such people are Orwell's unpersons. When the internet, a sensational tool for living, crosses the frontier and becomes a life in itself, it risks destroying life.

Already the implied omniscience of the digital revolution is a gift to power. The American justice department was apparently angry with AP because it revealed details of a CIA operation in Yemen  without Washington's permission. In days of print – of Watergate and Spycatcher – power had to bow the knee to the media and the law. There is no such bowing now. The American government is about to open in Utah the greatest surveillance centre and storehouse on Earth, hoovering data from satellites and cables everywhere.

Government efforts to stamp on free information and opinion are usually a cloak to conceal executive embarrassment in "national security". It dusts secrecy with good intent: say a word and the dreaded al-Qaida will get to hear. Britain's Ripa dragnet, which the present home secretary still wants to extend, subjects the entire electronic realm to secretive state surveillance.

 Some of this intrusion may be useful – for example, in exposing tax evasion or paedophile websites. Every cloud can be found a silver lining. But two things are frightening in the Schmidt-Cohen futurology. One is the near total absence of accountability or redress – little beyond pleas for voluntary protocols and codes of corporate behaviour. Relying for personal privacy and security on corporate virtue – remember, the virtual world is entirely corporate – is like relying on Google to pay taxes.

Far worse is the boost the internet offers to state paranoia. The US justice department professes to decide for itself how to balance press freedom against national security. How does it come by this licence? As the security industry goads ministers to ever more purchases, the ratchet is always towards control and against freedom.

It can be no accident that the systematic destruction of the privacy of the individual parallels the ascendancy of the corporatist state and the relentless degradation of democracy.  What a wonderful tool to facilitate the restoration of both oligarchs and their essential companion, serfdom.   We not only invite them to steal our privacy but we permit them to commodify it.

There was a time that events and trends like this mattered.  We would argue endlessly about them among ourselves and they would be debated on the floors of our legislatures.  Ask yourself how that all fell silent?   Are we simply too busy spilling our guts on Facebook or to Amazon or Gmail to notice that we're spilling our guts to those who can find more than one handy use for our information, most of which may be against our individual and collective self-interest?

That's why I'm beginning to think one Anonymous might not be enough.   Somebody has to watch the watchers and show us what they're actually doing to us - to you and me - today and tomorrow.  They will not tell you and you will not know.   If governments wield great and dangerous powers that we haven't given them, they are not governing with our consent.   They have only two sources of powers - those that we have given them and those they have stolen from us when they thought we wouldn't catch on.

By now the entire country  knows what happened here in BC…the re-election of the Provincial Liberals (or Con-Lites) …to say that  I am depressed is to  state the case in an all-too delicate way.

If I can derive any tiny bit of  satisfaction  from the election, it is that… a) my old home riding, Kitsilano in Vancouver, did not elect Christy Clark  as their MLA – and this is Gordon Campbell’s old riding, where we fought long and hard to unseat him (unsuccessfully, I should add)… and b)   Vancouver Island, my current  home base, stubbornly true to form, went almost all NDP,  and even elected our first Green MLA, leaving only one seat left for the Fiberals  in,  inexplicably, the Comox Valley……

So, here’s my plan for the future..that the Island declare Independence  and break away from the rest of the Mainland, becoming their own  Province…and why not?  We have a very large land base, and grow an increasingly large amount of our own healthy food. We have a thriving  tourist industry, beautiful natural places (that we want to maintain and protect) and we are willing to fight hard to protect, and work with, not destroy, our  well-appreciated  natural resources. We have elected politicians willing to thumb their nose at the status quo and protect children’s health and education, and show some respect for our  seniors…

I have a strange sort of feeling that other  places might actually wish to join us..the Gulf Islands, Haida Gwaii, etc….(well, Haida Gwaii as a friendly sovereign nation, then)

It will take me a long time to recover from this  major defeat of principles and social justice..but, of course, the work continues, because I just know that  the Feds will look on this  rightwing triumph as a green light for the pipeline push…and that is something that should be fought with everything we have…it’s the only important fight we have left.