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An Inconvenient Party: The Manitoba NDP, Neoliberalism and Poverty

Chris Webb — 2009-11-22T17:55:24+00:00

This article appears in the latest edition of Socialist Project’s Relay

On November 5th, Manitoba’s new New Democratc Party (NDP) premier, Greg Selinger, heard the shouts of hundreds of students organized by the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) demonstrating outside the Manitoba Legislative Building demanding concrete action be taken against poverty. Had he graced the protestors with his presence he would have seen the energy of a diverse crowd tired of growing economic inequalities and band-aid solutions. Far from marking a new beginning, the Selinger response emphasized the desire to continue the legacy of the preceding NDP governments of Gary Doer (see incremental wage increases and lacklustre financing for social services). The NDP remains an inconvenient obstacle for those fighting to fill the gaps left by years of neoliberal restructuring and the present capitalist crisis. In a province under social-democratic control, those calling for progressive economic and social change need to carefully assess the nature of the provincial NDP and its new leadership.

The Manitoba economy, for example, has hardly been insulated from some of the main features of neoliberalism. Despite local economic forecasts proclaiming the strength of the provincial economy, employment rates are declining, child poverty rates remain high, and aboriginal poverty remains severe. Manitoba lost several thousand more jobs in October, pushing the unemployment rate from 5.3 to 5.8 per cent. Employers are on the offensive, demanding concessions from workers to maintain profitability. In the rural community of Pine Falls, to cite one of the more notable examples, 260 pulp and paper workers are currently locked out for refusing to accept drastic wage and benefit cuts. While GDP growth has remained steady, Manitoba isn’t immune to national and international economic fluctuations. The emphasis in the 2009 Provincial Budget on maintaining business stability translates as ensuring business profitability by demanding concessions from workers rather than the business community.

The Selinger Victory

In this economic climate, NDP members chose to elect to the party helm former Finance Minister Selinger. His ascendency speaks to the very nature of the provincial NDP. Selinger’s leadership is essentially the distillation of years of neo-liberal NDP policies. When we look at the neoliberal drift of the party under Gary Doer, in particular in economic policy, it is no surprise that a finance minister who oversaw a decade of ‘fiscal austerity’ should emerge as leader. In the leadership race, Selinger promised no change from the economic policies that have guided the party for the last decade. His support amongst NDP cabinet ministers and his unblemished image compared to the left-leaning Steve Ashton—branded a fiery socialist by the media—was an obvious choice for the party after the departure of Gary Doer, who now serves as Canadian Ambassador to the U.S. for the Conservative government of Stephen Harper.

During his time as Finance Minister, Selinger oversaw personal and business tax cuts that deprived the province of over $1billion. These cuts overwhelmingly benefitted high-income families and hurt already underfunded social services. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives reports that the income levels of poor Manitobans could be brought up to the poverty line for a cost of under $516 million a year (or just 1.1 per cent of Manitoba’s annual GDP). Selinger will continue Doer’s legacy of leading the NDP down a centrist road by balancing business tax cuts with incremental investments in health and education, or what he calls “govern[ing] with warm hearts and cool minds.” His strategy follows on the heels of Doer’s wholesale adoption of this third-way social democracy: a middle ground between social democracy and neo-liberalism. It comes as no surprise that 2009 Manitoba budget reflects a decade long obedience to zero deficits, improved credit access for business, and lower taxes. This fiscal restraint has become mantra across the provincial political spectrum and reflects the ideological dominance of neoliberalism.

Selinger’s victory in the leadership race should be a clear indication to the Left that working for change within the NDP is a battle that continues to be lost, as the NDP follows other social democratic parties into a realignment of their policies, organization and demobilization of its working-class constituency. Labour leaders and community groups supported Selinger over the left-leaning Steve Ashton, who promised to reinstitute the tuition freeze and impose a ban on replacement workers during a strike. This is suggestive of how timid the Manitoba labour movement has become in challenging the NDP’s political direction on even the most elemental of principles and legislative reform. In his nomination speech, Ashton challenged party members to create an inclusive party that gets back to its social-justice roots: “There is no reason why we cannot achieve social and economic justice for our population.” The Doer government originally promised the business community not to bring in anti-scab legislation, and it is likely that neither will the Selinger one.

In the face of the economic crisis, the federal Conservative government has shaken some of their dogma and done an about-face on deficit spending. The Manitoba NDP, however, remains committed to tight fiscal spending through crippling anti-deficit laws. In addition, Manitoba’s tax limitation laws make it incredibly difficult for the province to seek new revenue areas. The law caps personal and corporate taxes unless Manitobans vote for increases through referendum (under present legislated limits that, of course, could be repealed). This unlikely to happen, and it makes the prospect of progressive taxation near impossible.

At a time when it is clear to many that the free-market has failed to deliver the goods, there is a need to rethink in more creative and profound alternatives not only to neo-liberalism but also to the simple re-adoption of Keynesian economic policies. An anti-poverty campaign that fails to offer a systematic critique of capitalism, which the Target Poverty campaign lacked, begins with false pretences and offers false promises. The Target Poverty campaign called for an increase in public housing, universal childcare, funding to post-secondary institutions, employment opportunities, services for immigrants, reforms to employment insurance, etc. A liberal reading of poverty targets these areas without considering their relation to the rest of economic and social life. In other words, this is treating the symptoms instead of the cause. While most would acknowledge that reforms are needed in most of these departments, instituting reforms that affects all these areas in real terms would be a direct challenge to the structure of capitalism. Herein lies the first mistake of the campaign: That capitalism will allow all these reforms. Unemployment and poverty, instability and glaring corporate corruption are elements of capitalism that cannot be undone by mere reforms. The logic of constant growth and profit accumulation will erect barriers to these reforms at every possible opportunity. This can be seen vividly in current economic policy in Canada and Manitoba: we are bailing out the banks and other financial institutions while cutting welfare and calling for austerity. Being realistic about an anti-poverty strategy means you need to be realistic about what class-forces shape government policy, and Manitoba NDP governments have done nothing to offset the power of capital as a dominant class force.

The CFS Student-Anti-Poverty Protests

The decision by CFS to go beyond its immediate constituency and embrace demands affecting millions of Canadians facing poverty is crucial. It comes at a time when governments are imposing the burden of the economic crisis of capitalism on workers and the poor. As Ontario Coalition Against Poverty organizer John Clarke warned:

“November 5 will fall sadly short if it appeals to the supposed conscience of the Government instead of calling for resistance to those in power. It will not meet its potential if it fails to identify the attacks that are coming down on us as an attempt to stabilize a system in crisis at our expense. More than anything, the day must be about building a movement of serious and effective resistance to these same attacks.”

The CFS-led Day of Action was a valuable step in mobilizing new constituencies to combat poverty in Manitoba. In considering issues of youth and class—and the intersections of racism, sexism, xenophobia, low wages and student debt—the campaign actively opposed the liberal consensus of removing poverty from its structural context. Young people make up a disproportionate percentage of workers in the low-skilled, low-paid service sector, and have born the brunt of flexible working practices and a decline in real wages. Promoting solidarity amongst youth, workers, immigrants and aboriginal people affected by government cutbacks and neoliberal policy is far more valuable in building a fighting political movement than promising government will take action. Building a genuine alliance outside NDP party parameters to both develop policy and demand changes should be an ongoing campaign by progressive groups in Manitoba. Building these linkages will further the goal of creating a progressive movement that offers an alternative to the impotency of the third-way social democracy represented by the NDP, and its failure to break from neoliberal policy orientation, not to speak of addressing any of the structural inequalities of capitalism.

An independent, progressive movement outside the NDP would be invaluable in confronting the continued assault on public services throughout Manitoba . The privatization of Winnipeg’s waste-water facility and the subsequent increase in water rates was confronted by labour and community groups without much public support or debate. The agenda at City Hall has been dominated by the pro-business cronyism of Mayor Sam Katz and his attempts to do away with the municipal business tax. This has entailed an increase in the number of public-private partnerships and lay-offs of municipal workers to make up for the budget shortfall. City hall continues to prioritize ventures like a new football stadium and downtown water park rather than confront grinding poverty amongst aboriginal and newcomer groups that demand action from multiple levels of government. Building a militant alliance of workers, students and activists ready to confront issues like these with solid class analysis and subsequent action will not only urge the NDP to action, it will demonstrate what their years of neglect has bred.

The decline in left-opposition in Manitoba, at both the city and provincial levels, and the continued assault on workers’ rights and poor people, must be considered in a wider global context. Despite the value of current socialist theory in analyzing the scope of capitalist crisis, there remains a gulf between this work and the work needed to build and imagine a better world. As much as anything else, the NDP in Manitoba has fostered a political climate of complacency, political retreat and a marginalization of participatory democracy. The narrowing of social vision and political ambitions has impacted the Manitoba labour movement and social movements.

This is the challenge for the Left to both re-imagine and re-invent anti-capitalist theory and organizing. It is time for those working for genuinely progressive change in Manitoba to shake off the false consciousness – to use an older but still valuable term – encouraged by the NDP government. The new leadership of Premier Selinger will only give more evidence of the drift of the NDP toward managing the worst features of neoliberal capitalism, while doing next to nothing to develop the democratic capacities and popular forces to oppose it. The November 5th demonstrations in Winnipeg did its part to help put the formation of an anti-capitalist movement on the social agenda.

Gil Levine: The ultimate mensch

Judy Rebick — 2009-11-20T18:32:21+00:00

Last week I received an e-mail from Gil Levine, a legendary union leader, founding member of CUPE and a wonderful man. He was writing to say that he was fatally ill. He died a few days later on Nov. 16 at the age of 85, still vigorous and politically active. He said “This is probably the hardest email I’ve ever sent, as I need to let you know that I am gravely ill.” Still he wrote that e-mail, so like Gil to think of his legions, friends and comrades even as he and his family were struggling with this terrible news.

He asked us to reply to his family who would read him our e-mails. Sam Gindin who was Research Director at the CAW when Gil had the same position at CUPE replied to Gil’s family to pass along how much “he achieved and especially how much he taught us — not just what he said but what he always was. Whether passing on an idea or passing on a joke, whether indignant or cheering a small gain, Gil was always so present and even at this moment.”

Gil was active in the trade union movement and the left and throughout the dark days of the 50s and early 60s. No doubt he was delighted to see a new generation of radicals emerge in the late 60s. Prominent Marxist intellectual Leo Panitch remembers a friend and a mentor:

“Politically, I especially admired his rank and file activity in the Ottawa Committee for Labour Action. That an overwhelmingly busy and prominent national figure in the Canadian labour movement would do this was indeed a truly rare example of socialist egalitarian commitment and comradeship. What an example, what a standard, Gil Levine always set.”

Gil also mentored young people in CUPE. Morna Ballantyne who continues to be active both in the labour and women’s movements was hired by Gil in CUPE’s research department. “Gil Levine will live on in so many of us who grew up in CUPE under his watchful eye and guiding hand. He sharpened our vision, nurtured our passion, and gave us courage.”

Canadian Dimension publisher Cy Gonick told me “Gil was a mentor to me as he was to many of us. I never saw Gil compromise on a matter of principle or avoid confrontation when it was needed. Gil was always strategizing.”

I first met Gil when he asked me to speak at a CD fundraiser in Ottawa in the 1990s. He organized these gatherings of the Ottawa left every year for 22 years inviting a progressive leader to speak. After that, I was on his list and glad to be so.

In the month of October, I received several e-mails from Gil forwarding articles about the injustice of attacks on Goldstone whose report accused Israel of war crimes, the Montebello incident where an agent provocateur was outed by a video and reminding us about a PBS show with Joan Baez. A few months ago he sent a hilarious e-mail about growing up Jewish in the 1950s that included lines like “The only good advice that your Jewish mother gave you was: ‘Go! You might meet somebody!’ You grew up thinking it was normal for someone to shout ‘Are you okay?’ through the bathroom door when you were in there longer than 3 minutes.”

He remained politically engaged as a unionist, a left-wing activist and a Jew critical of Israel right until the end. He was also a strong supporter of women’s rights. Maybe it was because his wife of 62 years Helen has been an active feminist all her life but I don’t think I ever met a man of Gil’s generation more deeply committed to equality for women. Gil was at every rally or demonstration I went to in Ottawa. His warmth, passion, enthusiasm and open heart was something rare and wonderful especially in the often sectarian world of the unions and the left.

In remembering him his family wrote: “He was happiest when he was fighting for change, winning rights for workers and organizing everybody…He mentored and befriended many and brought people together in remarkable ways. His work, his passion for social justice, his humour and his caring will never be forgotten. Gil wanted to live forever. In all of us who loved him, he will.”

The tributes have been many. “Few people were as dedicated to Canada’s working people as Gil Levine,” said CUPE National President Paul Moist. “Gil has truly been the heart and soul of our union and its predecessor for over 50 years,” added CUPE National Secretary-Treasurer Claude Genereux. Former CUPE 79 President Jeff Rose called him “a giant of the Canadian labour movement.”

But my favourite tribute came from some friends of the family in an online condolence. “He was the penultimate mensch,” they said. Mensch is a Yiddish word meaning a really good person. Actually I think he was the ultimate mensch. You can leave your memories of Gil too.

How can we best remember Gil? “His death leaves an enormous, unbearable hole that can only be filled by all of us doing what he did best — creating opportunities to make a difference, getting people to think and act, connecting people and ideas, and living life to the fullest,” Morna Ballantyne.

A look at Campus Conservatives in Manitoba

Brian Latour — 2009-11-15T23:55:16+00:00

Nov. 5 was another student Day of Action in Manitoba. This one was important because it linked issues facing students directly to broader societal concerns with the Target Poverty campaign, as well as linking up the organizations representing students with a broad cross-section of anti-poverty activists and civil society organizations in Manitoba. It’s a new tactic, and it really opens the door to building broad coalitions of activists, student unions, and other civil society organizations to confront the neoliberal policies which have affected us all over the past couple decades. I would say that it was moderate success, in that new ground was broken and new spaces for resistance were opened up for people from diverse political backgrounds to unite and fight for a better world.

But, the latest Day of Action also featured the sorry spectacle of Hugh McFadyen and the University of Manitoba Campus Conservatives “teaming up”, presumably against students rallying against poverty. Or, as the Campus Conservatives called them on their website, a “army of pinkos”. Hey guys, 1952 called, and they want their political epithets back. One wonders if these Campus Conservatives got that line from Hugh himself, given his accusations of communism against the NDP in front of the Manitoba Chamber of Commerce.

The entire episode was a sad exercise in self-promotion for both a desperate and ineffective politician as well as a student group made up of Tory hacks. The messaging on the Campus Conservative website sounds like an opening shot in a campaign against student unions and anti-poverty activists. As for Hugh, the only paper with so little journalistic integrity as to take his little meeting seriously was the notoriously far-right Winnipeg Sun.

Hugh McFadyen ignoring the elected representatives of students and cherry-picking which few students he wants to talk to is an insult to all students. It shows that he is not interested in talking to students or their elected representatives, just a few carefully vetted conservative hacks. Of course, it is no surprise that someone with such little support among students would want to carefully choose which students he wants to use as media props seeing as he was heckled and chased off campus during the 2007 election.

Of course, the most ironic thing in all of this is that on this issue, the government and the opposition are practically indistinguishable on the issue. McFadyen is complaining about a tuition freeze which no longer exists. McFadyen’s bullshit line borrowed from the liked of Bob Rae and Alex Usher about the tuition freeze “subsidizing millionaires” is the same bullshit line I heard from a prominent NDP activist upset with the fact that student unions weren’t rolling over at the insistence of the NDP at a recent conference about “only helping students from Tuxedo”. Hugh thinking all students are “millionaires” is an indicator of just how out of touch the supposedly youthful Tory leader is. McFadyen putting out a press release angry at the government for agreeing with them on tuition fees while students outside are rallying against poverty only serves to underline the incompetence of whoever is running the show at the Manitoba PC Party and gives an insight as to why Hugh failed to pick up any seats in 2007.

The announcement on the Campus Conservative website closes with:

More importantly, students are taking notice. Slowly but surely, students are waking up to the fact that a tuition freeze comes at a great cost. They are realizing that lofty goals such as eliminating poverty are not, and should not, be the mandate of their elected student government.

Thank you to everyone who attended. There is much more work to be done - but we are up to the challenge.”

Now, is it just me or does that sound like they have plans to try to take over the University of Manitoba Students’ Union?

So, let us look at these tiny tories a little closer. When the story of the secret Conservative training sessions was first broken by the Ryerson Free Press, it mentioned that they were held in a variety of cities, including Winnipeg. Now, if I were a Conservative Party activist and I wanted to target a student union in Manitoba, UMSU would be the logical choice. It is the most powerful student union in the province (apologies to my friends at the U of W), it contains a large portion of CFS-Manitoba membership, and it has a history of right-wing governance typified by former UMSU President Steven Fletcher.

So, I decided to do a little investigation. By which I mean I decided to take a look at the membership list for the facebook page of the University of Manitoba Campus Conservatives. Members include:

Pierce Cairns, 2008 UMSU Presidential candidate (Regressive Conservative) Adam Cousins, 2009 UMSU Presidential candidate (Campus Change) Young Jung, 2009 UMSU VP Student Services candidate (Campus Change) Stefan Paszlack, Campaign Manager, Campus Change

Those who were around campus in 2008 might remember that the Regressive Conservative slate ran an openly right-wing campaign, reminiscent of the Fletcher days. They were rewarded with a third place finish with less than 10% of the vote. With Campus Change, on the other hand, they seem to have learned their lesson and tried to run a more centrist campaign. Some unknown persons also produced and distributed around the parking lots unapproved flyers making accusations against rival candidates from the Be The Difference slate. These flyers were clearly beyond the budget of the campaign teams, leading one to wonder who paid for them. Despite all of this, they were still defeated handily, winning less than 20% of the vote. All this makes one wonder to what extent Campus Change was supported by the Conservative Party, as well as what the Campus Conservatives will try next.

Another member of this facebook group is MP Peter Braid, who you might remember from a certain Ryerson Free Press article, delivering these Conservative training sessions in Waterloo. Other politicians include my MP, Shelley Glover, former UMSU President and now Minister of State for Democratic Reform Steven Fletcher (the irony is abundant to anyone with knowledge of Fletcher’s reign at UMSU), and Rob Anders, a professional heckler turned MP who is best known for being the only MP to vote against honorary citizenship for Nelson Mandela.

This little group also includes a smattering of writers for our campus paper, The Manitoban, as well as Joey Coleman, Canada’s self-proclaimed “top student blogger”. Coleman formerly worked for Macleans in the education section, a media outlet leading the charge against the CFS, and now blogs at globecampus.ca. The composition of student and corporate media is of concern to students because whether it is campaigns for more neoliberal education policies or against the CFS, these campaigns tend to be very media-driven. Macleans is practically the national headquarters for the movement against the CFS, and it was corporate media along with the business community which pushed the government to lift the tuition freeze in Manitoba.

As students, we need to be constantly vigilant about Conservative attacks on and infiltration of our student unions. Not only are student unions a crucial voice of students in the neoliberal era which should not be co-opted by right-wing forces pushing anti-student policies, but they are also one of the few mass membership civil society organizations left which is willing to build coalitions and take stances against the dominant political forces for a better world. Right now, we need people in student unions who are able to check their political affiliations at the door and focus on fighting for students, not Tory hacks who want to neuter or co-opt student organizations in order to advance the anti-student agendas of the mother party.

For more information on conservative plotting across the country, please visit Campus Conservative Watch

Unholy Alliance? Conservatives and Ultra-leftists unite against CFS?

Brian Latour — 2009-10-30T05:32:18+00:00

Recently, (as always) there has been much hullabaloo about the Canadian Federation of Students in the student media, as well as the usual suspects over at Macleans (here’s hoping the National Post somehow takes Macleans down with it). It’s mostly the usual stuff regarding disaffiliation campaigns, but with a twist this time. The interesting thing is that it doesn’t seem like it is just Tiny Tories anymore. A website titled Dear CFS appears to be run by a section of the Montreal radical left which is opposed to the CFS and actively working for disaffiliation campaigns. Signatoried to the letter include Yves Engler, author of The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy. As someone who identifies as an anarchist (anarcho-syndicalist if you want to get picky) and proudly carries my red card, yet is also active in my CFS-affiliated student union (to the point where I sometimes catch myself referring to it as “Local 103”), I find this interesting. I’m not sure I’m qualified to speak about all of their concerns because my experience with the student movement and the CFS is limited to the colonial backwater of Manitoba, but I think there are a few things which should be addressed here.

First, the CFS is far from perfect. Student union bureaucrats, especially at universities which have an active right, a history of right-wing governance, or a hostile student media, often fear conflict which could threaten the prospects of the re-election of a “progressive” slate and the self-preservation of any sort of official progressive politics at a university. They think that everyone is out to get them and to some extent they are right, as evidenced by the exposure of Tiny Tory plots over the years. However, this understandable paranoia can cause sections of the bureaucracy to start to become insular and bureaucratic, which results in some of the issues that we see in our student unions.

Also, despite what it says on my hoodie, there is a difference between the CFS and a student movement. The CFS is a bureaucratic (meant without any negative connotations) mass membership organization, somewhat analogous to a labour unions, with elected positions, an office, a big (by activist standards) budget, and a lobbying machine. While a student movement, where one has any presence, is a grassroots movement of students organizing in their spare time with every student an organizer – think SDS, or the Palestinian solidarity movement on campus. And as we all can figure out, a bureaucracy detached from a movement inevitably results in all sorts of issues. And perhaps the praxis of the CFS does need a lot of work. This is an organization that needs more organization at the bottom and to move a little from the liberal politics of awareness to the radical politics of disruption and fucking shit up.

All that said, there are things in this supposedly left critique which seriously need to be addressed.

The CFS has alienated real activists by highjacking our campaigns, stamping glossy brands on our hard work, and attracting bad press across the country. So here’s the truth. The real student movement can’t be put on a pin or a sticker, can’t be sold to us in a bus ad, and can’t hide behind superficial and obsolete rhetoric. The CFS has been a driving force behind the active and ongoing co-optation of legitimate social justice organizing for too long.

I haven’t really seen this happening. From “Drop Fees” to “No Means No” to “Target Poverty”, it seems as though rather than hijacking campaigns, the CFS is at the forefront of creating and pushing campaigns. I don’t think the CFS attracts bad press to external campaigns it signs on to, if anything, it grants them a bit of legitimacy, resources and muscle, and may generate some positive publicity or an increase in support for the issues on campus. In Manitoba, instead of attempting to co-opt social justice organizing, the CFS and local student unions are the only mass membership organizations really making an effort to mobilize their members or even lend some bureaucratic support for any sort of campaign these days (oh, the perils of having a “friendly government”). This might be different over in Montreal, but in my experience, I have seen the CFS take part in campaigns, but I have never seen them attempt to co-opt them.

sell shamelessly corporate CFS-Services contracts to our unions behind closed doors

As for CFS-Services, I don’t see any problem with student-run services, especially under the model they have with CFS-Services as a legally seperate branch of the CFS. In fact, I would say that students do benefit from some of these services, especially bulk buying and economies of scale. Incidentally, if I am not mistaken, all of the t-shirts ordered by the CFS or by individual student unions through their bulk buying programs are made by a worker co-op of single mothers in El Salvador – hardly the corporate behemoth that CFS-Services is portrayed as.

Moreover, we consider the adoption of progressive campaigns by the CFS deeply problematic regardless of whether or not we agree with their stance. The reason is simple: the CFS has a clear mandate to provide a voice for all students–on student issues–at the federal level, and no matter what we think about Palestine, copyright, gender, Cuba, abortion, or land claims it is unrepresentative to speak for all students on such divisive issues. Some of us have dedicated our lives to these causes, but it’s inappropriate for a federal lobby organization to adopt these campaigns while matters of urgent importance to all students (rising tuition, accessibility, corporate control of university bodies, declining subsidies) go completely untouched.”

Why should this be “deeply problematic”? First off, there are more to “student issues” than just the ones which are seen as directly affecting students. Attacks on students are just one part of something bigger, capital’s global offensive known as neoliberalism. We should be building coalitions and working in solidarity with people opposing an incredibly brutal intensification of the capitalist system around the world, not dismissing it as “unrepresentative”. The CFS is a civil society organization and a democratic organization of students. Why should it be prevented from taking stances on issues?

Also, copyright is a “student issue” (did I mention I hate this dichotomy of student issues and non-student issues?). We often come across it in our research, and the commodification of knowledge and culture has deep implications for any student doing any sort of research.

Furthermore, the CFS represents a broad cross-section of society – women, LGBT students, students of colour, aboriginal students, and international students from nations oppressed by global imperialism. It seems a little privileged to argue that the CFS, as their representative, should completely ignore their issues and refuse to take positions in support of their rights, especially given what myself and others have seen about the racist nature of our university.

It also seems awkward to complain about the CFS taking stances on issues such as gender when above the authors are complaining that “While quick to pay lip service to marginalized and disenfranchised communities, evidence of actual progress is hardly forthcoming.” The authors decry the CFS for not making progress, then complain about the CFS taking stands on these issues. Do they want this acutal progress or not?

It is also absurd to claim that it is inapproprate that the CFS is adopting campaigns such as Palestinian solidarity. First off, only the CFS-Ontario has a position on Palestine. I wish the national CFS, my provincial wing, or my local student union did, but they don’t (I wrote about this issue a few months ago). Also, CUPE Ontario and CUPW have voted to endorse the BDS movement against Israel – would it be logically consistent for these activists to also call for a decertification of these unions on that basis? Are they opposed to CUPE Ontario and CUPW’s endorsement of the BDS movement as well? Also, as someone who has a bit of experience in the Palestinian solidarity movement, I was under the impression that one of the goals of the BDS movement was to get large organizations to sign on and use their political and economic clout to end apartheid in Israel. It seems absurd to me that any Palestinian solidarity activist would oppose a civil society organization representing hundreds of thousands of students signing on to a BDS campaign. If anything, this only advances the cause and should make genuine Palestinian solidarity activists happy.

Finally, to address the notion that these “matters of urgent importance to all students” are going untouched, that is flat out wrong. It is the absolute height of absurdity to claim that the tuition issue has gone untouched when it is pretty much the biggest thing the CFS has done last year, and the CFS has been routinely and unfairly criticized for focusing too much on tuition. Has the writer of this document ever seen this?

Some people may say that any “other” issues should be ignored until such time as the CFS has won on all the “core student issues”, but when you are a large civil society organization like a student union or a labour union, solidarity and coalition building is not something you maybe get around to at some point when everything is peachy, it is something that you make time for. If we all decided to stop doing solidarity work until we’ve sorted out our own issues, no solidarity work would ever get done.

All in all, the CFS is far from perfect and I am sympathetic to genuine left critiques of the organization. And I am very intrigued by radical student federations such as ASSÈ in Quebec. But all that aside, I think we’re better off with the CFS than without. If you’re going to convince me that opposition to the CFS is a left position, you’re going to need a lot more than recycled Tiny Tory talking points and a rejection of any sort of solidarity campaigns.

Remembering the Waffle

Judy Rebick — 2009-10-25T19:44:39+00:00

Remembering the Waffle

Yesterday I did something I rarely do. I participated in an academic seminar. It was to mark the 40th anniversity of The Waffle, a radical youth movement inside the NDP. Hardly anyone under 50 knows what The Waffle was, unless you have ever tried to organize an opposition in the NDP where it remains a scary ghost. But it was a significant and almost unique formation of the 1960’s in Canada. Apparently scholarship on the 1960’s is the hottest thing in academe these days. Who knew?

The Waffle was a youthful, radical, left nationalist and socialist formation within the New Democratic Party. Formed in the heady days of 1969, the Waffle Manifesto was incredibly radical when read with today’s eyes.

Our aim as democratic socialists is to build an independent socialist Canada. Our aim as supporters of the New Democratic Party is to make it a truly socialist party.

Sigh…I wonder when the last time anyone in or around the NDP used the word socialist. It is, of course, a document of its time, referring to “men” as a word covering everyone, ignoring Indigneous people altogether in its formulation of the founding two nations, and without a mention of equality for women, or women’s liberation, as we called it in those days.

What was extraordinary about the Waffle was its economic nationalism. Even as a young woman who was attracted to the Waffle because of its strong female leadership, I never agreed with the idea that the main problem was that Canada was economically subordinate to the United States. In those days, the Waffle argued that Canada was basically a branch plant of the US and would only be able to be independent though a democratic socialist society.

I never really understood Canada as a subordinate power. A lesser power, yes, but not really under the thumb of the US. I understood cultural nationalism that sought to promote and protect Canadian culture so that we were not totally overwhelmed by US culture, but economic nationalism never made sense to me. In studying to counter their arguments at the time, I learned about Marxism, which made a lot more sense, and argued that nationalism in an advanced capitalist country was reactionary, while it could be progressive in a developing country.

Yet the Waffle’s nationalism was progressive in many ways. Yesterday I finally understood the economic nationalism, listening to both proponents and scholars. I won’t go into detail here because a podcast of the event will soon be available. I still don’t agree with it, but at least I understand it, and no doubt the left nationalism of the Waffle and others helped the Canadian Left and social movements to respond quickly to free trade when it first reared its ugly head in the Free Trade Agreement with the US.

On the surface, this discussion seems a bit archaic and not of much interest to young people now who are more likely to see Canada as a colonial power itself and an equal partner in global corporate governance. With some of the most important social movements taking on the abuses of Canadian mining companies and the exploitation of Canadian banks, it is hard to imagine anyone accepting the nationalist arguments of the Waffle, however rooted in a radical analysis.

Yet the Waffle was an important factor in the development of these very social movements. It was women in the Waffle who fought for the NDP to accept women’s liberation and women in leadership. They uniquely worked both inside and outside the party, creating a model of work that they also brought into the trade union movement. The Waffle women played a critical role in the shaping of the Canadian women’s movement. As a result, Canada’s women’s movement included working class women and Canada has among the most feminist unions and social democratic parties in the world.

As a young woman I was attracted to the powerful women in the Waffle like Jackie Larkin and Varda Burstyn, both of whom remained active on the Left and in the women’s movement. Waffle leaders like economist Mel Watkins and political scientist James Laxer continue to be relevant critics of the NDP.

In my view when the NDP expelled the Waffle, they cut out their heart by expelling the youth. It is true that the Waffle was sectarian towards the NDP, as was the culture of the time, and that the remnants of Cold War ideology made a rational response to this highly active opposition difficult, but still, it is hard to look back on the energy and creativity of the Waffle and not conclude that the NDP slit its own throat when they threw them out.

What was interesting about the roundtable was the richness of discussion about the Waffle in the context of the times in which it lived, and the decline of that discussion as soon as we started talking about the future of the Left, and everyone retreated to their usual nostrums.

I am sorry more people didn’t attend the event, and I hoping they will listen to at least some of the podcast. If we don’t pay attention to our own history, no one else likely will.

Slavoj Žižek interviewed on Democracy Now!

Ben Wood — 2009-10-15T18:42:50+00:00

Cultural theorist and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek controlled his interview on today’s episode of Democracy Now! Click on the link below to read/hear why he believes the Health Care debate in the U.S. represents ideology in its material force (laughing in the face of those who claim we live in a post-ideological era) and explain his assertion that the only reason we love Latin American populism is because it warms the hearts of well-paid academics in the U.S., reminding them of the old desires of the Left.

Slavoj Žižek on Democracy Now!

Zelaya returns!

Ben Wood — 2009-09-25T15:49:22+00:00

Zelaya has returned, though this hardly means the de facto Micheletti regime has recognized the democratically elected president. In fact, when word spread that Zelaya had indeed returned, Micheletti denied it. During a press conference, he went on to accuse the two reporters who broke the story of “media terrorism” and “psychological warfare” and threatened to serve them with criminal charges.

Zelaya made his return publically known from the Brazilian embassy. As Greg Grandin points out, choosing the Brazilian embassy as his safe house was a ‘strategic masterstroke’ for Zelaya as this shifts attention away from Chavez, U.S. public enemy #1.

When it was confirmed Zelaya had returned Micheletti imposed a 15-hour curfew from 4 pm to 7 am in response to a growing resistance to his regime. As with Zelaya’s return, Micheletti also denies this resistance. He recently told Fox News reporters that Honduras was “a quiet and happy country.” The thousands of arrested protestors suggest something different.

To recap, Zelaya was ousted in June for his intentions to make changes to the Honduran constitution regarding presidential term limits. There has been considerable debate over this. Some claim what he expressed was an anti-constitutional and undemocratic attempt to remain in power. Others insist he was suggesting to simply poll the country on the subject of constitutional reform.

As this World Upside Down article discusses, there is a growing Women’s resistance not only to Micheletti but also to the current Honduran constitution. One women from COPINH, the Front Against the Coup, said, “The current constitution never mentions women, not once, so to establish our human rights, our reproductive, sexual, political, social, and economic rights as women would be to really confront this system of domination.”

The coup resistance represents much more than outrage at the ousting of a democratically elected president. These women’s groups, for instance, are fighting for a constitution that acknowledges their rights and needs. For others, the coup resistance means fighting to improve the standard of living in Honduras. Many, including those following the situation abroad, see the resistance to Micheletti as a desire by the Honduran people to cut ties from the U.S. and have an independent Honduras.

All of these desires happen to be expressed in the same event: protesting thede facto coup government and fighting to restore democracy. As one woman’s rights advocate said, “What Zelaya has done is symbolize the popular discontent accumulated over the years.”

The Real News Network has an excellent video newscast that documents the aftermath of Zelaya’s return.

Intelligent Commentary: Episode 11

Madeline Bruce — 2009-09-20T22:13:56+00:00

The final episode of Season 1 of Intelligence leaves drug kingpin Jimmie Reardon stuck in the men’s room of a Seattle nightclub, as it dawns on him that this is a sting to arrest him, even though he has been cooperating with the Feds in Canada. Ted Altman (Matt Frewer) has sneakily thrown in his lot with the American Drug Enforcement Administration in a ploy to destabilize Mary Spalding in her career, the better to rise to the top himself. Mary is gaining important information about arms trading from her drug trade informant, whose trust she has earned. Jimmie drops his famous cool when he phones his wife and daughter on his cell phone, fearing that he may not be long for this world. Actor Ian Tracey gives a believable, riveting performance as this husband and father whose kingpin reign may well be over. It is moving to see the sudden shift from where he has been brushing off his daughter’s questions about his activities, to leveling with her, and saying, from his heart, “I’m sorry for the kind of life I lead.” Another surprise is when he tells his troublemaker wife Francine, “I’ve always loved you.”

Ted Altman belatedly realizes that the Americans have no qualms about killing Jimmie Reardon, the marijuana smuggler, and at that point he regrets what he has done. This is the first sign of a conscience that we have seen in Ted. The theme of what merging with Americans means for Canadians is a real one, because it does mean the eroding of our own unique Canadian values, which are kinder, gentler, and more humane than theirs. I don’t want to become more like the Americans, and I feel sure that the majority of Canadians feel the same way. About our leaders, I am not so sure.

It is chilling to see how close an American spy, Richard Royden, got to taking over the top job in the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service. Even the Deputy Minister has been hoodwinked by this menace. All it takes is one or two other ambitious, greedy, hotheads in the system for that to happen. It is not so far-fetched a situation. Only last year Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier left top secret documents in his girlfriend’s apartment, and this girlfriend had ties to the Hell’s Angels. This was after parading her in a low cut dress in a very public setting. Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney took $300,000 under the table, for ? services, from a very shady German arms dealer who now faces a number of fraud charges in Germany. Next came the Sponsorship Scandal, when millions of dollars of tax-payers money was handed over to Liberal cronies for doing – nothing.

We need to start vetting our leaders early on in their careers for sociopathic tendencies, meaning - do they have much of a conscience? The same for leaders of large corporations. Otherwise, mankind is doomed. There are tests for this. Character and integrity and morals should be the most important qualities for those in leadership positions. .

A thread running through every episode of Intelligence, or shall we say a missing thread, is the sidelining of the female of the species. Mostly she is viewed through the venetian blinds of the Chick-A-Dee nightclub office, slithering around poles, wearing nothing. What is it with men, that they actually want these girls to fool them, and pretend that they are always undressed and ready for sex, like it’s the one great thing in life? What a silly, silly game. The reality is that women rarely concern themselves with it, being too busy with raising children, keeping house, cooking, having careers, and other activities such as gardening and reading good books. They can be manipulated into behaving like moving wallpaper, but then you have taken away 99% of their true value to the human race – to civilization. I suppose this in turn makes the men feel that they then have 199% importance.

This is where Mary Spalding is such a refreshing departure, with both brains and integrity to spare, and functioning in the world at a very high level.

Intelligence shows us how seemingly unconnected things do have unholy alliances. The world of drug smuggling reveals evidence of arms dealing, and this information is valuable to Canadian security, ergo, informants from that world are cultivated by the Feds. Drug smugglers and dealers need places to put their money, and banks want money, so - cultivate a banker who likes cocaine and strippers and – you’re in business.

It’s a wonder they let men into positions of responsibility at all.

Excerpt from interview with composer of Intelligence soundtrack Schaun Tozer, August 28, 2009:

MB: The final episode of Season 2 has a fabulous car chase – the best I have ever seen, on TV or in the movies. The music for that makes it almost unbearably exciting. Was that fun to do?
ST: Very much so. Together, with the sound editors, we decided to try and go somewhere special.

Intelligent Commentary: Episode 10

Madeline Bruce — 2009-09-16T13:13:27+00:00

Excerpt from interview with Schaun Tozer, composer of the soundtrack, August 28, 2009:

MB: Did you get all of the percussion out of the synthesizer? Is a human percussion player any better than a synthesizer? Would he or she have something extra?
ST: The large percussion orchestra was a combination of live performances and sampled performances. With the latter, I programmed many different percussion templates or scenarios, which were then triggered by my performance at the master keyboard. With real players, they would replace or enhance performances that I had already recorded. With the guitars, we experimented with a wide variety of timbres, and in the case of the pedal steel guitar we used it in ways which just maybe wasn’t what the inventors had in mind. Generally, this was the modus operandi which, let’s face it, is better sustained with what the human touch may offer.

The background sound of Episode 10 contains little music as we know it. There is an exotic fantasy garden of intriguing sounds of no discernable origin. I might call this percussion, or I might call it sound colours which weave in and out of the action, not so intrusively that they distract your attention, but which serve to heighten the tension and suspense and the deep-seated paranoia and danger.

MB: How often do you hear interested commentary on the soundtrack of Crime shows?
MB: You don’t.

And, too, the soundtrack seems to absorb the personalities and the world in Intelligence, and the personalities and that world seem to absorb the soundtrack into themselves. How does this happen? I don’t know. It’s some kind of magic, like when you hear the zither playing in the movie The Third Man, and you know that Harry Lime (Orson Welles) is standing in that completely dark doorway.

In this episode we have Mary Spalding, head of the Organized Crime Unit, frantically making calls to Ottawa to warn them of the infiltration of a secret American agent – Royden, into a top position in our security network. I feel like Mary does – get him out of here! What is he doing here? Never mind what the is doing. Get him out of here! He is having secret phone calls to the American Embassy. It is spying, and it must be bad for Canada. Ottawa is behaving in a strangely placid, submissive way, which is the reality of all Canadian/American relations, and this is increasingly frightening to many Canadians, including myself. (See Paul Manly’s documentary You, Me, and the SPP: Trading Democracy for Corporate Rule, coming soon to a city near you.)

This increasing merger of Canada with the USA means getting on board with an ethic that is not Canadian, such as the proven torture at Guantanamo Bay. In this episode we have a parallel, when Jimmie and Ronnie Delmonico know that a gang member has been tortured and killed, but won’t divulge the names of the culprits who did it to Mary Spalding. That means complicity. Canadians know that the Americans are engaging in torture, and civilians are being killed, yet we assist them in their wars, which are now called “missions”.

Jimmie Reardon, the crime boss, wants to avoid a blood bath between the warring gangs in Vancouver. Interestingly, he calls on females for assistance. WHAT A GOOD IDEA! He encourages Sweet, the dancer, to parlay with a relative of the Gang Boss Dante. And then, voila, (here in Canada we all know a lot of French), calmer heads prevail.

Brandon Huntley and the Colour of Crime

Chris Webb — 2009-09-07T18:06:52+00:00

Ask any South African about the country´s crime problem, and they´ll ring off a list of brothers, sisters, friends and uncles, stabbed, hijacked or shot. A few short weeks ago, some of my family were held at gunpoint in their own security complex style home in suburban Johannesburg—complete with razor wire. Unfortunately their story is all to common in South Africa, and the nation´s familiarity with violent crime has developed its own farcical national-identity for a country still plagued by a legacy of institutionalized violence and racism. Equality, it seems, is often found at the barrel end of a gun.

Crime, by virtue of the country´s black majority, falls heavily on this (also the country´s poorest) demographic—a group victim to one of the twenty-first century´s more notable acts of barbarism. While crime is not a black only phenomenon, most South Africans acknowledge that black South Africans bear the brunt of violent crime. Which is why I was so surprised to hear the story of Brandon Huntley, the white South African refugee. Being a white South African myself, I have never considered myself a refugee even though my family has been a victim of violent crime. Huntley brought his refugee claim before the Canadian Immigration Board claiming he had been a victim of racial attacks—around 7 in total. The board—whose job description, it seems, would be to stay informed of international social and political issues—showed an astounding ignorance regarding the realities of post-apartheid South Africa. William Davis—chair of the board—declared that Huntley would ¨stick out like a sore thumb due to his colour in any part of the country.¨ Mr. Davis´s knowledge of basic colonial history seems to be lacking.

While Brandon Huntley was sticking out like a sore thumb in cosmopolitan, multicultural Cape Town, he claims he was attacked multiple times by assailants who uttered racial slurs. While multiple attacks for racial reasons seems improbable even in a country as divided as South Africa, the crux of the matter is that Huntley failed to report any of the attacks. With lack of any circumstantial evidence, the immigration board declared that Huntley´s ¨fear of persecution by African South Africans¨ is justified, and ¨he is a victim of race rather than a victim of criminality.¨ As an aside, the use of the term ¨African South Africans¨ is yet another indication of the hopelessly muddled political ignorance and PC ideology that dominates Canadian bureaucracy. While I cannot speak for all South Africans, many white, black and coloured people consider themselves African, myself included.

As African National Congress deputy of Foreign Affairs Minister Sue van Der Merwe said, the board´s decision shows ¨a lack of familiarization with the realities of South African society.¨ The decision to grant refugee protection is usually based upon systemic oppression or discrimination faced by the claimant. While South Africa´s white population is, no doubt, subject to violent crime few would argue that this crime is racially motivated. If anything South Africans across the racial spectrum would argue that the blame for out-of-control crime rates rests squarely on the shoulders of the ruling ANC government. The floundering administration of past-president Mbeki cared more about international attention and business dealings than grappling with crime and a failing public infrastructure. While the bombastic left-rhetoric of Zuma is yet to produce any profound changes. If anything, worker dissatisfaction has risen under Zuma, with massive public sector strikes in the last few months. Mr. Huntley´s case is a perfect example of the ANC hiding behind their moral curtain and crying international racism instead of pledging to do something about crime and unemployment. The jerking of knees—both to the left and right—extends from Ottawa to Pretoria.

Nevertheless Huntley´s case raises serious questions regarding the refugee review process in Canada. By showing an abysmal knowledge of South African society and politics, and accepting unreported claims as fact, the board has shown their inadequacy in dealing with refugee claims. Why was the board so willing and eager to denounce South Africa and accept Huntley´s claims and not those of US soldiers seeking asylum in Canada?

An understanding of South African history is the basis for solving this case. As Barney Mtombothi, editor of South Africa´s Financial Times, rightly argues: ¨What a shame we did not apply for refugee status in Canada during the apartheid years.¨ Mr Huntley has caused a great disgrace to his country and compatriots; and his government to its citizens by failing to protect them. The Canadian Immigration Board should be equally criticized for acting absurdly to the point of colonial protectionism. What will clear the air is a full investigation by the South African government into Mr. Huntley´s claims and a schooling in South African history for the crew of the immigration board.

Protesting TIFF’s spotlight on Tel Aviv

Judy Rebick — 2009-09-05T17:05:08+00:00

Every once in a while the act of an individual can make a big difference to a struggle. On August 28, Toronto film maker and long-time gay activist John Greyson wrote an open letter to the directors of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) pulling his short film Covered out of TIFF, which is one of the world’s top film festivals and opens in Toronto on September 10. His decision was to protest of TIFF’s spotlight on Tel Aviv. This is the first time that TIFF has held a City to City spotlight and the spotlight is on Tel Aviv, a city that is symbolic to Zionist Jews of Israel’s success and to Palestinians of the ethnic cleansing that took place to found that state of Israel.

Greyson’s courageous action and eloquent letter is a significant contribution to the Palestinian solidarity movement and the Boycott Divestment and Sanction (BDS) strategy that it has adopted to shine a light on the inexcusable aggression of Israel against the Palestinian people and pressure Israel to comply with international law. It has been followed by an open letter from arts and culture luminaries such as Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn, Jane Fonda, Danny Glover, John Berger, Alice Walker, Ken Loach and several Israeli and Palestinian film makers and artists.

It begins: “As members of the Canadian and international film, culture and media arts communities, we are deeply disturbed by the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to host a celebratory spotlight on Tel Aviv. We protest that TIFF, whether intentionally or not, has become complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine.”

The letter is quickly gaining signatories. You can sign it by emailing tiff.let@gmail.com.

A cultural boycott is a difficult issue. No-one is proposing that TIFF refuse to show Israeli films. In fact, Israeli films contain some of the most devastating critiques of the Israeli regime but even if that was not true, there is no desire to censor or stop audiences from seeing films made in Israel. Rather a cultural boycott is a way of insisting that a country that is actively suppressing the human rights of a whole peoples and trying to cover it up by promoting their cultural strengths not be allowed to do so.

One of the original signers of the open letter and herself a Toronto resident, Naoimi Klein explained her decision to support the cultural boycott against Israel in an interview with Alternet:

“Well, it has to do with the fact that the Israeli government openly uses culture as a military tool. Though Israeli officials believe they are winning the actual war for land, they also feel that the country suffers because most of what the world hears about the region on the news is about the conflict: militarization, lawlessness, the occupation and Gaza.

“So the foreign ministry launched a campaign called “Israel Beyond the Conflict,” which involves using culture, film, books, the arts, tourism and academia to create all kinds of alliances between Western countries and the state of Israel, and to promote the image of a normal, happy country, rather than an aggressive occupying power. That’s why we are always hearing about film festivals and book fairs with a special “Israel spotlight.”

And so, even though in general I would totally agree that culture is positive — books are positive and film is positive and communication is wonderful — we have to understand that we are dealing with a state strategy to co-opt all of that to make a brutal occupation more palatable.”

I am an anti-Zionist Jew and an active supporter of Palestinian rights but have hesitated to support to the BDS campaign. Boycotts are difficult to organize when there isn’t strong support for the issue like there was with the grape boycott to support California farm workers or the anti-apartheid boycott of South Africa and needless to say in most of North America the actions of the state of Israel remain contesting ground with governments and media aligning themselves with the State of Israel. In addition, I am a strong opponent of censorship and cultural boycotts can lead in that direction. But the Palestinian BDS campaign is very clear about their aims and in the case of TIFF, the protest is clearly not a question of censorship.

As Klein says after adding that the Israeli state is also using gay and women’s rights against the fundamentalism of Hamas to win support : “It’s a very sophisticated strategy.

“That means we have to come up with equally sophisticated strategies that defend culture and human rights on the one hand, but that, on the other, reject all attempts to use our work and our values to whitewash the ugly reality of occupation and segregation.”

The debate produced by John Greyson’s actions have for the first time in North America that I know has put the BDS campaign onto the front page and produced a very educational and important discussion led by artists about not allowing their art to be used as propaganda at the same time as ensuring that a diversity of voices are heard.

Greyson’s open letter asks: “Why are only Jewish Israeli filmmakers included? Why are there no voices from the refugee camps and Gaza (or Toronto for that matter), where Tel Aviv’s displaced Palestinians now live? Why only big budget Israeli state-funded features —why not a program of shorts/docs/indie works by underground Israeli and Palestinian artists? Why is TIFF accepting and/or encouraging the support of the Israeli government and consulate, a direct flaunting of the boycott, with filmmaker plane tickets, receptions, parties and evidently the Mayor of Tel Aviv opening the spotlight? Why does this feel like a propaganda campaign?

“This decision was very tough. For thirty years, TIFF has been my film school and my community, an annual immersion in the best of world cinema. You’ve helped rewrite the canon through your pioneering support of new voices and difficult ideas, of avant-garde visions and global stories. You’ve opened many doors and many minds, and made me think critically and politically about cinema, about how film can speak out and make a difference. In particular, you’ve been extraordinarily supportive of my own work, often presenting the hometown premieres of my films to your legendary audiences. You are three of the smartest, sharpest, skilful and most thoughtful festival heads anywhere —this isn’t hyperbole, with all of you I speak from two decades worth of friendship and deep respect —which makes this all the more inexplicable and troubling…” Read the entire letter(PDF) and TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey’s response.

John Greyson’s action is mobilizing an entire artistic community to speak out in solidarity with the Palestinian movement against the defacto apartheid that Israeli has established in Israel/Palestine. There is a debate but it’s not about whether these artists are anti-Semitic, as many critics of Israel have been called to silence debate, but rather whether Israel deserves to be celebrated in any way and whether it is legitimate to protest one of Canada’s most prestigious cultural institutions doing just that.

Intelligent Commentary : Episode 9

Madeline Bruce — 2009-08-31T02:58:52+00:00

Excerpt of interview with the composer of Intelligence sound track Schaun Tozer (Facing Ali, Hard Core Logo), August 25, 2009:

MB: What kind of mood, signature, or personality were you aiming for with your music in Intelligence?
ST: Very much one that would reflect a City under stress, with an ambiguous personality, and all washed down with great dollops of intrigue and paranoia. The music of South East Asia sprinkled liberally with doses of 1960’s British thriller soundtracks. Imagine walking down a noisy, busy city block, passing stores selling wares from around the world. Each store is playing music from home. This is where the music for intelligence needed to touch down.

Along with the driving, adrenaline-soaked percussion, the beginning of this episode features some howling sounds that brought to my mind the terrible anonymity of the cosmopolitan city of Vancouver, and the sterility, the fundamental emotional coldness and disconnection of the world that all the characters in this series inhabit. These unique sounds spring from a combination of “a large percussion orchestra, and a combination of live performances and sampled performances.”

Our own society grows colder, and we are becoming more alienated from each other. One contributing factor is the reliance on drugs to solve problems, which has been masterminded by the huge pharmaceutical companies. In Psychiatry, Group Therapy, Milieu Therapy, Therapeutic Community, Psychotherapy, and counseling have been mostly replaced by prescriptions. That B.C. has a marijuana industry worth billions of dollars annually tells us what a drugged up nation this is, not to mention that other very lucrative business in liquor. The pharmaceutical corporations have done the spade work of convincing people that drugs are the answer, and a great way to relax and escape everything, including committed, intimate relationships, and civic involvement. Just ask the wife or husband of a habitual marijuana smoker what their relationship is like. They are apt to feel quite alone and cut-off. To be the partner of a heavy drinker is no better. .

In the hard and cold world of Intelligence, love cannot bloom. The pathetic, dismal roof garden atop the Chick-a-Dee nightclub is about as close as any of these characters get to the beautiful things in life. For love to happen, somebody has to take a stand, make a move. These characters are too cool to do that, and too emotionally and imaginatively frozen. Ted Altman’s near encounter in a bar with a handsome young man reflects his moral wishy-washiness in his job. He waits to see which way the wind is blowing before he makes a move. Instead of saying, “I find you very attractive,” he says, “Were you looking at me?” The young man walks out of the bar. And actually he had been looking at Ted, with interest. G. K. Chesterton wrote, “Where love is failing, power fills the vacuum.”

That was like a microcosm of our society right now – a moral wishy-washiness, passivity, and apathy that is becoming increasingly dangerous to prolong. Canada is in imminent danger of being subsumed by the world domination plan of the U.S.A.

To take a stand, to bravely put your life into what is important to you, is what gives meaning to your time on earth, even if that time is short, as it was for Canadian long distance runner and Cancer research fund-raiser Terry Fox.

One way the passions and outrage of Canadians gets contained is the lack of open forums where people can express themselves, in front of each other. Even at political meetings, even at Union rallies, everything is tightly scripted now, and spontaneous debate in the group is studiously, scrupulously avoided. Our leaders are forever telling us that they have their ear to the ground to listen to Canadians, but we do not see the group in action, so leaders can cherry pick issues as they choose.

Writer Chris Haddock has said that this series contains issues of great importance and relevance to Canadians. I have been mulling over the hot potato that I learned in a recent episode about how double agents from the U.S. are groomed to infiltrate CSIS and are actually pushing the interests of the U.S., not Canada. Canadian scholarship students attending American Universities are targeted by American agents and primed to work as double agents when they return to work in Canada. This makes me feel even more nervous about the leader of the Canadian Liberal Party, Michael Ignatieff, who worked for many years in the U.S., and according to many of his quoted speeches swallowed whole and digested the American agenda, and also NDP leader Jack Layton, who asks us in a recent mail-out to “Get on board with Obama.” It was reported by Barry Weisleder that at the recent federal NDP convention in Halifax, Layton’s wife overturned the plan for one hour of open debate, and instead had a Democrat from the U.S. speak. I don’t believe for one second that this increasing merger with the U.S. springs from the hearts of grassroots Canadians. Not for one second.

It is impossible now to believe that B. C. Premier Gordon Campbell has the interests of British Columbians at heart. In an under the table deal, shrouded in secrecy, and a missing paper trail, he sold our B. C. Rail, which is now a matter for the Supreme Court. He is also flogging our gas and hydro to the Americans.

In Intelligence, we are shown a window into a world where nothing has any meaning except money and power. Millions of dollars, billions of dollars, are discussed like we are in a game of Monopoly. That window is really into our own world and it is perilously close to being utterly meaningless and ruthless, and without the values that guided our forefathers and the great leaders of the past. Dostoevsky said that man is a being that can adjust to absolutely anything. That numbness and lack of meaning in the lives of the drug pushers, the strippers, and the detectives in Intelligence is just one shade darker than where Canada is at this moment. Bangsters and powerful, ruthless, privateers have taken over the ship and gutted our democracy.

It’s time to look alive and take responsibility for the moral vacuum we have created by our apathy and foolish trust in sociopathic leaders. Our country, Canada, is in danger of being swallowed up by the world domination plan of the U. S. A.

Intelligent Commentary : Episode 8

Madeline Bruce — 2009-08-24T19:24:01+00:00

Things move so fast in Intelligence, it is so full of incident - that your head is buzzing at the end of an hour. It’s a keyed-up, telescopic view of a very exciting movie that the characters on both sides of the law are living. It’s dangerous, and it’s exhilarating. People are betrayed, guys get bumped off, and this is the daily reality in that world. Contrasting with this speedball pace were a few glimpses of a floor polisher, in action, at floor level. It made me think of Mary Spalding, with her genius I.Q., head of the Organized Crime Unit, and how dull most other occupations, including housewife, would seem to her, now that she is honed to knife-edged proficiency in her job, and ready for even more responsibility as the probable next head of the Canadian Intelligence and Security Service.

Murder, betrayals, sex as entertainment in the Chick-a-Dee Nightclub, where the business is about supplying millions of dollars of illegal drugs to people. Where is the moral compass in all this? It is missing. I’m not going to pin a medal on Jimmie Reardon’s chest because he shows caring for his adolescent daughter. The truth is that it is a superficial kind of caring, because everybody’s life is in danger that comes close to the high stakes world of the drug trade.

By omitting a moral compass, the writer Chris Haddock invites viewers to contemplate the conscienceless world of big business, to face the implications of it, because that is what people have to do, in order to turn things around before it is too late. Big corporations don’t care about polluting the earth and her waterways. They don’t care about the sovereignty of nations. In Haddock’s previous two series the hero was named Da Vinci. The great genius Leonardo Da Vinci of the 16th Century had such a broad intelligence that, along with his immortal paintings such as The Last Supper, he designed advanced forms of war weapons. He met Machiavelli in his lifetime. It’s debatable whether the genius of mankind will go towards plundering the earth and destroying it, or making an abrupt turnaround now. That would mean the exact opposite of big business, as Irish author Richard Moore outlines in his book Escaping the Matrix. As early as the 19th Century, novelist E. M. Forster prophesied the moral, aesthetic, and emotional doom that big business and the automobile would bring to people, and he pulls back the London characters in Howard’s End to the ancient form of the small family farm. In the movie Asphalt Jungle, where Marilyn Monroe makes her film debut, the character played by Sterling Hayden, a career criminal, speaks with longing of the 160 acre farm in Ireland that his family owned for centuries, and lost. He yearns to return there, and bathe in the stream.

The style with which this series is presented gives it an addictive quality, and a big part of that is the musical score by Schaun Tozer (Facing Ali). One can tend to take that for granted, because it is so well blended with the action, cutting in and out, heightening suspenseful scenes, and disappearing at times. The intriguing synthesizer “instruments” (what’s the new word?) are a new breed of cat, sometimes sounding like a Sitar, and in this episode there is a sequence of what sounds like keyboard repetitive chording, a la Phillip Glass, but this was more interesting and melodic than that. Altogether, this episode was a standout for the musical score. The main theme of the series, by the “Sitar” as I call it, got a swinging percussive treatment that literally had me up on my feet dancing.

There is a slick scene at the beginning of this episode which plainly showed the deeper dynamic behind jealousy, and that is that it is often subtly provoked. Jimmie Reardon knows that his estranged wife Francine is coming over in the morning to pick up their daughter. On the seat of his car, which Francine walks by to get to the front door, is a pair of women’s high-heeled shoes. The inevitable happens, and Francine gets upset – for one thing, because he slept with a woman while their young daughter was in the house. Then Jimmie gets to play Mr. Cool again, and tells her to “Calm down.” That’s the pay-off in this game for him: “I’m Mr. Cool, and you’re a flipping maniac, hah, hah, hah.”

Bernie Coulson gives a Sean Penn-like nerviness and quirkiness to the character of Michael Reardon, the drug kingpin’s brother. Not having to maintain that colossal, stupendous cool that Jimmie does makes him a more human character, with more dimension and unpredictability.

As we hear about the billions of dollars worth of illegal drugs that are being grown and sold on a yearly basis is B. C., I wonder what it is about life now that makes people require this, to get through the day.

RiPped: A Remix Review

Brian Latour — 2009-08-23T06:35:34+00:00

Before I write this review, I must admit that I came to this film with very little knowledge of copyright issues. Prior to watching this film, I was not aware of who Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig or even Girl Talk is. Despite my extensive background as a nerd, I have always found copyright law to be a boring and unimportant issue. While Brett Gaylor’s RiP: A Remix Manifesto is an entertaining venture into the realm of remix culture and its confrontations with copyright law, its serious substantial weaknesses are unfortunately not concealed underneath its flashy presentation.

RiP uses extensive animations and pieces of audio-visual candy remixed in such a way that it can keep the viewer’s attention throughout what is essentially a 90 minute presentation on copyright law – no small feat by any means. While at times it can be overly flashy and pretentious, the presentation keeps what could be just another boring documentary fairly pleasing to watch. During the presentation, Gaylor’s open source cinema really shines. Parallels can be drawn between the remix of today and the detournement of the Situationists – a parallel which is clearly obvious when watching George Bush remixed to John Lennon’s Imagine.

Some of the secrets to the presentation are in the editing and distribution process of RiP, which is a fairly innovative attempt to practice what is preached in the film. Much of the movie is the result of six years of collaboration through mixing and remixing a glut of imagery. Gaylor is continuing to force the film to evolve as well, by asking for input to be remixed in to updated versions. The film is available to watch at the National Film Board in 12 parts, or can be downloaded at a price set by the consumer, a distribution system similar to that of Radiohead’s 2007 album In Rainbows.

While the film is an informative primer to some basic issues of copyright law, the biggest problem with this film is the manifesto iteslf. It eschews any sort of meaningful economic analysis of copyright and the interests behind copyright laws in favour of some pretentious and meaningless drivel, the sort of thing which might pass for deep political thought in either a gathering of technocrats or a Thomas Friedman column.

The manifesto is as follows:

Culture always builds on the past
The past always tries to control the future
Our future is becoming less free
To build free societies you must limit the control of the past

It starts off good enough, with the notion that culture always builds on the past. In fact, as all human labour is social, whether in the widget factories or the word factories, all contributions to society are based in some part on previous contributions. It is also hard to argue with the notion that “our future is becoming less free” given the continual of capitalist consolidation of power and erosion of civil liberties we are seeing in modern society.

However, points two and four are the problem. Point two is simply insubstantial and nonsensical – the past isn’t a person or organization with an intent on controlling anything, it is not much more than what is found in history books and its continuing legacy. Point four proposes a method to build free societies, which, instead of addressing issues of social and economic oppression and heirarchical and undemocratic power structures in society – the causes and manifestations of unfreedom – it simply builds on the tripe in point two to come up with a meaningless solution to a made-up problem.

Sadly, this muddles the relatively simple mechanisms behind all of the issues of copyright and corporate control of culture: art and information has become a form of capital, thanks to the commodification of culture embodied in copyright laws enforced by the state. And as this is a form of capital, capitalists are required to hang onto it tightly, and use their allies in the state for backup. While the power of the recording industry is touched on by the movie and there is the occaisional remark about some company making money off something, the movie portays the issue as the past verus the future instead of the owners of cultural capital versus the rest of us.

Unfortunately, RiP portrays the problem as one whereby copyright laws intended to protect the rights of consumers to consume and producers to profit are out of balance. An opportunity is missed for a discussion on how we can reverse the commodification of knowledge and return to the commons while still allowing producers of knowledge and culture a fair share.

While entertaining and fairly informative, RiP sadly comes up short in the analysis department due to the poor ideological framework embodied in the manifesto. Instead of tackling the economic issues of the commodification of knowledge head on, it manages to dilute any radical or anti-corporate message to little more than a proposal for the liberation of culture by trendy technocrats. This is actually a less emancipating message than it seems, as only a very small portion of society has the ability to participate in this liberated culture.

Overall, RiP had the potential to be an excellent movie and I really wanted to like this film, but a lack of even a semblance of a rational economic analysis and the weakness of the manifesto which replaces that analysis force me to give it only two Proudhons out of five.

Amnesty report highlights police brutality in Honduras

Ben Wood — 2009-08-20T18:09:52+00:00

Yesterday, Amnesty International released a document that profiles the abuse of Honduran police and military against pro-Zelaya (or at least, pro-democracy) peaceful protesters. The report contains stories by protesters and photos of their injuries. Hopefully, this report will intensify the pressure the international community puts on Honduras and the de facto government to restore democracy.

A teacher in jail told Amnesty reporters, ““We were demonstrating peacefully. Suddenly, the police came towards us, and I started running. They grabbed me and shouted “why do you (all) support Zelaya’s government? Whether it’s by choice or by force, you have to be with this government”. They beat me. I have not been informed as to why I am here detained.”

Another story of police brutality highlights the gender-based violence in the country:

“L. and her mother were repeatedly beaten by police using batons, across the back of the thighs and buttocks. L also told Amnesty International that the police shoved the baton down her blouse. The policeman said to her ‘if this [demonstrating] is what you’re up to, well this is what you’re going to deserve.’ L told how her mother had attempted to cover herself with a piece of clothing and the police officer shouted ‘This cloth isn’t going to save you’.

The experience of a human rights defender working with the Centre of Investigation and Promotion of Human Rights (Centro de Investigacion y Promocion de los Derechos Humanos CIPRODEH) demonstrates the lack of respect the Honduran police have for human rights:

“I noticed that they particularly targeted three youngsters and they chased them. The young people ran into a second-hand car sales company to seek safety, but were trapped there by the police officers. They tied the hands of the three young people behind their backs and beat them. I was at a distance at that moment of about 15-20 metres from the incident, and I said that there was no need to beat them, that they already hands tied and that what they [the police officers] were doing was disproportionate. On hearing this they trapped me too. When I explained to them that I am a human rights defender they ignored me. I presented my ID card and the police officer said ‘keep this piece of shit, here there are no human rights.’ The police officer ordered me to take out my shoe lace and used that to tie my hands together behind my back in the same way as the three young people. The only difference was that I was not thrown on the floor as they had been.”

You can read the press release and download the report here.

Intelligent Commentary : Episode 7

Madeline Bruce — 2009-08-17T21:50:57+00:00

Episode 7 of Season One of Intelligence starts off with moody scenes of boats and lights in the Vancouver harbour at night. Artistically this series is superior, with the exceptional music of Schaun Tauser contributing so much to the unique flavour and freshness that makes it stand out so far ahead of the standard American crime shows that look and sound so much alike. The music consists mostly of an instrument that sounds to me sort of like a sitar played like a guitar, and percussion. But that’s all you need, if it’s done right. Case in point is the music in Orson Well’s classic film The Third Man, which has only one zither. It is considered by many, including myself, to be the best movie music ever recorded.

This is an exciting series to watch – very fast-paced and intricate. But that’s why people do crosswords and play Scrabble. It’s good for us to get a brain workout. And it makes you think deeply about what is really going on in North America, not what mainstream media is purporting. People who have actually worked in this world of espionage and organized crime attest to the veracity of the themes and situations presented.

Most troubling to me is the infiltration of American secret agents into Canadian affairs at the most lofty and crucial levels. That kind of influence can get highly placed people elected into important positions, with the result that Canada can be run, as it were, by

Americans, rather than Canadians. There are so many power struggles going on for the plum “legitimate” jobs that drug dealers and smugglers become just puppets and notches on the belts of investigators, who compete for both their information, and their capture.

Mary Spalding (Klea Scott), head of the Organized Crime Unit, deals with all these sharks with a precision and clarity that is breathtaking. This is a wonderfully conceived female character. Her instructions to the Russian Madam of what her call-girls were to do with a group of international businessmen reminded me strangely of shift-change on a hospital ward, when the head nurse gives out the assignments to each nurse coming on shift.

It is interesting to compare this with Haddock’s series DaVinci’s Inquest, which is on just before Intelligence. There is a progression from a world where the welfare of those less fortunate members of society is high priority with the Mayor of Vancouver. In Intelligence, money and power are the only values, and hang the consequences. Then CBC News came on, with a report of a homeless man who was very sick for several hours on a hot day in Grandview Park in Vancouver recently, in full view of many people, who went into epileptic convulsions and died. It was reported on the news that paramedics, who were finally and belatedly called, treated the man disrespectfully.

CBC interviews CDs Sid Shniad

James Patterson — 2009-08-13T18:59:29+00:00

There has been plenty of chatter leading up to today’s United Church vote. Charges of antisemitism are being thrown around pretty liberally, and it’s a clear example of just how polarizing this discussion has become.

Despite the debate-stifling tactics being used, this vote in Kelowna has clearly sparked the interest of the MSM in Canada (which will help continue to fuel the discussion). This morning, CD’s own Sid Shniad, co-chair of Independent Jewish Voices Canada, spoke with the CBC early edition about the issue. You can listen to some of his perspectives, many of which CD holds, via this CBC podcast:

Click to stream — CBC (runs 6:26)

Start with Stories

Dave McLaren — 2009-08-13T17:10:18+00:00

It’s worth taking a closer look at President Obama’s speech at the University of Cairo, June 4, 2009. Obama’s greeting of peace, assalaamu alaykum (peace be upon you) was loudly cheered because it signalled he knew where he was and that he had respect for the place and the people. But his speech was more than a tip of the hat to a potentially hostile audience. It was a speech from America to the Muslim world, from one people to another, and the President did something I’ve never heard a national leader do before: he started with stories.

I don’t mean stories from the rubber chicken circuit (“Hey, did you hear the one about the Jew, the Muslim, and the Christian …”) I mean the stories of nations.

To quote from his speech: “The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of co-existence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”

In other words, he fessed up to the history of the West’s colonial adventures in the Middle East and, later in the speech, of his own countrymen in Iraq. It was more than an acknowledgement of history; it was a validation of the Muslim story as told by Muslims themselves.

Obama then acknowledged the value of Islam and the West’s ancient debt to the Muslim world: “As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam — at places like Al-Azhar University — that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation … And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.”

Obama was applauded for that statement and many similar, but he did not purchase his applause at the expense of his own country, for he was as adamant about the contributions of America: “The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known.” And he also made it clear that, “it is my first duty as President to protect the American people.”

Do you see what he was doing? Obama was telling the stories of both Muslim nations and America with respect and accuracy and asserting the intrinsic value of both. He was charting a course in parallel to the Other in which both are to be allowed to plot their own futures in peace.

This method was never clearer than in the part of his speech that dealt with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He acknowledged the suffering of both the Jews in the Holocaust and the Palestinians in the refugee camps on the West Bank. Neither denying Israel the right to exist, nor colonizing Palestinian lands will dissolve the hated. Again he reached for stories — the ancient myth of three peoples whose common ancestor is Abraham. And again the lesson is taken from Islam, from “the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.”

As the President pointed out, the separate stories of Jews, Christians and Muslims — our cultural myths (“myth” is just an old Greek word for “story”, albeit a story of defining power for a people) — are not all that different. They put all three peoples on ground that is surprisingly solid. From this common ground, he addressed several difficult matters: democracy, religious freedom, nuclear weapons, women’s rights, the developed world and the developing world.

In his concluding paragraphs, he demonstrates what Muslims, Jews and Christians have in common by quoting from our separate mythologies:

“The Holy Koran tells us, ‘O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.’

The Talmud tells us: ‘The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.’

The Holy Bible tells us, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.’”

So, the mid-East is the birthplace for three great cultures and, for better or worse, we have at least that much in common. If stories are the starting point for understanding a people, then place is the starting point for understanding their stories — Moses, Jesus and Mohammed prayed together in the same land in which God created Adam and Eve. As the sign at the entrance to the Ziibiwing Heritage Centre of the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe in Michigan says, “All creation myths are true.”

I would go further: all myths are true. I don’t mean all stories: hockey does not define Canadians, well not all of us anyway and certainly not as a people. I mean myths that arise from being in a particular place and that define who we are. If you think about it, most of those are stories about spirit and its connection with place. I can hear the old Celtic as well as the not so old English ideas of land and spirit in our modern Canadian plays, novels, court rulings and legislation.

In this regard, Canada is a difficult country. Most of our mythologies come from somewhere else. They are all as true as anyone else’s, but here is not their birthplace. And the languages we use to tell them (French, English, Polish, Greek, Chinese, Urdu, Yoruba, Tamil and a whole lot more) are also rooted in lands other than North America.

Those whose stories and spirit and languages do come from this place are Aboriginal, literally “from the beginning.” Aboriginal peoples are our Other. Even more so than the French for the English or the English for the French, for both have been dealing (and not well) with Turtle Island peoples for 400 years. And now Chinese, Jamaicans, Tamils, Indians — the real ones, from India — are also not dealing very well with Turtle Island peoples. Turtle Island is what Aboriginal peoples call North America — the source of their stories, spirit and language. The name itself, Turtle Island, has its origins in Aboriginal myths.

If President Obama is on to something — if we can begin to understand the Other from their mythologies — then we must ask, how well do we know the stories at the heart of Aboriginal culture? For their myths — those stories that define a people — are very different from ours. There is, I think, more that separates us from First Nations than from Muslim nations. But that’s all the more reason to start with the stories of Turtle Island.

“How well do we know their stories” is not an idle question. We are about to hear their stories yet again — from the new Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Shawn Atleo, and from residential school victims during the Truth and Reconciliation hearings. Some of what they tell us we won’t want to hear. But listen we must and, this time, try to understand them from their point of view — from the point of view of Aboriginal culture.

I hope the media is prepared to do as good a job in teaching us about Aboriginal culture as they have been about Muslim culture. We all know stories about land claims and Aboriginal rights because the media has reported the facts of the disputes; but do we understand what it is about Aboriginal culture that sets First Nations so at odds with the rest of Canadian society?

We know about residential schools and we know that they have done harm, but do we know why? What is it, exactly, about Aboriginal ways of raising children, of seeing the world, of knowing the spiritual, of relating to one another and to the land that was so damaged by residential schools? And why is it that our governments’ policies and practices continue to offend and seem to have no effect on the well-being of Aboriginal peoples?

I suspect the answer lies somewhere in our separate mythologies. All myths are true, but they are not all the same. Perhaps giving people the room to be different by starting with their stories as they wish them told is to let peace settle upon us all.

You can read more essays by David McLaren at http://mclarenathome.spaces.live.com/

Is the Party Over?

Judy Rebick — 2009-08-10T19:46:01+00:00

Today I was on The Current to debate the proposed name change of the NDP. The name is the least of their problems is my view. David Michael Lamb, the guest host, asked me why I wasn’t going the NDP convention. I answered, “I’ve kind of given up on the NDP.” Frankly, it didn’t even occur to me to go. I have been involved in efforts to change the NDP since the 1980’s in Ontario and with a few exceptions (getting them to support the Morgentaler clinic) it has been almost impossible to get them to change. Their response to opposition from the Waffle, a powerful youth opposition reflecting the new politics on the 1960’s until now has been to crush it.

Paul Dewar, the Ottawa NDP MP who seems to be doing an excellent job, is taking the opportunity of a debate on changing the name of the party to propose a process of thorough going debate about what the party is doing. He is enthusiastic about the possibilities of change and I wish him luck. I am sure he and I agree on many things. Libby Davies, another fantastic NDP MP, is currently on a mission to Palestine, as usual doing and saying what a progressive politician should be doing and saying. Follow her blog on rabble.ca

Libby was part of the effort to transform the party in 2002 called the New Politics Initiative. Most of the leadership of the NPI no longer see the NDP as an instrument of change. The NDP defeated the NPI’s proposal for a new unitary party of the Left at the 2002 convention by promising to incorporate our ideas. Instead Jack Layton has moved the party more towards the other parties, more professionalized, less and less presenting any kind of alternative vision. Paul Dewar said that the NDP unlike the other parties has real debates at convention. That’s true, but like the other parties, the NDP doesn’t really have discussions where they try and learn from opposition and from their own mistakes and look at debate as an opportunity for transformation rather than a threat to their power.

On this eve of the NDP convention, next week-end in Halifax, here is an excerpt from Transforming Power about the NDP and NPI experience.

“Over the years I have had to acknowledge that political parties seem to be just about the most intractable organizations around. I have been trying to convince the New Democratic Party to change since the 1980s, using various methods. Frankly, it was easier to win legal abortion in Canada against the power of the church, the police, the courts, and the government than to get this rather weak third party to change in any fundamental way. The pressure on political parties to conform to the existing political system is so great that they seem incapable of behaving in a way that is accountable, transparent, democratic, and effective. It is no wonder that so few people want anything to do with them.

My generation of activists expanded the notion of politics, arriving at an understanding that social movements, such as the women’s and environmental movements, far from being special interest groups or interlopers in the political system — as they have been labelled by right-wing politicians — have actually been the most important forces for change in our political system. Ever since the early twentieth century, trade unions participated in electoral politics through a close alliance, often institutional alliance, with labour parties, such as the NDP in Canada. But the movements that emerged in the 1960s maintained a greater autonomy from political parties, pressuring the parties from the outside or making alliances with activists inside the party to make change. Today, many activists believe that it is movements alone that will make the changes we need, and that political parties are anachronisms of a previous age that cannot adapt to the new politics of this one. However, my experience tells me that unless we change power at the top while we are building power from the bottom, the change will only be partial. I am frankly not sure if this means retaining political parties as we know them. In any case, I think we need to learn how power can be exercised at a government level in a manner that is dramatically different than that used today.

“The efforts I have been involved with, starting with the Campaign for an Activist Party in 1988, and ending with the New Politics Initiative in 2002, attempted to persuade a social-democratic party that its future lay in an alliance not only with the labour movement, but also with all the various social movements for change that had emerged and were emerging…

“In 2002, using some of the ideas from the Workers Party in Brazil and some of the lessons we learned from the NDP experience in Ontario, I got together with Jim Stanford, who is the chief economist for the Canadian Auto Workers, and we came up with the idea of the New Politics Initiative (NPI). We noted that the New Democratic Party was not attracting the youth of the anti-globalization movement, so we pulled together a group that was half old-time left-wing activists and intellectuals and half newly minted activists from the anti-globalization movement. Stanford and I proposed a manifesto for a new party that would be, in deference to the anti-authoritarian politics of the new movement, signed by grassroots activists in addition to well-known leaders.

“The young activists said “No” to the manifesto, because the process was too top-down, but suggested we put out the manifesto as a discussion paper on the internet and ask for comments and signatories. Since we had the support of CAW president Buzz Hargrove and NDP MPs Svend Robinson and Libby Davies, our discussion paper hit the front page of The Globe and Mail.

“Within days of the posting, we were engulfed in a maelstrom of public debate as well as a difficult private process of trying to integrate the Old Left culture with the emerging New Left culture. The NPI argued that a new party be a unitary party of the Left, bringing together the NDP and the Green Party as well as movement activists, and base itself on a partnership with social movements and with a commitment to participatory democracy. Many in the NDP, including current leader Jack Layton, easily took up the politics of partnership with the social movements that in the 1980s had been such a hard sell, but there was less general understanding about what participatory democracy would mean in a party. Even though I had just written a book on the topic, in retrospect, I don’t think we had much of an idea ourselves. Nonetheless, NPI argued that the NDP had to open itself to the new forces of the anti-globalization movement by initiating the formation of a new party.

Writing for Rabble after the NPI made its debut at the 2002 NDP convention, I said,

What became clear over the course of the NDP convention, where we brought a resolution calling for the formation of a new party, was that the NPI is really about transforming left-wing politics by bringing together the best traditions of old left with the radical democracy of the new left…” The NPI was able to bring a bit of the spirit of the anti-globalization movement onto the floor of the NDP convention, chants, costumes, and face paint included. More than that, in a profoundly cautious political party, 40 percent voted for a radical proposal to initiate a new party. Indeed the impact may have been strong enough to open the NDP to formally including a political opposition for the first time in its history…” On the left internationally, two currents are emerging. On the one side, social democratic parties in England and most of Europe are moving to the right and embracing the so-called “third way,” meaning corporate globalization with a slightly more humane face. “The other current is emerging through the anti-corporate-globalization movement and some socialist parties in Latin America. This current strongly opposes corporate globalization and sees radical democracy, engaging citizens at every level of government, as the way to counter corporate power. As someone who has given up on the NDP more than once in my long political career, I feel a greater sense of optimism today that a new kind of political party that brings together most of the forces fighting for social justice is a real possibility.”

It’s a little depressing to read these words today, but important to assess them. What really happened was that Jack Layton used the rhetoric of the NPI for his run for leadership, and he was supported by NPI leaders such as Svend Robinson and Libby Davies. As most NPI activists were NDP members, they got caught up in this election campaign and the NPI dissolved….

“Jack Layton has since turned the NDP into more of a professionally driven party than it has ever been. Instead of participatory democracy in the party, what we have is informal social networking. Layton does this himself as a form of damage control every time the party makes a move in a direction that activists don’t like. The party considered it a victory when it won eight more seats in the same election won by the Bush-loving Conservative Party of Stephen Harper, infuriating a lot of social movement activists. In the 2008 election, the party recognized the error of its ways and turned its fire on Harper, thus improving its presence in Parliament and somewhat healing its relationship with social movement activists.

“In retrospect, the NPI was too little, too soon. It has taken a decade or more even to begin to ask the right questions about how to transform political power. Events in Brazil and South Africa, as well as the experiences of Venezuela and Bolivia, have given us a lot of information about what works and what doesn’t. And the experiences of two decades of organizing under neo-liberalism gives us more of a vision of what a participatory democracy might really look like.” For more on political parties read Transforming Power.

So I’ve given up on the NDP once again. Here’s hoping Paul Dewar has more luck than the NPI. Change would be a lot easier if we had real leadership or at least a little more help from the political Left.

This blog was originally posted at Transforming Power.

Intelligent Commentary: Episode 6

Madeline Bruce — 2009-08-10T16:27:59+00:00

In this episode we hear lots of talk about guns, munitions, gun-running, spying, and war strategy, on a street level, and on a global level, stretching all the way to Hong Kong. Take it down a level, and it’s the talk you hear on the Canadian TV series Trailer Park Boys, when Ricky and Julian decide that a loaded gun is the best way to solve a conflict in the Trailer Park.

Take it up a notch, and you can find Marcel Proust’s delight in talking very elaborate Military strategy with his friend in the French Military, Robert de St. Loup. Also, in War and Peace Leo Tolstoy gives a masterful description of the relish and zeal with which Napolean’s soldiers ride happily to their deaths, so loyal are they to this emperor and his cause.

Missing from each of these examples is the presence of women. In each case, men have defined the situation, the problem, and the solution.

If we look at the arc of the career of this series writer, Chris Haddock, we recall that his series DaVinci’s Inquest, and then DaVinci’s City Hall, was based on Vancouver’s real-life coroner, and then Mayor, Larry Campbell. Campbell was that rare specimen in politics – a genuine compassionate person of integrity. Where might Haddock look now for an inspiring example of goodness amongst our leaders. Hello? I’m waiting……. .

In this series Intelligence we enter into a world of blatant crime and lives lived for greed and lust for power. It’s more difficult to look at our own world and acknowledge just how far down that path we are ourselves.

August 8th. This is the eve before the meetings in Guadalajara, Mexico, of the so-called Security & Prosperity Partnership between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico on August 9th and 10th, 2009. Heads of huge corporations, and world leaders will be there, but the press, and ordinary citizens will be strictly forbidden, and security forces will be very much in evidence. Business deals are being made away from democratic and parliamentary process. This is about the deregulation of laws that have been put into place concerning pollution, workplace safety, and liveable wages. Corporations are making their own laws now. This is all spelled out in Nanaimo Filmmaker Paul Manly’s full length documentary You, Me, and the SPP: Trading Democracy for Corporate Rule. This is available via the internet, and Paul will be showing this film on his cross Canada tour. Paul is the son of former United Church Minister and MLA Jim Manly.

In this episode, Jimmie Reardon (Ian Tracy) utters the slogan, “Peace and prosperity” several times. His brother Mike remarks something about, “Do you want me to sing an anthem? ” Well yes, I do. We are in danger of losing our Canadian sovereignty with the secret and nefarious planning taking place in the SPP meetings.

Actor Matt Frewer excels in these little bits of business that underline the profound sleaziness of his character. He is talking here to colleagues while placing a toothpick in his mouth.

That is what a society based on greed is – sleazy.