Monday 26 March 2012

On John van Dongen's Resignation from the BC Liberals

John van Dongen resigns from B.C. Liberal caucus

Great news! With this floor-crossing he indeed demonstrated the "courage of his convictions".  It is high time more conservatives within the BC Liberals come over to the party that truly represents what it is we believe in.  The BC Liberals have become so much of what I dislike in politics.  Their policies, decisions, and actions are purely based on political expediency, special-interests, allegiances to people in power, and cold calculations of public opinion.  Principled decisions based on the good of the province do not matter to this government unless it is calculated to win them votes.

When you lose your principles, when you lose the moral foundations upon which your personal opinions are based, you lose my respect.  This government continues to play its supporters for dumb.  The Liberals bring in big-name staff from the PMs office, appear at photo ops with Conservative ministers and Harper and think that means anything to us.  They do what Liberals do best: confuse style with substance.  But British Columbians are smarter than that and we will not stand for it.  The BC Liberals are wrong if they think that British Columbians are going to stand by while their beliefs and integrity are being taken for granted.

Unfortunately, Rich Coleman has decided what side he wants to be on. The NDP house leader John Horgan's defense of Van Dongen's move was admirable.  Coleman's unfounded and inappropriate response is upsetting and telling.  Instead of respond to a friend's warranted concerns he tried to cast doubt on the coherency of Van Dongen's move.  Instead of debating issues or defending the record of the government that he represents he chose to level an inappropriate personal accusation.

The party that Rich Coleman and Christy Clark stand for is not a party that deserves to govern.  The BC Liberal party is a party of dishonesty and deceit.  The Conservatives have a real shot at forming government in the next election.  It is the only principled, free-market alternative to the NDP.  Of course as things stand now it is a long-shot.  At least Van Dongen, I, and others who have made the switch will feel comfortable in knowing that we followed our hearts, and our heads, in supporting a party that would represent us as free-thinking individuals for the entirety of their mandate, rather than simply a vote to be counted on election day.

Thursday 22 March 2012

On the NDP Leadership Convention This Weekend

This weekend in Toronto the NDP is set to crown Canada's newest leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition. It has been a long campaign and one overwhelmingly cast as boring by commentators. Being a conservative but a political junkie first and foremost, I've been reading all I can about it but I couldn't bring myself to sit through more than little snippets of the six leadership debates. Through all of the articles I've read and all the news panels and reports I could not help but get an overwhelming sense of certain trends in the consensus media's coverage.

When I say consensus media the term's meaning is twofold. Firstly, I mean to highlight the approaches, ideas, and narratives that the majority of reporters, commentators, and columnists have and, more particularly, what they have in common. Secondly, the term is used to point out the nature of media coverage in the country. The way that there tends to be a consensus amongst the major news organizations (some outlets and journalists more than others) on ideas and narratives concerning politics. This is a common criticism around the world and it comes variously from the right and the left. Most often in Canada this argument is put forth by conservatives. In the past the National Post had a reputation as portraying an image of existing outside this consensus. Today the Sun newspapers (we don't have one in BC as the Vancouver Sun is part of Postmedia) and Sun News Network are aggressively marketed in this way. What is of interest to me today and, frankly, has me annoyed is not how the 'consensus media' is portraying the Conservative Party –as is often the issue amongst bloggers of my sort– but how it's portrayed the NDP leadership race.

I mentioned it before but it bears repeating that coverage of the race has overwhelmingly centered around how boring and long it's been. I find this to be a completely useless observation. First of all I challenge anyone –reminding you that I am obsessed with politics...I sit down with a bowl of popcorn to watch election coverage– to find me when Canada has ever had an exciting leadership race. In my relatively few years observing Canadian politics I've watched one Alliance, one PC, one Conservative, three Liberal, and one other NDP race. None were exciting. None had anything particularly scandalous, headline grabbing, or dramatic like American races often do. They have all been remarkably similar in their blandness to the average Canadian. That does not change the fact that they were all important. They were all integral to the functioning of one of the most advanced democracies in the world. When party members elect their leaders they are making historical decisions; they are effecting who our potential PM's are and sometimes directly who our PM is.

Understandably the media looks for winners and losers. The outlets like to follow dramatic narratives and get people riled up. This often leads them to portray a race as existing between a few front runners or, when it comes to parties, between two key diabolically opposed players. conservatism vs. liberalism fits this narrative perfectly in the US. For most of Canada's history it has served as a convincing framework as well, though less tidily and (mostly) without the diabolical elements. Thus media has tended to focus more attention on the leadership races of the supposed 'front-runners': the Conservatives and the Liberals. This is surely the way Canadian media would prefer to go on covering politics. But history has a habit of forcing change upon unwilling participants. The NDP became the Official Opposition after last election. As the official opposition it is the NDP's responsibility to represent Canadians in opposition to the Conservatives. In other words it is their job to behave as the official critics and to help government to function optimally through presenting the Conservatives with criticisms that can be used productively or as points of ultimate opposition on which voters can decide. The Official Opposition is integral to our democracy functioning as is the Leader of the Opposition.

Clearly the NDP leadership campaign has deserved in depth coverage from the media beyond superfluous observations of its perceived boringness. It has not received this. The NDP is being treated by the consensus media as it has been in the past; on the sidelines. The NDP leadership race has received extremely little attention; robo-calls and Bob Rae's musings on just about anything are presumably of more importance. The consensus media found every opportunity to cover the past two Liberal conventions. I'm quite sure they found these races vastly more exciting. I'll tell you why: most individuals that make up the 'consensus media' are liberals and often Liberals. They fear that the NDP may be replacing the Liberals in the bi-oppositional framework that they themselves perpetuate. Or, at least, may be complicating things by creating a truly three-way battleground.

The fact of the matter is that there are important ideas being debated in this race. Ideas that can, and will, impact the direction of our country. The candidates offer us very different images of what Canadian politics may look like in the years to come. The most prominent of them is Thomas Mulcair. He is likely to move the party more into the center, keep the NDP competitive in Quebec and, ultimately, move the NDP convincingly into traditional Liberal territory. Given that Harper has been doing precisely this from the right this fundamentally threatens the Liberals as a party. As the Leader of the Opposition whoever's crowned on Saturday will play a prominent role in shaping the debate and political direction of this country. He or She will be the primary political figure in opposition to Stephen Harper and the Conservatives and in this way will influence the Government's policies as well. Despite the Liberal's and the consensus media's attempts to shape the political landscape it is quite likely that whoever is crowned leader on Saturday will be the primary alternative to Stephen Harper in the next election. This likelihood increases immensely if Mulcair becomes leader.

Obviously the implications of the NDP leadership race that finishes this weekend are far more important than the consensus media would have us believe.   

Monday 5 March 2012

On the Teacher's Strike: The Same Old Story Regarding Unions

The latest teacher's strike in BC demonstrates a major disconnect in our society that is felt across the country. The government has allowed the strike to go ahead instead of sitting over the weekend and legislating the teachers back to work. This is a calculated move in order to win public support and to allow the inevitable 'anti-union' opinion to coalesce against the teachers' cause. We are all familiar with both sides of the argument and this story has been on repeat as long as I've been alive. What I'm interested in, is not so much who is wrong or who is right but in going beyond the arguments as they have been and as they likely will be, for years. We need to look at why it is that this same process and state of perpetual feud continues to see results that satisfies no one.

Unions developed out of necessity. They were formed to protect vulnerable workers from unscrupulous employers in an age when very little was expected from employers.  Workplace conditions and compensation levels were poor. Unions led the way in creating satisfactory workplaces and the government followed suit by legislating and regulating employers to ensure fairness. Unions served a purpose and motivated governments to make important changes. Most significantly, they motivated the private sector to offer employees more benefits in order to discourage unionization.

Unions function on purely socialistic logic. They demand out of their employees completely equal input (which is simply not possible given human nature) and, in turn, offer equality of compensation (based on seniority, of course). The problem is that these unions operate within a capitalistic reality. In the rest of the economy, individuals are rewarded for their different levels of input. Employers have the freedom to motivate employees through purely financial rewards such as wage increases, bonuses, etc., as well as through benefits, workplace amenities and other advantages. Individuals then have the opportunity to pursue careers that suit their own needs and seek out a relationship of their preference with an employer. Of course this is the system in principle and, indeed, reality isn't so simplistic. The fact remains, however, that a capitalist system's ultimate intention, and result, is to create fluidity and choice in the labour market and the power of the individual to make decisions. Unions work against nearly all of these principles. They co-opt the normal relationship between an employer and employee, allowing for no individual rewards, and create an instant state of confrontation. They negate the power of the individual in preference for the group; socialism defined.

Of course, most of this has been realized and remedied by the private sector. Unions have been on the decline for 40 years now. This decline is the result of the above reasoning and the important factor of private sector pressure to improve compensation in order to discourage unionization. Unions have become largely obsolete in the private sector because government ensures that both the employers' and the employees' needs are being met and that the system operates as our society deems it should. For the most part there is very little labour unrest in the private sector. All of this explains the situation in the private sector but the public sector is a completely different matter.

Unions function as representatives of employees and governments exist to represent the needs of both employees and employers. The public-sector creates a sort of conflict of interest. Here the government goes beyond its role of neutral representative of employer and employed and becomes the employer itself. It's like the defense lawyer being the judge in the same trial. This is part of the reasoning behind minimal government-run enterprise.  This, along with the idea that a government simply need not offer a service that the demand for is easily met through interactions amongst private citizens.  The logic behind a government owning a restaurant would be minimal as individuals are perfectly capable and wanting of opening their own restaurants while the consumer's needs are easily met. With things like health care, education, and the bureaucracy the need for government control and thus public-sector employment is obvious, if not ideal. The awkward relationship between government, as employer and governor, and public sector employees has created a situation of almost universal unionization. Rather than an option, as in the private sector, unions are seen as a necessity in the public sector.

Enter the teachers strike. Same as the teacher's strike before that, and before that, and on and on down the pages of history. Add nurses to that list. And let's not act on our socioeconomic biases...add doctors, police, the bureaucrats. All of these individuals are held hostage to their situation. They need unions to rectify the immense power that the government has over them as their employer and representative in society. They are cut off from the normal operating of a capitalist system; they don't get rewarded or benefit from their own individual effort. The government is encouraged to view them as a collective, rather than individuals, and the unions are a powerful collective. The lines of power distribution are blurred (the government as legislator, executor, and employer is a daunting beast of disproportion) and the unions are seen as a beast of their own. Public opinion, inevitably, gets swept up in the relationship of perpetual conflict and people take sides. Often the debates get reduced to a team-sport. It becomes so natural.

Of key importance is the nature of the public's involvement in these public-sector disputes. In the private sector, individual relationships to employers and employees is dependent on their own individual action; concern with a private-sector labour disupute is largely relegated to whether or not they use the service affected. Of course, if worker's are not being treated fairly we hope that our government takes action. In the public sector our stake is more intimate. The government is, essentially, an extension of us. We vote in order to see to it that our government represents our individual perspective and we pay the taxes that fund its operation. So, by extension, public-sector employees are employed by us. They are employed by us because we see the need for their jobs to exist outside of the private sector. They are valued, important, and indeed, essential. We have individual stakes in them serving our society. As teachers they educate our kids and ensure that future generations can prosper and progress. As nurses they care for our sick.  Both jobs increasingly entail filling in the void left by the unfortunate decline in the family unit.

We elect our governments to make decisions on our behalf. But when they are negotiating compensation and engaging in a relationship as an employer we see a conflict of interest. We become more involved through public opinion and take sides. The yelling match reaches epic proportions and whoever yells loudest wins. Most often it's the government. They won with the paramedics. They'll win it with the teachers. And what was achieved? Teachers feel as though their individual needs and desires are not being heard. The government feels its being vilified for trying serving the interests of the people who elected them. The union feels that the process of collective bargaining is being made a mockery of. Most individuals feel as if a whole lot of time and energy was wasted with no productive result. Everyone has someone to blame, no one looks at themselves as –at leas the partial– cause, and the system goes on perpetuating itself.

The polarization of British Columbia along union and anti-union lines is well known. As soon as the strike began out came the same-old troops lined up to do battle. It was actually an articulate and involved facebook conversation of a friend's, regarding the strike, that inspired me to write this entry. We understand the problems. The current 'solutions' aren't working. Is it not time to try something different? The unique implications involved in having a government operate as an employer requires a unique handling of the relationship. Public-sector employment does not seem to be functioning in a way that is amicable to societies needs. There's a limited scope of change that can be instituted in this regard and it seems clear that the institution that is in most need of reform is the union.