B.C.’s New Anti-Democratic Party government swiftly set about to normalize and institutionalize the new bigotry.
And anti-democratic it is – a scheme for minority government rule by order-in-council and by bundling of legislation around confidence votes that will get a pass by their chosen Speaker. Allowed by the letter of the law, but a violation of the spirit of democracy. Loophole democracy.
And bigoted it is too. Prejudice in shiny new packaging. Because prejudice “for” is no different than prejudice “against.” Prejudice itself smilingly remains, not only unchanged and unscathed but hailed as a social good.
I call as witness outstanding Sun columnist Daphne Bramham to remind the populace of the following – certainly not because she will agree with my views.
She noted (July 19) that the official policy of the New Anti-Democratic party, as I call it, requires “retiring male (MLA) incumbents to be replaced by candidates who are female, visible minorities, Indigenous” – a term that has culturally climbed up to capitalization – “disabled or LGBTQ.”
To which should be added these specifics, rooted in the 2007 party convention: “There shall be representation of both genders in the three positions of leader, president and treasurer.” Also: “The positions of vice-president, members at large, regional members and YND (Young New Democrats) representatives shall have at least 50 per cent women.”
Plain prejudice. (And affronting to women who succeed on merit.) A goal attained in the cabinet of John Horgan, who, to remind an understandably forgetful public shotgunned by new scandals and assaults on their personal happiness every 10 minutes, lost at the polls but won the premiership with the connivance of Andrew “Three Seats” Weaver, forming what I kindly call the Horers coalition. (Would you prefer Weagans?)
Of course prejudice, past and present, ideologically distorts governance by favouring, well, favoured groups. Merit be damned. Competence be damned. Experience be damned. Jack may be a certified dunce, but if he falls into a favoured category – better still, several of them – he gets the party nomination automatically. Anti-democracy in full evil flower.
For the deep-dyed ideologues, the educated dummies and pseudo-intellectuals and that crowd, who were what Stalin chuckled as his “useful idiots” in the West who gullibly fell for communism in the Soviet Union and in Mao’s “leap forward” China and influenced top liberal media like the New York Times (Google “Walter Duranty”) and Washington Post, you have to be, I mean, really sorry for them. How to choose between Jill, who is black and disabled but sexually straight, and Jan, who is lesbian and native?
God, it must be – or will be – hell when these weigh scales are needed. Like debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
In fact this leftist conundrum has already blossomed. When a sitting male MLA retires, a female is required to replace him.
So Gerry Taft, mayor of Invermere, was apparently dead in the NDP’s ideological swamp when seeking the Columbia River-Revelstoke nomination to succeed retiring Norman MacDonald, a three-time winner.
But Taft read the not-so-fine print of the party equity rules. He passed muster when he came out as a bisexual, therefore an “equity-seeking” man.
“He certainly does qualify,” Grace Lore, a UBC political science instructor who specializes in gender and politics, chirped to the CBC. Taft scooped the nomination. And lost the riding.
Speaking of outrage being pushed out of the public’s pummeled memory by new outrage, try to recall Horgan’s creation – before he was even premier – of ringing contempt for democracy, his Confidence and Supply Agreement Secretariat, a syntactical trapeze act worthy of George Orwell. Translation: A device to protect the political asses of the Horers coalition, stroking the indispensable Weaver (and perhaps covertly policing the deal to make sure of no weaseling by Weaver?). Brazen politics paid for by taxpayers.
As for the founding Green beliefs, in private life I’m an almost maudlin lover of nature and sympathizer with its environmental purposes if not its practicality. The only environment Weaver visibly seeks to protect is his comfy, cosy seat in the legislature.
• • •
A possibly amusing footnote to lighten the load of the foregoing: I write these words (on a 50-year-old Eaton’s Custom typewriter) in the tool shed on an island in the very heart of B.C.’s and Canada’s Green-land – ridings of its fresh MLA, Adam Olsen, and of its national leader, Elizabeth May, for whom I have much respect.
And, as befits a socialist paradise, there’s little employment, an economy almost dead off-season, and what does exist is fanned largely by upper-middle-class retirees from business, the higher bureaucracy, and academia.
The bourgeoisie that Marx despised. Rich, eh?
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