Vancouver will get another NDP leadership candidate through town this Thursday when Toronto MP and (former) Finance Critic Peggy Nash comes to town. Brian Topp has already visited once, Nathan Cullen announced his race here, and Thomas Mulcair was here last week.
She’ll be meeting up with people at the Railway Club downtown (Seymour and Dunsmuir) and I’ll try to get a recording of any speech she might give.
When I first heard that Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver (NSV) was running just four candidates for city council it was pretty apparent that today’s news was coming.
At the COPE nomination meeting last month, there was an almost obvious tension between the COPE executive and Tim Louis’ supporters. Louis ended up bumping off incumbent councillor David Cadman, and has long been critical of the electoral alliance with Vision Vancouver.
Now, with NSV endorsing the COPE slate, those who have been disappointed with Gregor Robertson over the past few years have alternates for council and mayor, without endangering any COPE candidates. This even helps Adrienne Carr and the Greens, who are also likely to get an endorsement.
What complicates this even further is that NPA isn’t even running a full slate for Park or School Board (6/7 and 5/10 respectively), and NSV is only running for Council and Mayor. The Greens are only running one candidate for each of those positions.
A poll released last week suggests that almost anything could happen. The poll doesn’t include NSV or their mayoral candidate Randy Helten, so mayoral support splits 66-32 for Vision. The results for council are less clear, especially since they found 19% support for the Greens, while only 11% for COPE. The poll doesn’t list its sample size or margin of error, so it’s worth questioning some of the numbers.
It should be an interesting election.
While I didn’t manage to get a picture, tonight I did get to meet Thomas Mulcair, leadership candidate for the federal NDP, deputy leader, and Quebec MP.
Mulcair was a polished politician in the small Dentry’s Pub. He managed to shake the several dozen hands a couple times each. He remarked to me that it’s better to introduce yourself twice instead of never.
Once the crowd had assembled and he’d made his first round he gave a brief speech. I recorded it on my phone (I was at a bad angle so I just took audio), and you can listen here:
Every so often a number of stories pile up in my “I have opinions I want to express about this piece of news” list. Today’s theme is stories of interest to skeptics.
Sometimes I appreciate the local coverage that the Georgia Straight provides. They’re coverage of the Vancouver election is extensive, and they’ve provided pages for every school and parks board candidate so far to get their word out. Hell, they questioned Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts on whether she though George Bush should be arrested for torture.
But then they have a day when they put out a pair of articles like they did last Thursday.
A friend of mine recently sent an email to his MLA, which I adapted and sent to my MLA, premier Christy Clark. Her office (or potentially her personally) responded below.
It’s good to see a response from one’s MLA, especially when that MLA is the premier and has stated she doesn’t plan on running in this constituency in the next election. Hopefully those camped out downtown have tried to contact their representatives. Protests are good for visibility, but there is always work to be done.
Stephen Harper and his cronies must be happy today. With Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, the Conservative war room had to argue against a carbon tax and quote mine extensively to find a suggestion that a tax hike wasn’t off the table.
Now, NDP leadership candidate Brian Topp comes right out with out:
Brian Topp is boldly going where most Canadian politicians fear to tread: promising to make the wealthy pay more in taxes.
The perceived frontrunner in the NDP leadership race wants his party to make higher income taxes for high-income earners a key plank in its next election campaign platform.
He told The Canadian Press he intends to unveil a detailed proposal in the weeks to come.
"I will be talking about income taxes and I think it’s time for our party to step up to that plate and to be pretty clear about that because then we’ll have a mandate to act if we’re elected," Topp said in a wide-ranging interview.
He also called for a hike in corporate taxes and did not rule out a sales tax increase "at some point," once the fragile economy is on surer footing.
I like it though.
With the Occupy protests and growing awareness to the increasing inequality worldwide, calling for a fair tax system is long overdue.
Where Ignatieff went wrong was when he caved to the Conservative attacks. They attacked him for taxes, he fell beck. They attacked on coalitions and cooperation, he fell back.
I see Topp standing up to the attack ads and saying, “Yes, I will raise taxes for the wealthy so that this country can be great.” It will paint a stark picture of the different visions that the NDP and Conservatives have for the country.
One with cradle-to-grave health care and peacekeeping; the other with austerity and peacemaking.
My personal preference is for the underdogs, but so far, Topp is painting a pretty promising picture.
It’s not all flowers though. Topp does go out and suggests that NDP MPs should toe the line and oppose the gun registry
"The fact of the matter is, the money has been spent, the registry is here, police services are using it, the public overwhelmingly supports it, there’s no compelling case for dismantling it that isn’t emotional," he said.
"There is precedent in our party for letting people sit out a vote. But I could not support arrangements in which members of our caucus vote with the government on this bill."
He may be right, but the evidence of its efficacy is limited at best.
He’s likely going to alienate a few voters in the prairies, which will threaten his chance at expanding where most of the new seats are going. Blowing off the prairie voters like this could have long-term consequences.
It looks like I’ll be getting my chance to meet Mr. Mulcair on his way through Vancouver.
Care of the Vancouver-Quadra NDP Association, Mulcair will be appearing at Dentry’s Irish Grill on Wednesday, October 26th at 7:30pm. The bar is located at 4450 West 10 Avenue, Vancouver.
Along with the invitation, the email states:
This is a great opportunity to get to know Tom better–to hear his views on the future health & growth of the NDP, its electoral-political successes, commitments to Canada, & efforts we can take to save the environment.
They also promised to try to get meetings with any other candidates that come through town, so hopefully this won’t be the only meeting.
I’ll try to make it there and bring a report back (with some photos) here.
It seems like liberals (of the traditional variety) have reason to celebrate Canada’s current Supreme Court bench.
First, the Court ruled unanimously that Insite, Vancouver’s Safe Injection Site, could not be shut down as the evidence clearly demonstrated that the facility was saving lives.
Now, the Court has also ruled unanimously that a mere hyperlink cannot count as libel. This gives more room for bloggers who were at risk of lawsuits for using a link to make an additional editorial point.
The decision has a qualifier (as any good ruling should):
However, if a post linking to another site itself contains defamatory material, the poster may be liable in a defamation action.
Basically, if you copy something that defames someone onto your own website, you’re still liable for libel.
This is likely welcome news for fellow-Vancouver blogger Crommunist who is hoping to see the Court strike down our Hate Speech laws in their next big case. I must admit that he’s likely to get his wish, given that Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin wrote the dissenting opinion to the 1990 Supreme Court ruling that had upheld our current laws.
Overall, I don’t believe we ought to be tossing away all anti-hate legislation in favour of a free speech for the loudest approach. Speech can have consequences. While bullying and harassment are already crimes, I believe we ought to be striving for something better as a society. Michael De Dora argues on Rationally Speaking that we can and should legislate morality:
Broadly speaking, morality is the domain of one’s thinking — beliefs, attitudes, and feelings — about the well being of conscious creatures. It concerns right and wrong, good and bad, questions of how we should act toward one another, and the kind of people we should want to be. The legal realm (whether a piece of political legislation or a court decision) is where these beliefs, attitudes, and thoughts are societally enacted. In this sense, the connection between morality and legality is natural and inherent.
But there is another reason to enforce moral norms: if your conscience tells you some action may be causing great harm to society, you have both the right and, I believe, the duty to try to help or correct the situation, through both social and political means. In this sense, we should not be afraid of moralizing. Instead, we should be afraid of not moralizing. The consequence of not moralizing is unchecked harm. The consequence of moralizing is potentially a safer environment and perhaps even a more virtuous populace.
He goes on to qualify his remarks (again, as we all should) stating that we need to be careful of false and unreasonable moral beliefs and laws based on preference rather than morality.
In the land of Hate Speech legislation, I believe there is a moral imperative for us to defeat bigotry. Obviously we can’t just legislate it away, but we can target the worst offenses, those that cause measurable harm. It may not be easy to measure the harm, so I believe we ought to err on the side of liberty, but in many cases it’s quite clear cut. When Lorna Pardy was verbally assaulted by a homophobic “comedian” at a Commercial Drive comedy club, the BC Human Rights Tribunal correctly ruled that Guy Earle was guilty of Hate Speech.
Our actions and speech has consequences. We can’t hide behind the Charter when we cause harm to others. Freedom of religion doesn’t grant the right to beat one’s spouse or mutilate their children, and freedom of speech doesn’t give the right to target hate-fuelled discrimination.
Another thought has struck me regarding Nathan Cullen’s approach, and it goes beyond my opposition to his joint nomination meetings suggestion.
His key statement and drive seems to be a desire to defeat Stephen Harper at any and all costs. It’s us versus them; right versus left; progressive versus conservative.
The push is very much a negative, “we must defeat Stephen Harper” focus, and is very telling that it’s the first announcement to come out of the Cullen campaign since he launched.
What made Jack Layton successful in May wasn’t his focus on how we needed to bring down Harper at any and all costs. Jack broke through because he convinced people through his cooperative efforts and getting back to work talk that he cared about making Canada a better place. He inspired people to vote for him, not against Harper. This is why (among many other reasons) voters in Quebec abandoned the Bloc Québécois as their anti-Harper vote and chose to vote for their local NDP candidates.
Cullen is smart though, and recognizes some of this, stating he “didn’t want to just beat Stephen Harper, I want to beat the way he does politics”. But the irony is that his proposal is focussed on uniting for the sole purpose of defeating Harper.
He talks about putting forward a progressive alternative, but doesn’t fill in those details. He mentions climate change and economic fairness, but doesn’t give any hint how he’d address them.
His proposal instead is that if a riding thinks a Liberal candidate has a better idea than the Nathan Cullen NDP then we should abandon his plan and vote for them instead.
But perhaps the biggest irony here is that by suggesting what amounts to local Liberal-NDP-Green mergers, Cullen is arguing for exactly what Stephen Harper did for the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservatives. He isn’t presenting an alternative to Harper politics, he’s merely re-wrapping it in autumn colours.