The NDP and Greens Self-Destruct in BC Election

This is Kevin Annett's take on the BC election.


When Will They Ever Learn: The NDP and Greens Self-Destruct and Hand an Unearned Victory to the Campbell Crew in
"Beautiful British Columbia"
by Kevin D. Annett
www.hiddenfromhistory.org

The bare and brutal facts tell it all: Gordon Campbell's Liberals won last night's provincial election by thirteen seats. But in twelve ridings taken by Campbell, the combined NDP-Green vote was actually greater than the Liberal. (1)

Clearly, a Green-NDP coalition would have won yesterday's election, which witnessed the Greens and NDP garnering over 50% of the popular vote, compared to the Liberal's 45%.

Even in Campbell's own riding of Vancouver-Point Grey, the combined Green-NDP vote came within 700 votes of unseating him.

This sobering conclusion is indicated by more than simple arithmetic. If the NDP and Greens had have done the sensible thing and joined hands, enough centrist voters would have been wooed from the Liberals to give such a left coalition easy victory.

So why didn't it happen?

Twenty five years ago, I was expelled as chair of the Point Grey Green Party after having publicly called for the Greens to unite with the NDP in the next provincial election. As a founding member of the B.C. Greens, I saw no real difference in policy between both parties when it came to the environment and other basic issues, and to run separately was, and remains, tantamount to political suicide. Yesterday's election results continue to bear this out.

Family feuds are always the most vicious, and the origin of many Green party leaders as activists in or around the NDP compels one to assume that the ongoing and disastrous animosity between the NDP and Greens is simple a battle of egos. Certainly nothing on the part of either party's leadership indicates much political sense when it comes to the need for a strong coalition-building strategy. Indeed, in the face of B.C.'s historically polarized, "first past the post" electoral system, which dooms the Greens from the outset from winning any seats and casts it, as best, as a spoiler force, the continued rejection of such a coalition by both party leaderships make absolutely no sense.

The pro-capitalist parties in B.C., unfortunately, have never suffered from such political stupidity. Ever since the formation of the NDP's predecessor, the CCF, in 1933, a continual anti-socialist coalition of liberals and conservatives has kept the left out of power: the only exception being when the anti-left coalition fell apart in 1972, and the national backlash to Brian Mulroney decimated the right-wing during the early 1990's.

Notwithstanding the virulent sectarianism of many Green activists when it comes to uniting with the NDP, the biggest barrier to a left-green coalition in B.C. is the odd confusion of the NDP itself when it comes to its own political self-identity, as it continues to deny its own principles and legacy in its elusive search for "middle of the road" respectability.

It was not for nothing that former Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent once referred to the NDP as "liberals in a hurry". The trouble is, they're not in much of a hurry anymore: a fact which routinely sours its supporters and prompts desperate spin offs like the B.C. Greens.

The problem is, we are running out of time, and cannot afford the luxury of further political myopia. The grotesque prostitution called the 2010 Olympics and the impoverishment and militarization of the province that has accompanied it is but a symbol of the disaster that is unfolding in B.C., as the land and its wealth is being sucked dry and shipped abroad.

The B.C. Liberals, and their corporate bosses, have a clear and stated plan, and no qualms about following it. It's time the NDP had a similar boldness - and political sense. And the place to begin is by knitting together a new peoples' coalition by approaching the Greens and working next time for a coalition government in B.C.

One can only hope that there is a next time.