Fallout from a bad election

The left is shattered and leaderless, but can it rebuild?

by Reed Eurchuk <reurchuk@republic-news.org>

Can’t COPE with that Vision

The fruits of COPE’s forced self-emasculation are now clear: the loss of three of the most progressive politicians in the country—Fred Bass, Anne Roberts and Tim Louis.

Just as bad is their replacement by four timid “Visionaries.” Vancouver will suffer from a loss of clear debate and alternatives in council, as the NPA and Vision basically agree on issues, they only disagree mostly on details.

But the long-term effect of this election is less clear.

With Jim Green’s loss in his bid for the mayor’s chair, the Vision council members have no obvious leader. Raymond Louie lacks self-confidence. George Chow has never sat on council, and is more conservative than many of the NPA elected council members. Tim Stevenson is lackluster, and has never been a leader in his years in politics. Heather Deal is unknown. Vision is a rudderless boat at this point. COPE’s only elected council member, David Cadman, is bright and effective, but don’t expect the Vision types to allow him to lead them.

Meanwhile, COPE is far from down for the count. They would be in much worse shape had Green been elected. Other than council, they had a decent showing. They have a surer sense of direction and politics. But, with the amputation of their left side at council, COPE could drift toward Vision. As it stands, it is unclear which of the two parties, or whether both, will go forward into the next election.

Tim Louis

In a wonderfully descriptive portrait of defeated COPE councilor Tim Louis, conservative Vancouver Sun columnist Pete McMartin painted Louis as a man who “exudes a prickly self reliance and enormous strength of will.” McMartin went on that, “the right has identified Louis for particular loathing, painting him as the Svengali of the radical and dangerous left that COPE represents to them.” But it is the soft left that most despises Louis: the Jim Green’s and Mike Harcourt’s of the NDP, the Jim Sinclairs of the BC Federation of Labour and the George Heyman’s of the BCGEU. McMartin should check out liberal columnist Allen Garr’s many gratuitous kicks at Louis to get a sense of where the true animus towards Louis lies. These people, so eager to trade basic principle for meager victory, for less punishing labour contracts (but punishing still), for less punitive government cutbacks (but cutbacks just the same) will never understand a politician like Louis. Tim Louis is a fighter. He comes to issues with a bottom line, which he will not cross. He does not come to the table with a talking position from which he happily retreats.

In this dreary, nasty campaign, Louis spoke as surely as ever. At a local all-candidates meeting, Louis leveled the latest attempted speculative land grab in the downtown area—the suggested Whitecaps stadium atop the train tracks behind Gastown. The City of Vancouver should “build something useful instead” of the stadium,” Louis said, with his usual terse style. And he went on, “The simple fact of he matter is: boosterism is great for the rich. But you can’t eat boosterism. You can’t get warm from boosterism. You can’t keep the rain off your head from boosterism.” The rhetoric implies the opposition between wealth and poverty, privilege and oppression. It is the rhetoric of generations of radical thought, past and future.

A ‘Win-Win’ Compromise

At the same meeting, Vision Vancouver’s Raymond Louie was asked the same question as Tim Louis. Louie exercised the tired rhetoric of “win-win” 3 rd Wayism: “The jury’s out for me,” said Louie, but he mused, what if “there are enough benefits that it makes sense for the city overall? What happens if it means more social housing? What if it means more jobs.” You get the drift: the inevitable trade-off occurs, offering a pittance for the low-waged and the poor. This is the “win-win” compromise.

Who We Are: Vancouver as Shangri-La

Meanwhile in an interview with Tyee Magazine, Jim Green waxed philosophic on the relationship between Vancouver, architecture and development. “This is what city architecture should do: build cultural merit into buildings; demonstrate who we are. Buildings can’t just be utilitarian; they should represent us. The Shangri-La does this; the Arthur Erickson buildings do this.”

The Shangri-La in question is the gigantic upscale hotel and residential complex to be located at Thurlow and Georgia. Built by a multinational Asian hotel conglomerate, each hotel room is to be 50 square metres, double the standard size. The bathrooms will be 9 square metres, and each room is to have a sensurround stereo system. The $250 million project will be the tallest building in Vancouver. Floors 1 to 15 will have 120 deluxe hotel rooms. Floors 16 to 42 will feature one and two bedroom condos planned to retail at between $400,000 and $1 million. Floors 43-59 will have “residential estates” costing $1.5 million and up. The 60 th floor will consist of a $13 million penthouse suite.

Such a neat, tight hierarchy: it certainly does “demonstrate who we are. Workers enter at rear.

****