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Vancouver
Elected NDP officials oversee COPE’s surrender
By Reed Eurchuk
Provincial party directs affairs among two Vancouver civic parties, playing off both sides in the pathetic drama
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Senior figures within the national and provincial NDP party played key roles in orchestrating the ratification of a Vision-COPE agreement at a recent COPE membership meeting. The agreement leaves COPE with very little opportunity to renew itself, or even to sustain itself. As widely reported in the media, under the terms of agreement, COPE will not run a mayoral candidate and it will be allowed to run only two candidates for council. The agreement allows COPE to run five candidates for the School Board and two for the Parks Board. The agreement ensures COPE will have a low or no profile in the upcoming election. What attention it does garner will be as an auxiliary organization cooperating with Vision. Vision is a coalition of the NDP, developers and conservative trade union bureaucrats, with a sprinkling of Liberals.
According to The Georgia Straight’s editor Charlie Smith’s blog, among the four who spoke in favour of ratification of the terms of surrender, three were current or former NDP politicians, including former NDP Member of Parliament Margaret Mitchell, current NDP MP Libby Davies, and current NDP MLA David Chudnovsky. The only non-NDP representative named by Smith who spoke for ratification was ex-BCGEU President, George Heyman, a man rumoured to be pining for a safe NDP seat in an upcoming election. Jamie Lee Hamilton’s Oldtown News Blog lists a number of other NDP elected officials among the crowd in attendance.
This will be the second time in as many years that powerful NDP operatives have intervened in the affairs of the municipal COPE party. In the spring of 2007, NDP MLA David Chudnovsky and others organized a putsch by stacking a meeting and overthrowing the more independent-minded COPE Executive Board. COPE Parks Board representative Spencer Herbert also worked to install the pro-agreement Executive Board in 2007. Herbert previously worked for David Chudnovsky on an NDP campaign. Herbert is now jumping head-first onto the mother ship by throwing his hat in the ring for an NDP nomination to run in Vancouver Centre.
Since the 2007 putsch, COPE Councillor David Cadman and Executive Board member Ellen Woodsworth have begged and pleaded with Vision to agree to a joint campaign. Cadman feigned interest in running as the COPE mayoral candidate as a way to placate COPE membership and defuse others from thoughts of organizing an alternative COPE mayoral candidate. After nearly a year of contacts, Vision made its pitiful offering only days prior to a long-scheduled COPE meeting. The offer was enough for Cadman, Woodsworth and the NDP to urge COPE members to sign on the dotted line.
The twist to the story is that the NDP controls both COPE and Vision. Like a comic farce, the NDP family played both sides of the aisle, contributing at a high level from both the COPE organization and the Vision organization to the talks.
That Vision is largely made up of NDPers cannot be denied. For starters, Vision Mayoral candidate Gregor Robertson was, until a few months ago, a sitting NDP MLA in Victoria. When Robertson ran with the NDP for MLA, one of his advisors was Michael Magee, the Vision backroom boy and current co-chair of the party. Another of the Vision founders, Tim Stevenson, was an ineffectual NDP MLA prior to becoming a founding member of Vision and a Vision city councilor. Geoff Meggs, now confirmed as a Vision council nominee, previously worked for NDP Premier Glen Clark before assisting in the founding of Vision. Jim Green, another of the founding group behind Vision, worked for the NDP government. Am Johal, currently on Vision’s Executive Board, works for NDP MLA Jenny Kwan (who prefers to attend COPE meetings, the other side of the aisle). Stephen Learey, currently a Vision Executive Board member, previously worked for the provincial NDP government, and later for former Mayor Larry Campbell, whose “Friends of Larry Campbell” incubated Vision.
Another significant group behind the agreement are the labour bureaucrats, including Vancouver District Labour Counci’s Bill Saunders and Donalda Greenwell-Baker (who is also on the COPE executive) and labour lawyer and Vision co-chair Carolyn Askew, among many others. But of course for the most part this contingent is also active within the NDP, and they’re hard to tell apart.
The many interlocking connections between these powerful NDP elements within COPE and Vision determined in advance the outcome of the vote, a vote in which COPE chose to ensure that it will not be a player in the upcoming municipal election. It remains to be seen if COPE rank-and-file will accept the direction of the NDP and vote en masse for a party, Vision, that is funded overwhelmingly by property developers, casino owners and big “entertainment industry” interests.
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