To be radical, goes the old dictum, is to go to the root. By this definition, Work Less Party’s municipal platform is radical because, as it says on its banner, it “tackles problems, not just symptoms.”

The platform combines a broad understanding of the forces creating Vancouver’s key problems with concrete proposals to address them. Organized around the acronym “WATCH,” short hand for Waste, Arts, Transit, Crime and Homelessness, the Work Less Party offers a qualitatively different path from the traditional approaches of the two mainstream civic parties. The following review of the party’s platform derives from two policy statements, “Transitioning Vancouver Toward a Truly Sustainable Future for Ourselves and Our Children,” and the “Waste, Arts, Transit, Crime and Homelessness” document. They are essentially the same document, the first one being an earlier draft of the final WATCH statement.

Work Less proposes a comprehensive plan for managing and processing waste produced in Vancouver. Work Less’s radical approach is illustrated in the critique on one “green” solution for waste management, that is, generating power from garbage. The idea is “inherently flawed in that it fails to address the underlying reasons we produce as much waste as we do: we are trapped in an unsustainable economy built on endless consumption.” The garbage plan “paradoxically feeds a psychology of consumption.” Instead, Work Less proposes a program of city-wide composting, city-wide recycling of consumer goods, a ban on various disposable items like plastic bottles, coffee cups, plastic bags, and incentives to encourage recycling.

Arts and culture are “the very lifeblood of the city” and should be encouraged, cultivated and championed throughout the city, rather than discouraged, as they are currently. Again, Work Less differentiates itself from the other municipal parties by the breadth of its understanding of the problem. Vancouver’s artists are hamstrung by a City government whose main interest has been to facilitate the inflating of an unsustainable housing bubble that has driven property values to the point where non-established artists have nowhere to perform, exhibit or even live. Work Less’s arts and culture proposals include the use of zoning and taxation powers of the City to provide housing for the artists and spaces for performance. Zoning restrictions have created entertainment ghettoes, such as the nightmarish Granville Strip where success is measured by gallons of booze consumed per hour.

Transit is key to any green shift an urban area can effect. But while others traffic in leafy green platitudes, Work Less cuts to the heart of the matter. “We are told that we must collectively reduce our carbon output and that carbon taxes must be implemented as fuel prices skyrocket, but the bitter reality is that Vancouverites who want alternatives to the use of private cars have limited options.” Anyone who has used Vancouver’s transit system knows how unreliable, uncomfortable, slow and overpriced it is. Anyone who has cycled knows how dangerous it is trying to navigate auto-dominated streets. The body count of dead and injured pedestrians, cyclists and passengers attests to the “road warrior” mentality prevalent on our clogged streets. Work Less points to the non-democratic nature of the transportation system in Vancouver: “We strongly oppose transportation policy for the region being dictated by a secretive, non-elected Translink Board.” Work Less proposes Vancouver create its own bus company paid for by tolls and user fees.

Work Less is the only municipal party offering a realistic approach to crime. While others like Vision promise more money, more cops and crime-fighting aimed at gangs, Work Less looks at Vancouver’s crime problem as a function of the drug war itself. Work Less wants clinics, “run by public health officials . . . to dispense the appropriate drug therapies, free of charge.” Why? Because “without the imperative to find the money for their addiction, those afflicted would have little incentive to resort to property crime or the sex trade.” At the same time, gangs would lose their motivating force because “making drugs freely available to addicts under controlled conditions will remove the financial incentive that drives the lucrative criminal drug trade with its accompanying gang warfare.” That’s exactly right, the drug war fuels the crime.

Work Less calls for “a freeze on hiring of additional police officers” and it advocates replacing the planned increase of police officers “with on-the-ground mental health care workers to contact and assess the status of homeless persons, addicts, and other in need of assistance.” One difficulty that their policy document does not address is that laws criminalizing drug use are not the responsibility of the City, so the same ridiculous laws will remain in place regardless of who is elected. We need disincentives in place for arresting people for possession of any drug. The police should be told that they would lose, for example, $25,000 of funding for every person arrested for possession. The drug war must be brought to end. Left to the police it never will.

One of the indirect benefits of Work Less’s approach to crime is the fiscal conservatism that is written into it. “Policing costs already eat up the largest chunk of the municipal budget, coming in at $180 million” the policy document states. The police budget sucks the city coffers clean as a vampire, much as the military budget in the US stands in the way of a shift in public spending from that wasteful death machine to spending on beneficial programs such as education, medical and health spending and housing.

The housing question is the key question facing Vancouver. Over the last ten years successive NPA and Vision councils (the COPE Council was fractured and Larry Campbell, Jim Green, Raymond Louie and Tim Stevenson, together with their NPA allies were, effectively a Vision city government), took a laissez faire approach to development. As the earlier policy document states, “our municipal leaders have built a monoculture economy almost solely around real estate speculation associated with the 2010 Olympic Games.” On the municipal scene, only Work Less has a larger view of the crisis: “The real estate ‘sub-prime’ collapse is only one facet of a much larger systemic problem [of] an increasingly predatory form of capitalism.” This was the era of negative interest rates and the bubble economy. Now, with the bubble burst, we are left to clean up the mess.

Work Less proposes to pass by-laws that “set [a] percentage of units (30%) devoted to the homeless and lower income residents, especially those with families.” They also propose a number of measures to expand opportunities to increase density in areas now zoned as “single family,” including the allowance of secondary suites, lane-way housing, multi-family dwellings, and the relaxation of by-laws requiring the inclusion of parking spaces as a proportion of new housing development. As well the party proposes measures to protect tenants most vulnerable to homelessness, such as the enforcement of by-laws mandating the upkeep of low-income housing and the involvement of mental health workers to assist people in maintaining their housing security. The party platform also includes measures to discourage real estate speculation on housing, including possible support of “squatters rights” in vacant suites and by-laws to curtail the flipping of housing. Finally, Work Less supports putting in place a committee to explore how best to support cooperative and non-market housing.

Larry Campbell’s Vision and Sam Sullivan’s NPA city governments were one single disaster for Vancouver. The current Vision-NPA duo, the Robertson-Ladner machines, offer more of the same. Work Less promises to begin a transition to a new type of city, one not based on international spectacles (the Olympics) or international capital (the speculative housing boom), or neo-liberal fantasies of a “world class city.”