There were no pets, dead or ghosts involved.
However, the BC NDP has disqualified leader candidate Anjali Appadurai, alleging collusion with a third party (the Dogwood campaign organization) in recruiting many thousands of new members.
And with that, one of the fastest and most dramatic political insurgencies in Canadian history reaches the end of its first phase. But I don’t think we’re close to done yet.
Unlike the usual shenanigans in party leadership contests, where membership lists are sometimes stuffed with false identities and non-existent entities, the people who joined the NDP to vote for a champion of climate justice are completely real.
what people are reading
What is really going on has less to do with messy internal partisan debates and more to do with why thousands of real people were prepared to buy a $10 BC NDP membership in the hope that they could vote for Appadurai as party leader. . , making her prime minister of the province.
Anjali Appadurai was kicked out of the NDP leadership race, but her successful membership campaign is a warning to the party; she ignores climate action at her peril. @avilewis writes for @natobserver. #BCNDP #climatecrisis #bcpoli
(Full disclosure: I have been what they call a “super volunteer” on the Appadurai campaign, ever since I participated in the public Zoom call when he made the decision to run.)
This party’s decision could have far-reaching consequences: Appadurai’s debarment is a nuclear option. It risks contaminating the administration of the new prime minister, former Attorney General Dave Eby, and sends a message to a whole wave of NDP members that they are not welcome in the ruling party. Most ominously for the NDP, it unnecessarily hands the party’s opponents a cudgel that they will no doubt deploy relentlessly between now and the next provincial elections in 2024.
So why the heck is the BC NDP doing this?
Simply put, the party is disqualifying Appadurai because if the leadership race were to go to a vote of party members, there’s a good chance she would win. Because a 32-year-old climate justice champion and a handful of climate activists have just out-organized the BC NDP establishment, an impressive and accomplished government minister, and a caucus full of MLAs who support him. And they did it in 25 days.
Understanding how that happened, amid all the noise in this news cycle about broken rules, fraudulent members, Green Party takeovers, and Dogwood’s third-party activity, quickly leads us to the real meaning of this explosive moment in BC politics. .
Since 2017, the BC NDP has, to be polite, changed direction on some pretty fundamental issues. It is best summed up as the unholy trinity of the BC environmental left: Site C, LNG, and Old Growth. After campaigning against the $16 billion mega dam, Christy Clark’s “pipe dream” of fracked gas export infrastructure, and for a “paradigm shift” away from felling old trees, under John Horgan, all those industrial projects are moving forward. This while the skies fill with smoke, the poor and elderly cook at home, seafood cooks off our shores, gardens wither from drought, and rain, when it comes, can trigger biblical floods.
This is one of the reasons BC NDP membership fell from a high of 40,000 to just 11,000 prior to this leadership race: a significant segment of the party’s base has been demobilized by government decisions on these very topics.
But there is also another reason. The NDP has moved again and again to disconnect any internal debate on these visceral and existential issues. Attempts to introduce ambitious or anti-LNG climate resolutions at party conventions and party organs have been lost, buried, dismissed, systematically pigeonholed, and procedurally closed. Local constituency associations cannot build coalitions or momentum around shared climate concerns, because the party does not make their contact information centrally available (citing privacy concerns). Young climate activists who have tried to run for party office have been blocked or undermined. .
In other words, BC NDP decision-makers have been pushing a cork in a bottle filled with an expanding gas: the growing climate anxiety that comes from living in this province on the front lines of the emergency. And it seems they thought the cork would hold. it did not
Appadurai did not enter the fray until August 6, just 25 days before the deadline to register new NDP members to vote in the leadership election. As a longtime climate justice activist, her candidacy generated intense enthusiasm, sparking a fast and furious wave of organizing as environmental groups (especially Dogwood) let their members know there was an opportunity to put in the prime minister’s chair someone who ran for the NDP in the last federal election (falling 431 votes short of winning) and whose previous job was at an NGO called the Climate Emergency Unit.
To be crystal clear, under both the NDP and BC Elections rules, third parties like Dogwood are absolutely allowed to encourage their members to get involved in leadership careers. Coordination and collusion are not allowed, but to believe that this was a grand conspiracy, rather than a spontaneous popular uprising… well, you need a reason to see this kind of mobilization as a threat.
Unfortunately, the people who run the BC NDP apparently do. Caught completely off guard by this wave of enthusiasm around climate justice, party members freaked out. They spun an absurd narrative about a hostile takeover of the Green Party and hired an outside company to start calling thousands of new members, looking for reasons to disqualify them.
While that process is likely to continue, a surreal spectacle of a political party actively trying to reduce its membership rolls, at some point it must have become clear that there were simply too many thousands of new members to settle the books and quell the insurgency. So instead of trying to purge thousands in a short time, they just disqualified one: the one who inspired all the others.
So this phase of the battle is over. No doubt the BC NDP will continue to amplify the charges against Appadurai for some news cycles, though those charges will never be proven in court, because the trial against him was cleverly constructed to be devilishly difficult to come to judicial review. And then the party and the government will move on, hoping to put this behind them and work to change the narrative with a new prime minister.
Dave Eby inherits a badly bruised position, but I suppose there is still hope that he will see this tsunami of election activism fueled by climate anxiety as a real source of political energy. Perhaps it will come up with a climate policy that is a bit stronger than the current CleanBC plan, which, as readers here know, is a decent start on climate policy, if its gains weren’t wiped out by the government-subsidized expansion of fossil fuels. same government.
However, the real significance of this debacle is twofold: first, it is an important chapter in the long history of the struggle for the soul of the NDP.
While the BC Greens and Liberals are undoubtedly the prime beneficiaries of a divided provincial NDP, there are still many across the country who see the party as the only electoral force that could yet simultaneously embody climate urgency, enthusiasm for confront the monopolizing class and a deep (if forgotten) tradition in the organization of the working class. With Rachel “I heart pipelines” Notley once again on the rise in Alberta, the next fight in the NDP corral will not be long in coming.
More urgently, this was the most successful and electrifying election intervention by the climate movement in Canadian political history. He was by all accounts an emerging candidacy, and yet he rocked an experienced technocratic ruling party and stole a march from it in less than a month. And when the hammer fell, he was able to mobilize over 5,000 people to send protest emails in less than 24 hours.
That is the thunderous power of social movement organizing. And Appadurai’s meteoric rise should be seen as a harbinger of the movement’s millennials toiling in silos of nonprofit industrial complex issues: This was a flex. Getting into the mess of party politics is, of course, complicated. Here too there is power. Moving at the speed of trust can also be a race.
And we can’t stop here. If a left-wing political party and a generation of brilliant activists and communicators cannot find a way to respect and cooperate with each other soon, we will all find ourselves putting our bodies in front of public health clinics in the era of Prime Minister Pierre.