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By Gabriel Haythornthwaite
Leading up to the Oct 19th BC general election, corporate media giant Global TV hosted an elite political debate on Oct 8th with the three mainline party leaders. Moderated by Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute, Premier David Eby of the NDP, Conservative Gauleiter John Rustad and Green leader Sonia Furstenau faced off on their respective formulas for corporate prosperity in BC.
The Not Democrats Do The Rightwing Shuffle
Under attack from the new darlings of the corporate class--the Trumpy Rustad Tories--Eby took pains to explain how his short pro-corporate tenure would move further Right with a new electoral mandate.
Eby’s campaign has previously chucked out one liberal half-measure policy after another--drug decriminalization, forced treatment and the carbon tax. But the Premier made a much larger concession to his retro-colonial rival at the debate by swearing off legislative follow-up on the 2024 Land Act to mandate large-scale negotiations with First Nations around land title and co-management rights.
Eby also took pains to point out that the NDP is already doing what the Rustad Cons propose to inflict on people’s healthcare in making up for public funding cuts by sending people to expensive private clinics; courtesy--who else?--of the working class taxpayer. This openly rightwing NDP policy stand is further underlined by the fact that the broken 2020 BCNDP promise to selectively bring disastrous private Long-Term Care services under public management is conspicuously absent in the 2024 Eby platform.
The Not Democrat standard bearer even managed to work in a rightwing jab at the Green pledges to modestly tax ridiculously high incomes and the most obscene levels of corporate profit-looting. Eby chastised the Green leader in apparently wanting to “tax certain groups” to which Furstenau quickly responded, “tax the wealthy”.
Con Liar! Pants on Fire!
Rustad took a hammering on his lack of a ‘costed budget’, the Cons’ 20th Century (at best) view of Indigenous rights and his BC Liberal government past record of massive health care cuts.
But the sedate regressive inflicted the worst damage on Con fortunes himself with a ludicrous lie about witnessing a drug overdose death on his way to the debate! Turned out to be absolute bullshit as revealed by predictable media queries. Rustad forgot that ruling lies on key policy are rarely challenged by the corporate press but idiotically gratuitous unforced errors generally receive unfavourable notice.
One of Rustad’s key repellent debate lows was delivered around Indigenous rights with boasts about what a good colonial master he was while BC Liberal Minister of Aboriginal Affairs (2013-17) under Premier Christy Clark. Grasping for a touching moment, the Con leader described being given beadwork for a job training program (not even actually paid work) by someone Rustad claimed was an Indigenous mother saved from the streets by his beneficence. Another “from the streets” tale, no doubt.
More importantly, this self-aggrandizing anecdote reveals this former colonial master’s absolute ignorance of Indigenous political rights. Of course, if Rustad and his Trumpy Tories did understand such rights, they would surely be rabidly opposed in any case.
The Green Facade
There is no doubt that Sonia Furstenau handily bested her rightwing male opponents. The BC Greens are, for the first time perhaps, running on a moderate yet fairly comprehensive social democratic platform.
But will it save the Greens from the drubbing the polls suggest, in which the party’s vote is around 5% down from 2020? The close contest between the NDP and Cons will no doubt put even more pressure on the Greens perilously low vote.
A leftish platform should resonate with a larger section of the public that noticeably tires of two generations of rightwing political rubbish. Taxing the rich and protecting public services have both been popular priorities for decades.
If the Green 11th hour gambit of a leftish program does not wash this time around, it will be because the party has not truly fought for any of their progressive platform points. Speeches in the Legislature--which the Green MLAs are awfully proud of--have little political value if they are not matched by effective political leadership in the community. In between elections, it is painfully evident that the Greens organize around nothing and lead no struggles at the ground level. This makes this progressive liberal party nothing more than a facade of politics.
Voter-Fodder or Voters For Democracy?
In addition to force feeding the public decades of rightwing political propaganda, voters are serially conditioned to panic about using their vote to prevent the triumph of what is broadly billed as the ‘greater evil’. Voters are generally given an impression by elite media in particular that their votes are actually determining the nature of governmental power when in fact the public is routinely used as voter-fodder by opposing business political camps.
The ‘vote-splitting’ talking point is not just fundamentally anti-democratic; it is dishonestly ludicrous. All parties aim to 'split the vote' in that they aim to take votes from each other. Fundamentally, all three mainline parties bow down to varying business sectors premised on the indispensability of a capital market economy.
Public ownership and control in any part of the economy is strictly off the table. None of them pledges to end corporate welfare or privatization nor to enact mass public housing. All three outfits smear the Palestinian solidarity movement. These elite parties are all splitting the rightwing business war vote! For shame!
However, we are free, instead, to use our votes to work for a leftwing democratic politics over the long-term. In the riding of the Cowichan Valley, Eden Haythornthwaite is running for MLA on an independent socialist platform that identifies key starting points for how the working majority can politically act against deepening exploitation, injustice and war.
Such leftwing electoral campaigns aim to expand the bases and capacities for popular organizing around the key social material priorities of working people. If working people want a politics that exclusively champions their interests and oppose the rule of politics dictated by big corporations, then we will have to organize that ourselves starting now and going forward.
Gabriel Haythornthwaite is a Campaign Lead of the Eden Haythornthwaite Independent Socialist 2024 bid for MLA in the Cowichan Valley.
Gabriel is a former leftwing school board trustee in Cowichan.
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