Today’s decision by Adrian Dix to step down as BC NDP leader, pending a leadership election next year, comes as no surprise. The good news for Mr. Dix – to be a bit catty for the moment – is that he stays as Leader of the Opposition, with the salary that goes with it, until some time in 2014.

That he had to resign based on history doesn’t stand up – Gordon Campbell blew the 1996 election, stayed on and became the worst premier in our history. Right wing parties, until Mr. Vander Zalm, have always circled the wagons and – to mix a couple of metaphors – refrained from eating their own whelp.

For the NDP, however, self-immolation is traditional.

This announcement gives the NDP time to focus on its leadership to come, and the party has never been very good at that. The reason is simple: the NDP is a party of principles – which is not to say that any of those principles make any sense  – whereas right wing parties concentrate on winning and let other principles be damned.

The business community doesn’t give a fiddler’s fart what the leader stands for as long as he is being friendly to business at all costs. You will remember how, right after Campbell became premier in 2011, he gave a billion dollars in tax “relief” to the well off.

Replacing Adrian Dix

The candidates for succession to the slightly-less-than-enviable prize that the NDP nest of adders is, are several  – and we may not even know the names of some of them by the time the contest gets seriously out of the starting gate.

The two favourites at this stage are Mike Farnworth and John Horgan. I mention that Mr. Farnworth is gay only because that will be – and perhaps should be – a plus in a party that prides itself on its openness to minorities. Whether or not this bears any electoral problems, I can’t say – it shouldn’t. In addition, Mr. Farnworth has had experience in cabinet, including the senior post as Health Minister. He is also – and this is important  – liked and respected both in and out of his party.

John Horgan is certainly intelligent but has a temper. A tempered temper, so to speak, may be just what the party needs. He carries with him, however, a conviction that might be hard for the NDP to support in the days to come . He supports, evidently without serious reservations, the Liberals’ vision for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) plants – plus the pipelines and fracking that go with them. Since this is the only hope the Liberals have for 2017, that makes things awkward for an NDP leader who agrees with them.

It’s also a problem for the third name always mentioned – George Heyman, former labour leader and former executive director of the environmental organization, the Sierra Club in BC. Heyman’s first problem is he’s not popular with the union movement who believe he laid down when Campbell legislated his members back to work.

His second problem is that he’s an untested rookie and, since the leadership contest will likely be before the Legislature goes back in session, will still be unbloodied before the leadership convention.

There will be others. Somehow dust gets sprinkled into the eyes of no-hopers who always visualize a deadlocked convention with them, somehow, coming up the middle to win – something that rarely happens. The last one I can recall – and this was before conventions were stacked with 24-hour members – was Joe Clark in 1976.

Horgan’s LNG problems

I believe that the odds on favourite will be Farnworth. He’s popular with the caucus and the party and that’s pretty important, to put it mildly. But more importantly, he will be able to corner Horgan on the LNG issues – especially over fracking. Horgan, poor chap, is trapped in the policy of the 2013 election when the NDP – if they stood for anything – were for LNG development with a minimum of study.

Now that the Liberals have staked their government’s future on LNG and mythical “Prosperity” funds, being in favour of this will not be a winner at the convention. Horgan will, no doubt, be babbling, “LNG if necessary but not necessarily LNG” – and he’ll have the experienced and popular Farnworth snapping at him from one side and the kid on “the make”, Heyman, on the other. Heyman, that is, with the strong track record opposing fracking.

This, to my mind, makes Farnworth the winner and also guarantees the usual outcome – the NDP squabbling and divided at the end of the process.

The BC Liberals have the worst attendance record in the BC Legislature since 1976 – especially with this week’s decision to avoid a Fall sitting…again. If they were employees working in the real world, they’d have a tough time holding down a job. In politics, apparently, it’s a different story.

Socreds: 80, Liberals: 51

The Clark Government’s two predecessors differed little in their legislative schedules. From 1976 to 1991, the Socred Government held an average of 80 sessions a year; the NDP, from 1992 to 2000, hosted an average of 78.

The Liberals began their legislative tenure by choosing not to hold a Fall sitting in 2001, setting the tone for years to come. Since 2001, including this year’s abysmal 20 days in the Legislature, they have averaged just 51 days in those hallowed Victoria halls – a 53-56% decrease from their predecessors, according to data crunched by Will Koop of the BC Tapwater Alliance . (see graph below)

His organization is furious that at a such a pivotal moment, with critical issues reshaping the province’s future – from fracking and liquefied natural gas plans to oil pipelines, the $8 Billion proposed Site C Dam, mounting deficit challenges and the mess at BC Hydro –  the government would choose to sit this session out.

Premier Christy Clark says it’s precisely for that reason she can’t be bothered with pesky debate – stating that “building an LNG industry in British Columbia” is her party’s main priority.

For Koop, that excuse doesn’t wash:

[quote]Amongst other pressing issues, this government clearly does not want the public’s elected officials to go on record to debate the serious future environmental consequences, social and economic issues related to the upstream and downstream fracking industry.[/quote]

The following is a private letter, republished with permission, from retired BC NDP cabinet minister Corky Evans to a friend, discussing their party’s recent election failure and uncertain future. Though not intended as a polished manifesto, it should be required reading for anyone interested in rebuilding the NDP.

August 10, 2013

Dear Steve,

Thank you for initiating the dialog about the state of our Party. 100 members with your commitment to change could save us.

We lost an election we could have won. This is not a particularly new phenomenon. The only difference between this one and many in the past was that the pundits and the press told us we would win.

Otherwise, it was pretty much as we remember. We thought we could win. We didn’t.

Of course Adrian must go. His image has been damaged by attack ads the same way Mr. Dion and Mr. Ignatieff were damaged by similar smear campaigns in the recent past. They were both fine people and they both had to leave so that their Party could move on, so must Adrian.

It would constitute huge failure however, if we, the membership, celebrated the departure of our Leader and believed our troubles were resolved.

The first Leader I ever ran for was Bob Skelly. Bob did a terrible job of campaigning. And, I don’t know, but I would wager, that in spite of his troubles he got more of the popular vote than we have received lately.

Indeed, we continue to decline regardless of who we chose as Leader. Getting rid of the Leader is sometimes necessary but it solves nothing except allowing folks to feel that they can begin again.

The only way I can think of to describe our problem is to say the Movement that we were has become the Institution that we are.

The same thing happens to every religion as it turns into a church, every political movement that outlives it’s vision, every business that grows big enough to forget what it started out to accomplish.

The Pope dies, the CEO gets paid to leave, the Leader resigns, and the institutions that they led, precisely because they are institutions, survive and carry on as before.

It seems to me that a movement becomes an institution pretty soon after it spawns a number of people whose well being, financially or psychologically, is dependent on the survival of the organization, rather than its success.

And survive we do.

We survive even if our Leadership candidates sign up bogus membership to get nominated.

We survive even if we cannot attract enough voters to grow or win.

We survive when we have nothing to say to citizens who are not already committed to our way of thinking.

We survive even when we have to get someone else to pay our President.

The people who increasingly dominate positions of leadership electorally or in the Party do not need to win elections for them to remain secure. So secure, in fact, that there are those among us who have never held a job that wasn’t, essentially, political.

Please do not misunderstand my intent. I do not wish to denigrate the folks who dedicate their lives to make us function. They Are Us.

Our problem is not ”who” they are, it is that they exist in critical mass and their voice is perceived to be our voice and their voice is not interesting. It is an institutional voice. It is pretty much like listening to the Ford Motor Company or the BC Medical Association.

I remember when one of the Leaders I worked for asked some guys many of us know to purge our Party of the troublemakers (that was not the word he used.)

They did a good job. We got Slates so the people we didn’t like couldn’t serve in Executive positions. We got Mike Muffins (members with nothing to say who stand in the line at the microphone) at Convention so they couldn’t speak. Candidates got a Message Box and were told not to say what they thought and to stick strictly to only what they were given to say.

The “troublemakers” were sidelined and we became an effective, and boring, machine. Leaders and Leaders staff tell MLA’s what they can and cannot say and punish independent thinking. Or, worse, speaking their mind. We are now a modern political machine, and we sound like one.

We are rarely, anymore, embarrassed. There is no blood on the floor at Convention. We have become a successful Institution and a failed Movement.

The contradiction in this analysis, if analysis it be, is of course that some of this organizational behavior is necessary and some of it even works.

In an age of television many believe that we cannot allow real debate at convention and we cannot have MLA’s saying what they think about stuff because everything, everywhere, is grist for the mill and can be used against us.

I remember the election when every Liberal candidate in BC, including Gordon Campbell, had a sheet of stupid things Corky Evans has said to quote from.

Of course, every quote on the page was taken out of context and was, to me, defensible. But in a time where the sound bite has replaced discourse as the way that people receive ideas, it can be argued that it is better to be boring than to risk being made to look stupid.

I do not know how to fix this. I could not write a tract entitled ”What is to be done,” because I do not know. The thing I do know, though, is that discussion is medicine for screwed up situations. Self-criticism can heal.

The message box, on the other hand, is not discourse. It is poison, like drinking the cool-aid at Jonestown.

I’d like to see us cut everyone a little slack and see if we couldn’t be a bit of a movement again, a bit embarrassing at times but also interesting and current and vibrant and less controlled, less careful, less run by anybody in particular.

This isn’t about Adrian, who I am pretty sure knows what he has to do. It is about us as a Party with a diverse base of support. I doubt very much if we know the details of what it is that we have to do, but I believe we know the spirit of the changes needed. So we best talk.

Thanks,

Corky