Carole James - why I think she is a weak leader

I have to start with that she is a not a great communicator or speaker, I listen to words she speaks and it sounds like she is a bad actor reading from a script, beyond the words do not convey any sense of a message of what she wants to do as premier or how she would govern.   Whoever writes for her is a wooden writer with an aversion to content.

On the strategic level, as a leader I have utterly no idea where Carole James is headed with the NDP.   There are those that say she is a centrist, but I do not see it.   I do not see her setting out the vision of an NDP government.   When the Socreds under Bill Vander Zalm were collapsing the NDP under Mike Harcourt only needed to wait for the dust to settle, but I still had a very good idea of the direction the NDP would be going under him.   On most of the issues I most closely work on I have not got the faintest idea what the NDP would do as government.   I have no idea what they would do with the environment, energy, forestry and aboriginal issues - and it is not as I am not trying to find out.  At best I can guess they would not be doing what the current government is doing.   Carole James has no plan to tell us about and this is a dramatic failing as a leader.

Next there is a lack of any ability of the NDP to coordinate themselves and be an effective opposition to the government, to really hold the balls to the wall.   There are no shortage of very good stories that the NDP could run because all governments have more and more flaws as time goes by.   Carole James has the biggest opposition caucus in BC history and more staff to work with, she should have the resources to be able to take the government to task.   What I see is an issue raised by the media and the NDP lazily coming to comment the government is bad - when bored I try to predict the words the NDP MLA will use to comment on an issue, it is humourous how close I can get.

I also do not see Carole James either inspiring people to join the party or make sure the party executive is working hard to have a lot more members.   In fact I see very little evidence of the NDP growing as an organization.   As the presumed government in waiting, I would expect people to be flocking to the party, I would expect the NDP to have 50,000 or more members, not 10,000.

At 10,000 members the party is in really, really serious trouble.   If we assume that 15 ridings have 500 members, this only leaves 2500 members for the other 70 ridings in BC, that is 35 members per riding.   Even if we were to give the NDP 13,000 members and assume they were all in the ridings they were competitive in in the last election, this means only 250 members per riding.    If I were the leader of a party where the ridings my MLAs won had memberships of less than 500 I would be looking for someone to rip a strip off.   There must some NDP MLAs with riding association memberships of less than 100 - that speaks to very weak MPAs and a very weak leadership.

There are people that have something that means people trust them and follow them, this is something Carole James does not have, but without being able to communicate well ,without policy or tactical plan, and a weak political party she has nothing to rely on.

I guess a better way to to look at it all is to ask it as a simple question, what is Carole James doing?  What has she done that indicates she address the issues of policy, party, strategy or tactics of politics?

What does Carole James have going for her?   There is no obvious and clear successor to her.

The Three Independents

Since the last election we have had one independent, Vicki Huntingdon, and she has been joined this year by willingly by Blair Lekstrom and now unwillingly by Bob Simpson.  I have to say I was expecting a lot more from Vicki Huntingdon as an MLA, but she has been almost non-existent in the media.   She has obviously regularly spoken in the house, certainly more than many Liberal or NDP MLAs, but I have no sense of her political views on issues or what she has been doing.  

She is now calling for the three independents to work together:

Huntington calls for Independent MLAs to forge a new style of representation

DELTA B.C. - Independent MLA Vicki Huntington today called for MLAs Bob Simpson and Blair Lekstrom to use their status as Independents to forge a new style of representation.

“As Independents, Simpson and Lekstrom now have the freedom to speak on behalf of their communities,” Huntington said. “Independents are able support policies and programs that benefit the residents of our communities – whatever party or MLA is proposing them.”

Huntington said although they sit as Independents as a result of different actions, Simpson and Lekstrom share a common opportunity in that they no longer have top down big party politics interfering with their ability to truly represent their constituents.

“Government needs to listen to the people and provide a service to the community,” Huntington said.

-30-

Contact: Vicki Huntington

Independent MLA, Delta South

604-940-7924

When it comes to Blair Lekstrom, I honestly have no idea what he has been doing since he left the government.

The first two independents have done very little to get media attention or made much effort to use social media.    Our media is no longer a couple of major papers, radio and TV stations, there is an ever expanding media out there looking for content, but I do not see them making use of it.  I can not find a website for Blair Lekstrom and the one for Vicki Huntingdon is boringly irrelevant.

Maybe they are doing it and I am not noticing, but I am one of the people that spends more time than 99% of the population in this province paying attention to politics, so I figure if I am not hearing about it their audience has to be tiny if they are doing anything.

Where am I leading with this?   I guess I have to wonder of Bob Simpson will be just be another space filler like the first two, or will he be channeling the spirit of someone like Corky Evans and make the world take notice of him?

I do not see there is much benefit in him working with the other two as they have not shown themselves to be very relevant in BC politics and would tarnish him.

So does the NDP support a Carbon Tax?

In an effort to be better informed of where the NDP is at I was looking around the party website and found one place that seemed be a policy direction for the party  - http://www.buildingsustainablebc.ca 

Guess what I found on that site?   The following text:

apply carbon pricing to motivate the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by ensuring that prices of fossil fuels reflect the environmental and social costs of their production and use, while building in “just transition” measures to minimize impacts on low-income households; and 

OK, how is that not a carbon tax?   This is not carbon trading, but specifically adding to the price of fossil fuels, a tax.  Note it even calls for the sort of benefits the current government offers to the low income for the impact of the carbon tax.

Honestly I think someone forgot the document is even out there as one of the links from the site, http://www.realclimateaction.ca/ , seems not to be working any longer.  As of 4:11 pm PST on October 8th 2010 according to Whois, the address is available

How much trouble is the BC NDP in?

The loss of Bob Simpson is clearly a blow for the party and the whole incident exposes the weaknesses of the party at the moment. Here is what I see:

Even though the Liberal support is way down, the NDP has not really gained any support.  The NDP can trumpet a 20 point lead, but if they are not asking why the public is not coming to them from the Liberals, they are in trouble going into the election.   It says to me the party is out of touch with the public and unable to see where their weaknesses are.

For several years I have not managed to find anyone that could say with a straight face that they thought Carole James was the right person to lead the party.

The way the Bob Simpson situation was handled was done badly and without thought about how it would play out in the media. The expulsion looks like it was knee jerk and sudden. Doing it at 9:15pm on a Wednesday night leaves two full media days for the story to play out. The NDP was also not ready with a detailed press release and could not even get Bob Simpson off of their website for more than 12 hours. If this was not enough, Carole James expelled him less than 24 hours before she was scheduled to be on the Voice of BC with Vaughn Palmer.

The NDP is without a clear direction and vision for when it becomes government.  The NDP seems to be looking for the issue that is popular in the polls and takes the popular side of the issue.  I honestly have no idea where the NDP stands on any natural resource issues, First Nations issues or the environment.   All I can certain of is that the NDP want  to be government and do not want to govern like Gordon Campbell, whatever that means.

Coming out of Bob Simpson there has been a lot more NDP voices speaking out against Carole James than I expected.   Probably the most popular New Democrat in BC, Corky Evans, has come out in support of Bob Simpson.  Public Eye Online has a ever increasing list of people from the NDP.  What I find interesting is the sort of debate going on at Rabble.ca  - Carole James has a large amount of dissent within the party and it is coming out now.

Also coming out of this event is the news that the NDP membership is falling and they are losing their monthly donors.   This is the time the NDP should be seeing membership in the tens of thousands.   At a roughly comparable time for the Liberals in the run up to 2001 their membership was huge, over 100,000.  If the NDP membership is falling and it was only around 13,000 around the end of the last election, this is a very, very scary prospect for the party.

People in BC are very anti-authoritarian.   Gordon Campbell has suffered for looking like an autocrat.   Bill Vander Zalm crashed and burned in part because he was too autocratic.   The NDP has always suffered politically for not being very accepting of any dissent.   The outing of Bob Simpson for 'not being a team player' because of some criticism that is so mild almost no one would have noticed it makes Carole James look like a mini Hugo Chavez.

Carole James should have been able to see that she is a liability for the party and should have stepped down shortly after having lost the last election.

As it stand, the NDP is still likely to win the 2013 election and Carole James will be premier, but the election will be much, much closer than people expect and could have a dramatically different result.  A Liberal party with a new leader could see a repeat of the 1986 election for the NDP.

Lekstrom v Simpson, two different ways to leave caucus

It is inevitable there would be comparisons between Blair Lekstrom and Bob Simpson because they are both independents now.

Lekstrom quit caucus
Simpson was expelled from caucus

Lekstrom left late on Friday leaving the weekend for media furor to die down - he planned his leaving to lessen the impact on the Liberals
Simpson was expelled at 9:15 pm on a Wednesdag giving two full days of media frenzy - Carole James planned his removal to ensure maximum media for the story

Lekstrom has virtually no allies, not even his riding association
Simpson has had no shortage of people coming in his support and he has his riding association

Lekstrom won his riding because was a Liberal
The NDP won Cariboo North because of Bob Simpson

Campbell did not create anger in Blair Lekstrom by attacking him
James has made an enemy out of Simpson for her irrational and overblown actions and push now to rubbish who he is

In the end, Blair Lekstrom was minimal damage for the government because of how the story played out.   Bob Simpson on the other hand looks like he will go down in BC history as the start of the process to remove Carole James as leader.

Bob Simpson out of the NDP Caucus

Carole James removed one of small number of New Democrat MLAs that is of a caliber to be in a future cabinet from the caucus.

He was removed by her from caucus for a piece he posted at the Welcome to William's Lake website.

Here is the content:

The annual fall convention of local government officials (UBCM) is usually a place where provincial and federal leaders make major announcements or present their agenda for the coming year. This year, none took full advantage of this opportunity.

Premier Campbell’s hour long speech focused on anecdotes about BC’s Olympic glory – for the first fifteen minutes he kept telling “just one more story” about how the Olympics affected British Columbians. He kept his Olympic theme going through his bizarre attempt to make light of his fumbling of the HST along the lines of ‘my skating partner, Colin Hansen, and I should have spent more time warming up before we tried our first technical jump.’

The only concrete announcements the Premier made, aside from a rehash of previously announced infrastructure projects that may or may not be funded, was three new totem poles and some money for Beetle Action Coalitions.

Neither of these spoke to the immediate needs of local governments which lack resources to address the increasing responsibilities that have been downloaded onto them by provincial and federal governments.

The Leader of the Opposition likewise had little concrete to offer the delegates other than a commitment to be more consultative than the current government and a promise to explore the possibility of revenue sharing with local governments. This is a timely concept which has the potential to address the resource needs of local governments, but the lack of specifics was a disappointment to delegates.

MP Stockwell Day’s speech was a bizarre throwback to the heady days before corporate greed and “toxic assets” collapsed the economy. He simply rehashed old arguments about why government and taxes are bad, even going so far as to ask the audience if they wanted “Happy Meal Regulators.”

The most courageous speech of the convention was given by the Leader of the BC Green Party. While she failed to address the issues facing local governments, she at least challenged every politician in the room with her reflection that unless we fundamentally change our thinking about our consumer driven economy we will doom our children to a bleak future.

The failure of provincial and federal politicians to address the real concerns of local governments and communities at UBCM this year is simply another example of the ongoing failure of our political system to address the complex issues of governance in the 21st century. They were simply politicking for the press, not serving the real and immediate needs of UBCM delegates and their constituents.

Bob Simpson

MLA Cariboo North

I read this and I am stunned that the NDP leader was unhappy about the tiniest of criticism for her leadership. He said nothing here other than the reality.  Carole James went to the UBCM and said more or less nothing and continued down the path towards premier by not being a leader in any meaningful way.

I suspect the bigger problem was that he had something positive to say about Jane Sterk, leader of the BC Greens.

Interesting to read is what Bob Simpson had to say on his MLA website on September 30th

When Will We Rise to the Challenge?

September 30th, 2010

We have a hard time being proactive. We loathe spending money on things that might not happen. Governments are particularly reluctant to plan for and spend money on something that only has a “probability” of occurring. Unless of course that something is a “terrorist” threat, then we’ll spend billions with absolutely no accountability mechanisms in place to make sure those dollars are being spent appropriately, let alone necessarily. But, if the “probability” is the scientifically modeled impacts of climate change on our planet, our infrastructure, our food production, our community stability, and our basic way of living, we allow the press to get away with perpetuating the argument about whether climate change is real and we allow our governments and political parties to get away with platitudes. We’re already experiencing some of the catastrophic events the climate change models predicted: widespread forest fires, catastrophic rainstorms causing major floods, long term drought, changing weather patterns impacting crop growth, increased spread of plant diseases and pests, and significant climate induced damage to property and infrastructure. Yet, we continue to increase our per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Despite decades of warnings, we still don’t have the widespread capacity to dramatically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Nor do we have funded programs in place to prepare for and adapt to changes in our climate and their devastating impacts. There is a climate change plan on paper in BC, the centerpiece of which is the carbon tax. But, as we all know, before HST there was the great carbon tax “revolt” which caused us to lose sight of the bigger issue: reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and preparing for the impacts of a rapidly changing climate. I believe we have huge capacity to be creative and proactive and rise to the challenge that climate change presents to our way of thinking and living. We need to stop getting distracted by secondary arguments that are designed to create uncertainty and political debates that are more about the self-interest of political parties than they are the future of the planet. It would be great if we could find a way to apply the energy that’s been put into the two most recent tax revolts (especially the ongoing one over HST) towards a much more focused demand on all political parties to get their act together and work cooperatively to enable us to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and proactively prepare for the impacts of climate change.

I find the critism of the NDP within this more significant because of his criticism of the revolt against the carbon tax, something New Democrats normally call the gas tax.   I suspect that in private he has been much more critical of the party and has been some sort of thorn in the side of the leader.

So now what?  If the NDP MLAs have any political intelligence they will turf the leader now.   The single biggest problem the NDP has is that they have Carole James as a leader and I have yet to hear a single person say they think she will make a good premier and mean it.   2013 is not likely to be won by the Liberals, but if they have a new leader they are not down and out because the NDP against all reason continues with a leader that is such a handicap and takes anti-environment positions.

After reading what Bob Simpson has written and seeing climate change is his big issue, I could see him joining the Greens.   For the Greens to gain one of the ablest members of the NDP as a sitting MLA will make a significant difference to the political landscape of the province.

The local NDP riding association is also bringing up a motion calling for a leadership convention in 2011.  What is alluded to in the preamble to the motion indicates the NDP is in a bad state.

"The party is wilting under Carole James's leadership. Membership is at an historic low, PACs are being cancelled, the general membership is not donating to the party," the motion reads.

"It's time for renewal and a 2011 leadership convention is the best means to achieve this and position ourselves to win and form government in 2013."

I expect now there to be a character assassination campaign against Bob Simpson by the core of the NDP pundits in the province.   I will be interesting to see how he is treated versus how Blair Lekstrom has been treated by the Liberals.  Even more interesting will be if Lekstrom and Simpson can work together.

Four pending federal by-elections

I assume these will be called very soon as the Winipeg North one has to come soon

Here are the resignations

• Judy Wasylycia-Leis NDP Winnipeg North
• Maurizio Bevilacqua Liberal Vaughan
• Inky Mark Conservative Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette
• Jay Hill Conservative Prince George - Peace River

 Peace River - Prince George:  Forgone conclusion that this will be a Conservative win
Winnipeg North: I can not see any danger of the NDP losing
Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette:  Conservative calk walk

There is only one race, Vaughn.  It is not out of the realm of possible for the Conservatives to win this.  Maurizio Bevilacqua was on the right side of the Liberals.   The Conservatives have been gaining ground in the last several elections.  Still, this is a mountain to climb.

The one factor that is likely to help the Conservatives is that older voters are more likely to vote in a by-election and rural voters are also more likely to vote.   The local candidates will matter and the amount of money the two main parties have to spend matters.

If the Conservatives were to win, this would leave the house as follows:

• Conservatives - 145
• Liberals - 75
• Bloc - 48
• NDP - 37
• Ind  - 2
• Speaker - 1 ( a Liberal)

This means the Conservatives are nine votes short of a majority, with the two independents this is seven short.  It only takes a few MPs to be absent for the Conservatives to have a majority in the house from time to time.

It is still more likely the Liberals will win Vaughn, leaving no change to the house.

Some interesting use of Facebook by some MPs and MLAs

I am not sure if this is a trend, but I have come across some events being hosted by MLAs or MPs that are being promoted on Facebook.   The sort of events are the things I would like to see our elected members do more of.

• First one, Greening your Home and Business - Oct 16th Burnside Gorge Community Association in Victoria - Hosted by MP Denise Savoie and MLA Rob Flemming
• Second one, Forum:  Oil and Water (Stop Dangerous Oil Tranportation) Oct 17th in Port Moody at the Old Mill Boat House and hosted by MPs Fin Donnelly and Don Davies
• Third one, Want to Find Out More About Gaming Grants? Free Seminar - Oct 15th Newton Library in Surrey hosted by MLA Stephanie Cadieux

Too often over the years I have seen MLAs and MPs from across the political spectrum not go out to the community and seek public participation.   I am very supportive of any elected member that chooses to engage with the public like this, even if I disagree with their politics.

Is the Right Wing in BC truly that stupid?

We all have seen the rise of the BC Conservative party, and there are still people keeping the flames of BC Refederation, Social Credit and Reform BC alive, but it seems this is not enough parties on the right.  Sal Vetro of the Anti-Hst campaign has started BC First and now to top that all off, there is the BC Heritage party and the return of Wilf Hanni.

If we discount Reform BC and Social Credit, we are still talking about four parties to the right of the BC Liberals  .  There simply are not enough people willing to run for parties, or volunteer, or donate, or simply care about them at all.

We live in the first past the post electoral system, to succeed in this system you need to be looking at a big tent, not a row of pup tents.  It is not even that they would take votes from each other, they will simply ensure no one pays any attention to any of the parties.

There is a solid 30-35% of the people in BC that are conservatives.   There is a lot of space for a right wing party in BC, there is just not space for a host of tiny splinter parties with no organization.

If the right wing is to have any chance of a break through in the next election they need to have one party and be clear which party it is.  This has to happen soon, ideally before Christmas and certainly no latter than spring 2011.

BC Budget Consultation

For those people out there interested, there is once again an online option for providing input to the BC 2011/12 budget.

Here in Victoria the public hearing is on Thursday Oct 7th from 9 am to 4 pm.  The hearing will be in the Douglas Fir Room of the Legislature.

If I have the time I may make a submission, but realistically I am not going to be able to within the time frames provided.

Some polling changes

What has happened lately is drop in the NDP support nationally.  

Ekos Sept 28 - NDP 13.5%
Ipsos Sept 23 - NDP 12%
Ekos Sept 21 - NDP 14.6%
Harris Decima Sept 19 - NDP 14%

Only Angus Reid has the NDP doing better at 18%, though in their poll the Liberals are significantly down.

Nothing in the polling indicates there is any danger for either the Conservatives or Liberals to achieve a majority.   The Conservatives seem to be running about three points below there result in 2008.   Given their huge financial advantage and their lead among the people most likely to vote, I would expect the Conservatives to get just about the same vote as last time around.

I will write more in detail later, must run to buy chicken feed