Mike De Jong is upset about the BC NDP's new targets for nominating women and visible minority candidates for the next election. Mr. De Jong's bloated epitaph is that setting aside a percentage of non-incumbent ridings for women and minorities amounts to "a typical NDP, big-labour approach to an issue, which is to tell people what to do." For those of you scoring at home, the NDP is setting aside 30 % of available ridings for women, and 10% for visible minorities. If every New Democrat MLA runs in 2009, that means that only the 46 Liberal-held ridings would be subject to this formula: do the math and it works out to 14 ridings for women and 5 for visible minorities. Is De Jong saying that BC shouldn't have 14 more women or 5 more members of a visible minority as MLAs?
A 'big-labour' approach? De Jong can't be anymore clueless and instead grasps at the familiar anti-worker slander of the right wing. The NDP doesn't give out bulk Union membership anymore - the number of delegates a Union gets is based on the number of individual memberships within that Union. As for 'tell people what to do', this policy was passed at last weekend's NDP convention by a substantial majority of delegates across BC, so who gives a rat's (besides the Globe & Mail) what De Jong and the Lieberals think?
Affirmative Action targets are a far more democratic and transparent attempt to bolster representation from equity-seeking groups in the legislature than the Lieberals' elitist practice of parachuting 'star' candidates into ridings. Women and minorities are more than welcome to seek a position on Gordon Campbell's team as long as they were a Supreme Court Justice, President of the CBC, or an Olympic Wrestling champion. Anyone else who's background isn't as upwardly mobile doesn't count with the Lieberals, so thank the NDP for at least trying to come up with some numbers of their own.
2 comments:
"Affirmative Action targets are a far more democratic and transparent attempt to bolster representation from equity-seeking groups in the legislature than the Lieberals' elitist practice of parachuting 'star' candidates into ridings."
I agree. But that raises the question, why did this policy include a section where the NDP's unelected Party Executive can revoke a candidate's nomination, one whose nomination has met all the procedural rules, if in the Executive's opinion that candidate is "harming the party"? Does that mean disagreeing with some party policy or another? Why does it include the right of the Executive to pick ridings that will have female or minority candidates? When you couple that with the power the Party Executive already has to install candidates of their choosing, how is this any different than Paul Martin's "star candidates"?
How was the three to one ratio of women to minorities chosen for non-incumbent ridings? Why is it that incumbent seats that become open all go to women, and none to minorities?
'But that raises the question, why did this policy include a section where the NDP's unelected Party Executive can revoke a candidate's nomination, one whose nomination has met all the procedural rules, if in the Executive's opinion that candidate is "harming the party"?'
That's a good question. Judging from your blog, you don't spend a lot of time at Babble/Rabble, but during Saskatchewan's election campaign, an NDP candidate posted a few things there that would be considered as 'harming the party' (such as unfounded allegations about opponents)and ended up having to withdraw.
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