Still at the Movies

The other film I saw during the break which will make a nice transition into discussing politics again: Milk. This page encourages readers to go see this film while you still can and talk about it with everybody you know, or if you like, total strangers. Obviously, parts of Milk's life and career have been glossed over as most biographies do, but there's too much to learn about and be inspired by to pass up.

A few weeks ago, The Tyee ran a piece entitled "Where's our Harvey Milk?", and if I had a nickel for every time I saw a discussion thread on message boards across the Great White Net asking why Canada hasn't produced a Barack Obama, I would be jingling in perpetuity. In case you haven't it figured out (and all the 'we didn't vote for a coalition' screamers, I'm looking it you), Canada is not a real democracy. In a real democracy, people know when the next election is, and they know the candidates they are voting for.

Revmod Don can tear as many strips off this page as he likes, but fixed election dates allow a stable time frame for community organizers and community leaders like Harvey Milk or Barack Obama to build a local profile, and then grow that profile into a regional and national reputation that transcends party boundaries. Also, Carole James could not have taken the BCNDP from 2 to 33 seats on May 17, 2005 unless she could leader her party to build for that moment. Nothing grows like that in Ottawa when the Prime Minister's office can tear up the electoral garden on a whim.

In addition, Milk and Obama served real communities (neighbourhoods, not special interest groups) at San Francisco City Hall and the Illinois State Legislature. It wasn't until San Francisco switched to a Ward System that Milk could sweep the Castro and become America's first openly gay elected official. Obama stood with Chicago's downtrodden South Side residents and was elected to stand for them in the 13th Electoral District of the Illinois State Senate. The rest is history, tragic and triumphant. If leaders can't point on a map and tell us where they're from, we end up going nowhere with these leaders.

This is why Vancouver's At-Large system for electing City Council must be blown up while Vision Vancouver and COPE councillors have control of it. It's also why the intellectual fraud of the Single Transferable Vote system (BC-STV) must be resoundingly defeated along with the economic, social, and environmental fraud of Gordon Campbell's B.C. Liberal government. Democracy should be about making honest and transparent connection with our elected officials, it should not be about serving the machinery of political parties through oversized electoral districts and 'droop quotas'. Does anyone seriously think we'll see meaningful campaign finance reform in B.C. in our lifetimes if candidates have to campaign in ridings 5 to 10 times the size of the ones we have now?

When Harvey Milk ran for the California State Assembly in 1976, the Democratic Party establishment in San Francisco (including several gay community leaders) turned their backs on him, so Milk ran with the slogan "Harvey Milk vs. The Machine". As 2008 began, Americans lived with the overwhelming assumption that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee for President, until Barack Obama and his chorus of supporters shot back "Yes We Can". If we continue to go down the path of At-Large municipal elections, STV provincial votes, and federal polls at the drop of a toupee, we will never get a Harvey Milk or Barack Obama, The Machine will just give us more of the same Campbell/Harper vanilla technocrats that rub a party establishment the right way, but rub out the aspirations of the rest of us.