Who Replaces Carole James?

Brian White wrote:

Fidel, would you like to help design a new logo for the BC NDP?  (Rants are great, but action counts too).

Carole's backers must have approved the new logo.  Which is a bit of a surprise even to me.

I do not think the brand new logo is very good. I think it is a disaster actually but thankfully very few people know about it yet.

Maybe the federalistas like you can help too.

You are the parent party and parents help children sometimes.

What I think is that if 80 some-odd percent of the party votes for Carole, then I think it's a pretty definitive statement about who they want to lead the party into the next election.

I'm just a guy who votes NDP. I'm an unpaid foot soldier for federal and provincial campaigns. And since Woody Allen once said that 80 per-cent of life is just showing up, I will continue to do that, too.

I suppose we could go back to endless wonkish discussions about STV - look at how well Ireland is governed (not) and they have STV.

If Carole had shown this kind of grit and in your face opposition to corruption and mismanagement by the LIberals instead of playing Ms. Nice Guy she would be Premier now and we wouldn't need to have this discussions.  BUT SHE DIDN'T 

@Brian White - New Democratic Party affairs, including leader, constitution, executive etc are determined by NDP members, not the voting public writ large. Not sure where you are situated, but perhaps you are more familiar with some US jurisdictions where the voting public are invited to participate in primaries, for example.

@ Kropotkin - Are you suggesting that the dissident MLAs are being manipulated by a backroom scheme to damage Carole James beyond sustainability and force a leadership convention before a possible snap election called by whoever emerges as Liberal leader? Damn, that's nefarious, almost machiavelian. I wonder if they know?

Brian White wrote:

Fidel, I thought you were a communist. So no logo effort unless you get paid!? I do unpaid work myself, so I do not know what the problem is.

Well, you were uninformed, 80% of the party DIDN"T vote for Carole. The MLA's did not even have the privelage of voting.  The vote was the current leadership council agreeing among themselves that they should continue to lead the party further into the wilderness.

The main stream media in BC are VERY happy with that.

They prefer the BC libs and look forward to  BC Libs Versus the Walking Dead  Part 3 in the next election.

Fidel wrote:

What I think is that if 80 some-odd percent of the party votes for Carole, then I think it's a pretty definitive statement about who they want to lead the party into the next election.

I'm just a guy who votes NDP. I'm an unpaid foot soldier for federal and provincial campaigns. And since Woody Allen once said that 80 per-cent of life is just showing up, I will continue to do that, too.

Not sure what you mean by that. I am not paid to work for the NDP come election time. I volunteer. Around here the Liberal Party has to pay people to be their friends. And some take out Liberal and that other Party's memberships in hopes of riding the gravy train with government contracts and other political favors.

Which party out there receives more in donations from corporate friends of the Liberal Party? Because that's the party that will always be favoured to win the propaganda war with being able to pay for expensive TV and radio time and newspaper ads, public squawking engagemts, and kissing babies at barbeques etc.

If British Columbians want to maintain their worst in the country child poverty rates and HST-based economics of poverty while corporations cart away profits, it will be their personal choice come next election. I would recommend voting NDP though.

Mistake number one - removing Simpson from Caucus

Mistake number two - not re-admitting Simpson to Caucus

Mistake number three - going public with the divisions in the party

Solution - the Liberals are on the run, and NDPers need to move on about the divisions within the party. We have a leadership review process in place, so just allow it to happen. Energy right now will be best spent digging ourselves out of debt, building riding organizations to get ready to choose a candidate, and work to build up the constituency, etc,

Brian White wrote:

O ok, so who is the idiot that decided that elected mla's have NO vote on who leads them?  Thats like the british navy 150 years ago, abducting people to crew the ships.  Are the MLA's slaves to the party now? No rights, no votes, except as directed in the ledge?

Try 196 years. Impressment ended in 1814. Elected MLAs have the same rights to elect or vote on a review of the Leader as any other member at a Convention.

This is just devastating for the BC NDP

And there's more, much more. Read the whole article.

Carole James: Mission accomplished?

Hearing Carole James declare that the challenge to her leadership is over – because the NDP’s Provincial Council backed her – reminds me of George Bush on the US air craft carrier with the huge “Mission Accomplished” sign behind him after the initial attack in Iraq.

Talk about not getting it.

The NDP is now on suicide watch as James and Moe Sihota with James’ staff (eager to keep their jobs) egging her on, try to silence principled people in the party who know there has to be a change.

Those in the party who want a leadership review or a leadership convention point out that James’ leadership is severely lacking what it takes to win the next election. Who on earth could actually refute this sentiment? Of course she’s inadequate. If all it takes for this execrable government to be back in the running is to rid itself of Gordon Campbell that speaks volumes about how weak that leadership has been.

If James had been doing her job for the last seven years people would remember all the horrible policies of this government and they would be in danger of losing official party status in the next election. Apparently all they recall is that Campbell is a liar. The rest is lost because James never attacked the liberals for their destructive policies with enough energy and conviction to make it stick.

James’ performance before and after the Provincial Council meeting just confirm what the critics are saying – that she has no judgement, no political instincts and is incapable of strategic thinking. Did she really believe – and did the party brass believe – that simply saying it’s over would make it so? This position is dangerously delusional for the party and ultimately the province which faces another four years of the worst government the province has ever seen.

James will be exclusively responsible for that eventuality if she continues to hold on to her position. She will go down in the history books as sacrificing the good of the province for her own selfish ends.

The media spin on the “yellow scarves” caper at the Provincial Council meeting (supporters wore them, thirteen MLAs did not) completely misses the point. Who is responsible for bringing embarrassment to the party and to James? Certainly not the baker’s dozen who had not previously come out publicly and stated their opposition to the leader. Now she has identified them as a large group of dissidents. Just how does this help the party or James?  This outing was accomplished exclusively by the brinkmanship of James and her staff. What did she think the media would do? They did as they should have done – they counted the people without scarves and have established an “us” versus “them” scenario which will not go away.

As someone already commented recently about the BC Liberals in the Vancouver mainsteam press, the Caucus can throw the leader out. So all it seems that is needed now is for a few more Caucus members to become disenchanted and poof......

Actually, it seems to confirm the racist reality that James is facing.  It's directed at the party not James.

RevolutionPlease wrote:

Actually, it seems to confirm the racist reality that James is facing.  It's directed at the party not James.

I know. The point I was trying to make is that as leader she has some how been a counter to this stuff and that if she's deposed the party would easily return to a mythical past where it was in touch with what should be its natural constituency (i.e. the disaffected, such as First Nations people). Not that a new leader with the same inability to counter the "liberal cabal", as Kropotkin puts it, would be any better, but that's the point. The leader should be strong enough to break the loosing and out of touch tradition the usual suspects have held on it. Don't get me wrong, minority leader's are quite limited by majority constituencies in creating fairness for the minority. So it isn't as if one should expect too much in countering hundreds of years of injustice. But the fact that she was so irrelevant to his decision doesn't fill me with confidence in her leadership. It's a symptom of her general ineffectiveness on many issues. Let alone the out of touch disconnect from what core New Democratic principles ought to be.

A guaranteed loss for the NDP?

The NDP, not wanting to take any chances that they could squeak out a win in the next election, decided that Carole James was the woman to lead them into defeat. She has already been a two-time loser for the party, so why take a chance with someone who may actually look like premier material?

James epitomizes a party that is indecisive, uncommitted and rudderless. Remember when she claimed that Campbell ran his party like a dictator, not allowing his party members to speak their mind?

She skillfully countered this by hypocritically expelling Bob Simpson from the caucus. Simpson had the gall to actually want to be a representative of his constituents and not a James puppet or yes-man.

Last weekend, the NDP abandoned ship and jumped into a leaky boat.

http://www.thenownews.com/guaranteed+loss/3888546/story.html

Let's get to know these dissident MLAs, and there are a lot of them, and find out what they are thinking and the reasons for their disenchantment.

MLA Sather part of anti-James gang

http://www.bclocalnews.com/tri_city_maple_ridge/mapleridgenews/news/1102...

Whoever is advsing James is making too many mistakes. She is improving but is it enough, fast enough. Anyway, why can't the leader make her own decisions. This situation with Simpson has gotten way out of hand, and that is the leader's fault. Carole needs to correct the situation soon, and time is running out for her to do it. Unfortunately some people involved with the NDP are involved for the wrong reasons. They are there because it looks good on their resume, or they are hoping for some perk if the NDP forms the government. It's time for a new broom to sweep clean. Where are the exciting new policy initiatives?

North Report, you've posted some very good articles highlighting the problem with James and the NDP. And the common theme is very simple for anyone who isn't too obtuse to notice. That's what's so amazing about the BC NDP leadership, including James, but really most left-leaning parties at this time. This is the common theme by the way: the NDP, like the left in general, are allegedly the "pro-people" side of the political equation and yet they're out of touch with the fact that even middle-income people (who determine the state of elections) are angry and want people who will fight for their interests. The modern left constantly tries to look "statesman" like, or like they're willing to "compromise" and "find consensus" with the right when the average person couldn't give less of a fuck about that stuff. People simply want realistic sounding solutions to their problems. The right seems to understand this perfectly well and is acting accordingly, even though they're responsible for the mess that we're all in and obviously everyone posting here would agree that their "solutions" would make things worse. All the while the left -- and I think this is a symptom of the fact that too many on the left are too nice and honestly interested in kumbiya solutions related to everyone getting along -- looks wacky and out of touch by rambling about meta things that nobody cares about. Being out of touch makes one look like an elite, even if one isn't. Unfortunately the left has managed to put itself into the strange position of being an irrelevant elite.

I think the problems that have been so intelligently and precisely discussed above are endemic in the BC NDP party itself regardless of the leader. This seems to be a reoccurring problem. A party without a real platform other than anti-Liberal and pro Union. This is 2010 and it's time to do more.

There are no shortage of important issues: health care, education and housing to name a few.

NorthReport wrote:

Thanks VK.

Another issue, which relates, of course, is the massive debt the BC NDP occured during the last election. Fuck, we were 2 million dollars in debt. Unbelievable. So instead of organizing and developing a sound party platform over the past year and a half since the last election, we're spending most of time doing fund-raisers. Now we have supposedly paid off $700,000. of it. Whoopee!. Who was responsible for this 2 million dollar debt? Carole James was, and is, because she is the leader. Never again, should the party go into debt to run an election campaign. Do not spend what you don't have. What part of that do people not understand.

That's ridiculous. ALL parties borrow money to run election campaigns and then spend years paying off the debt. You can be sure that the federal NDP took out a big bank loan in 2008 as well. The BC Liberals are thought to be about $5 million in debt. Saying that a party cannot borrow money to run an election campaign would be like saying that it should be illegal to take out a mortgage to buy a house and that people should only be allowed to buy a house iof they have a wheel-barrow full of cash!

In any case, if you think the BCNDP has money problems now - how much worse do you think it would be if there was a leadership context with half a dozen people all trying to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to run a leadership campaign - during which time all donations to the central party would completely dry up. To this day, the federal Liberals have not recovered financially from all the costs associated with the 2005 Liberal leadership contest.

This thread has jumped out of the fish bowl and into the toilet tank....

Brian - if Carole has twice ignored the wishes of the voters in her riding why don`t  YOU  start a recall petition against her!

The voters in Victoria-Beacon Hill obvious LOVE Carol James since they have elected her twice in massive landslides. Obviously they don't feel she is ignoring their wishes!

Ok, this is long and there are a gajillion other threads on this issue. Closing.