Inside the BC NDP leadership ‘trainwreck’

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Jordan Heath-Rawlings It was just a week ago that the future of British Columbia’s NDP, and by extension the future of the province’s government was at a true crossroads. The NDP Leadership Campaign pitted a longtime party stalwart against an outsider, a challenger backed by thousands of new members who were demanding the party act quickly and decisively on climate issues. It seemed like a reckoning was at hand, and then it didn’t. Anjali Appadurai disqualified from the BC NDP Leadership Race and some of those new members now questioning their future with the party. David Eby is the new NDP leader. He will be BBC’s next premier. No vote, no decision, just a disqualification. So what happened here? What were the two contenders fighting over? And why was Angelia Pateri disqualified? What will she do now, along with her supporters, who are obviously very unhappy and could pose a serious problem to the NDP status quo? And what will Eby face first as the new leader of a divided party, but more importantly, as the premier of a province on the front lines of Canada’s climate crisis? I’m Jordan Heathrowings. This is the big story. Arno Kopecky is a BC based environmental journalist and author. He has been covering the NDP leadership race for Canada’s National Observer. Hey Arno.

Arno Kopecky Hey Jordan

Jordan Maybe we could start with this, just because the rest of the country needs it explained. Why was the BC NDP having a leadership racing and what’s at stake right now for the government there?

Arno Kopecky Sure. I’ll try to get this in brief, broad strokes, and then we can fill in the gaps. Maybe. So in June, John Horgan, the premier of BC, announced that he was stepping down following a battle with cancer, throat cancer, which he emerged from victorious, but I think weakened. And as soon as he made that decision, a few people thought about it. But in the end, David Eby was the only sitting member of the NDP caucus here in BC who threw his hat into the ring. And David Eby is and will not much longer be the Attorney General and Housing Minister of BC. And he looked like he was going to be cruising to a coronation with about 85% caucus supporting him, until at the 11th hour, a 32 year old climate activist and campaigner named Anjali Appadurai threw her hat into the ring to also run for the leadership of the NDP, which would have made her the premier of BC had she won. And so that her stepping into that vacuum set into motion a trainwreck of spectacular proportions which most British Columbians, or many certainly watched with all kinds of bated breath. And I really saw it as a collision of two narratives, both of which had a lot of truth to them.

Jordan Maybe explain those two narratives because that is kind of at the heart of this battle here. And then we’ll get into the whole train wreck. But yeah, just first, about those two candidates, what was the big difference in vision between them? Because that’s at the core of this.

Arno Kopecky It is. So let me spell these two narratives out as I see them. The first one was something like this. Look, BC has arguably the most progressive provincial government in this country, which is a rare and precious commodity at a time of surging rightwing sentiment. You know, we’ve got Pierre Pollyv in charge of the federal conservatives. Next door to BC. We have Danielle Smith running Alberta. Now, Doug Ford is in Ontario. And here in BC, we have a government that does not deny climate change or fight the carbon tax tooth and nail or say vaguely racist things on a regular basis. We have a pretty good government. And David Eby, who was a younger and more progressive version of John Horgan, was just going to push the party further in that direction until a 32 year-old climate activist who has never held office in her life launches this insurgent leadership campaign and illegally recruits thousands of new members, according to this narrative. And had she won, she would have just really burned the party down in the name of trying to improve it because she had such radical proposals that she was going to impose on the party, basically. And that would have just guaranteed a BC Liberal government in 2024. It’s important to remember here that the BC Liberals are our version of Conservatives, despite the name.

Jordan Right.

Arno Kopecky So that was the first, that’s the David Eby narrative and those who support them. And I think the party establishment saw things that way. But the other narrative, Jordan, goes like this the BC NDP’s progressive credentials really end where their environmental policy begins. There has been a huge and growing rift between our government here and the environmental movement. And that can be sort of summed up on four main files that have made national headlines, I think, over the last few years. The first is old growth logging. Fairy Creek protests have become the biggest civil disobedience campaign in the country. 1000 people who have been arrested in the last year. That’s one. The next one is ongoing subsidies for oil and gas, represented by the coastal GasLink pipeline, which is an enormous natural gas pipeline that would send liquid LNG to all over the world that’s going on. That listeners may recall right before the Pandemic, there were national protests against that too. And so Anjali Appadurai has promised to cancel that. There’s the Trans Mountain pipeline, sending Bitumen to Vancouver, here where I live as soon as it gets finished. And lastly, there is this mega dam, the Sightsee hydroelectric dam, which is also just an environmental boondoggle and has run roughshod over First Nations interests. So these are four huge files that just represent a huge amount of betrayal for the environmental movement by the BC NDP at a time when BC is on the front lines of climate change. We have been just hammered. In the last year and a half alone, there was a heat dome that killed hundreds of people. There were the atmospheric rivers that ripped our infrastructure to shreds and displaced tens of thousands of people and cost about $9 billion. And then this fall, we had late season wildfire smoke shrouding Vancouver on the eve of Anjali Appadurai’s disqualification. So all of these things basically indicate that Anjali Appadurai was not some lunatic trying to melt the party down. She represented a voice of reason in a wilderness of basically climate indifference and that BCNDP really needed to listen to her voice. So those are the two narratives, and it’s pretty easy to see them as centrist versus challenger.

Jordan Appadurai was a late addition to this race up until the final week or so when the train wreck we’ll talk about occurred. How was the race looking? Did we have any idea of what the polls would say and who was ahead?

Arno Kopecky Yeah, so about two weeks ago, the parties seemed to start panicking and launching all these accusations of basically cheating and malfeasance against Appadurai. And rumors started abounding that she had generated thousands of new memberships. And remember, leadership campaigns are not really the most democratic affairs. It’s really just how many people can you sign up to the party to vote for you in the actual election? So it’s an interparty thing. Pierre Poilievre demonstrated it very well. He flooded the party with new memberships and took over the Conservative Party. Danielle Smith did something similar in Alberta. And then so we had a mirror image version of that here in BC. And it became pretty clear about two weeks ago that a Patter I had really caught the party with their pants down. And she had totally out organized David Eby and generated thousands of votes and was actually, to a lot of people’s shock on the brink of winning this thing and becoming the next premier of BC.

Jordan So what happened?

Arno Kopecky They disqualified her for cheating? It’s a short answer. So David Eby’s campaign actually launched or not launched, issued some formal complaints to the Electoral Commission. The BC NDP has its own electoral commissioner. And Eby’s campaign said, look, Apparadai’s campaign has broken this rule and this rule and this rule. And the Electoral Commissioner looked into it and found, yes, she has. And on Wednesday of last week, they announced, yes, Appadurai, you have been disqualified from this. And we can get into the nitty gritty if I can put it into bigger terms or simple terms. In 2017, when John Horgan took office, he overhauled the rules of these leadership campaigns and said there can be no more collaboration between third parties like unions or NGOs or any group and a leadership candidate. There has to be a strict firewall separating church and state here, basically. And a Appadurai’s campaign arguably did really collaborate with one environmental group in particular named Dogwood, which is well known in BC. They’re an environmental advocacy group and they really did collaborate. It’s hard to say that they did not. What was unfortunate about this was that it really looked like the BC NDP was looking for a reason to disqualify, and then they found it. And there are different camps on whether she cheated. Does everybody bend the rules a little bit? And is there a discretion on which rules you enforce in which you don’t? Yeah, we could get into that first, maybe. Can you explain practically what she did? You just said it’s hard to deny that she collaborated with this third party group, Dogwood.

Jordan Why is it hard to deny, like, what actually happened?

Arno Kopecky Dogwood’s campaign manager is a woman named Alexander Woodsworth. I spoke to her and she doesn’t deny that she’s a campaign manager for Dogwood. And it’s important for context here that Dogwood really went out of its way and actively was recruiting people to sign up for the NDP. What they weren’t doing was telling them who to vote for directly. They said, Sign up for the NDP and vote who you like. Vote for who you want. However, Alexander Woodsworth was also helping Appadurai campaign to write campaign literature for their leadership race. That is one of the big examples of ways that the Dogwood senior leadership was collaborating and working really directly with the Appadurai’s campaign. And when I asked her if this didn’t actually represent an admission of guilt, Woodsworth like Appadurai , both of them said no. These rules changed as we went along, and it wasn’t until the leadership race was almost over that we were told, this kind of thing is illegal. But I don’t think that really holds water. If you look at the rules that were put into place in 2017, it does really look as though it was pretty clear and that these new stringent rules separating that church and state were in place, and it’s hard to get around that.

Jordan So following the disqualification, then I assume these thousands of new members that have signed up are still NDP members, still supporters of a Patter eye. How is she taking it? Is she planning to fight? She’s got a voice in that party now. What’s she going to do with it?

Arno Kopecky She does well, that’s the question. We’re going to have to see where that goes. But she said she’s not going to fight it. And she also really significantly, I think, said she’s not going to tear up her membership in the BC NDP. She wants to work with the party. She wants to get the party to listen to its grassroots. And David Eby has also said nice things in his victory speech. He made some statements that he probably wouldn’t have made had this whole thing not happened. And I’ll quote him here. He said, we cannot continue to subsidize fossil fuels and expect clean energy to somehow manifest itself. We cannot continue to expand fossil fuel infrastructure. So those are nice things to hear. Of course, we’ll see what actually happens in terms of the policies that he implements. But I think there is still a real opportunity for a lot of good stuff to be salvaged from the wreckage of this train catastrophe. But if I can say Jordan, I think one of the things that I really found interesting here was it really highlighted the NDP. And this is not just the B-C-N DP, but federally and everywhere that you see the NDP, which is this party that has its roots in social justice and the labor unions and representing the workers of Canada. They’re trying to be this progressive party. And nowadays, progressive also includes environmental policy. But we are a country as well as in BC, where the workers and the work and the labor is generally in industries that are bad for the environment.

Jordan So how do you represent those workers and be progressive on the environment at the same time?

Arno Kopecky And that is the bind that I think everybody finds themselves in, both Appadurai and David Eby. David Eby himself is an activist. He came up as a lawyer representing marginalized communities in Vancouver’s, downtown East Side. He was the executive director of the BC Civil Liberties Association. By almost any measure, he’s a pretty radical social justice oriented fellow, but he has never had much to say about environmental issues. And so Appadurai is stepping in here and she’s almost I kind of think of it as she’s sort of trying to appeal to a demographic that doesn’t quite exist yet, which is the workers of a clean industrial society, which is what we’re trying to get towards, but we’re not there. And it’s this really sticky thing. The David Eby of the world are saying, well, okay, incrementalism. We got to move gradually or else society won’t be with us. And Appadurai and her movement is saying, listen, we are at the 11th hour of a global existential crisis that is coming down hard, and nobody knows it better than BC, and there’s no time to be incremental. We have to take big risks. And her campaign represented that big risk.

Jordan I’m really glad you’re sticking to that contradiction because you touched on this a few minutes ago. But out here in the rest of Canada, specifically conservative run provinces, the idea of watching a race to be premier in which the traditional voice of the NDP is roundly criticized for not being active enough on climate is kind of mind blowing.

Arno Kopecky And it’s really interesting to think of where our politics will be going in the future. Maybe, if only by necessity, is this gets worse. And considering how parties like the NDP and maybe even to a lesser extent the Liberals will have to walk that line of appealing to workers, but also taking the kind of action that will cost them votes, frankly, if they don’t. Yeah, I think this question of incrementalism and how far can we push. I spoke to a man named Eric Denhoff, who was the former Deputy Minister of Aboriginal Affairs here in BC, and he described it as a battle between incrementalism and let’s do it now. And he put the fault not at the NDP’s feet, but really at all of us who were involved in this struggle in one way or another for not convincing the public of the urgency of this moment. And I include myself in that. As a journalist who writes about these things, I have a lot of sympathy for politicians who really want to get serious on climate change but need to win the votes of an electorate that has proven over and over again that it’s only going to do so much. I mean, just look at how much traction Poilievre is getting as a result of high gas prices. I mean, people you raise the gas, the price of gas, ten or twenty cents a liter, and it’s hard not to get, for me not to get a little bit cynical about the public reaction that that creates. You know, these high gas prices have overthrown governments all over the world. So that presents a real problem, and it’s a problem for people like me who are trying to convince the public of the urgency of this climate crisis. And it’s a problem for people like Appadurai and it’s a problem for people like David Eby. Because as climate catastrophes mount and cost evermore billions of dollars. To say nothing of human lives and displacement. It’s not just an abstract issue and there’s no clear way forward on this. But that’s you know. So that’s I think we just saw that play out in real time in this really dramatic leadership race in BC that really captivated a lot of this province. I don’t know how far it reverberated beyond, but it struck me as the mirror image of what’s been going on in federal conservative politics. And I think you see this the root cause of it is this ecological crisis that is just reverberating throughout our society and causing all of these weird political murmurs and hiccups and eruptions. And this was one of them.

Jordan I want to ask about what’s next for British Columbia and specifically for Eby. It seems from what you’ve described, that there’s perhaps not as big a rift in the party over this as there could have been. So maybe leaving that part out for the moment, what’s he walking into here? Obviously climate is a huge priority. Do we have any idea what kinds of decisions are going to have to be made? How soon, I guess, will we find out if all that nice stuff he just said Appadurai I conceded the disqualification was just words or whether there’s action behind it.

Arno Kopecky Well, he said in 100 days he’s going to announce his policies. I’m sort of optimistic by nature, it’s not always backed up by the facts. But I do think there’s a lot of room for this rift to be mended to some extent. David Eby is not an idiot. Nobody’s ever accused him of that or of being politically naive. So I think he sees both the political opportunity of bringing a patriot and her movement in. Let’s not forget she raised we don’t know the numbers yet, but it’s clearly many, many thousands of new members. So there’s a lot of wind available for him there if he can convince them that he’s their guy. And in order to do that, he would have to at a minimum, I think BC still offers the oil and gas industry a lot of subsidies. So I think that can be cut. And I think there’s a lot of room to really advance clean energy projects with funding and basically transferring those subsidies over and throwing some real money at clean energy and retrofitting homes, all the things that we’ve heard about that need to happen for clean energy. I don’t think we’re going to see David Eby canceled the coastal GasLink pipeline. I don’t think we’re going to see him cancel the sightseeing megadam. I don’t think we’re going to see him cancel or take on Trans Mountain pipeline. He’ll probably accelerate the end of all growth logging because I think that’s a direction the province genuinely the NDP wants to move in naturally, but those huge big ticket cancellation, outright cancellations, it’s just not on the table. He’s said as much earlier throughout that he’s going to be a continuation of John Horgan in many ways and John Horgan’s policies. And the NDP is just so susceptible to these accusations of being awful economic managers that you can just imagine the script would right itself for the opposition if David DB canceled a couple of these projects that would actually put the government tens of billions of dollars into debt at a time when BC, like the rest of the country, has a healthcare crisis with not enough doctors. We have a housing crisis, we have an Opioid crisis, our education system is on the brink. I mean, there’s all of these coexisting crises that climate change is just exacerbating. So David Eby is going to be cautious about a lot of that stuff, but I do think he’s going to, I guess I should say I hope, and I think there’s reason to hope that he will accelerate these climate and environmental policies and I think a pattern I’ve campaign really pushed him to do so.

Jordan Last question then about the flip side of the dynamic you mentioned earlier in which EB would see Appadurai winning and handing the next election to the BC Liberals. You mentioned the next elections in 2024. I don’t know much about BC politics. I know that not long ago the Green Party was a significant force in forming government in BC. Could this happen the other way? Around in which Eby does not pick up the kind of torch of climate activism that’s been given to him. And this pushes the NDP into a place where they are outflanked by the Greens on the other side.

Arno Kopecky</b Well, we're entering into a realm of rampant speculation, Jordan. But that's what politics is about lately, right? Listen, in 2017 it was the NDP tied with the Liberals for votes and then the BC Greens got three seats which was the balance of power and they threw their weight behind the NDP.

Jordan So I wasn’t imagining it.

Arno Kopecky No, you are not imagining it. You are quite correct. And they had this coalition between the Greens and the NDP which was a very hopeful sign. And so the environmental movement thought Hooray, you know, and John Horgan made the director of the Sierra Club our environment minister, George Hayman. And so all these wonderful things were happening. But then in 2020, John Horgan threw them under the bus and sort of betrayed the Greens and that’s when all of this bad blood really began. So whether or not a pattern is betrayal now gives all of this power back to the Greens and they get a couple more seats in government. I mean, there is a long ways to go BC NDP, I forget the exact numbers but they have a commanding majority. The BC Greens, god bless them, I love them but they have two seats in the house right now.

Jordan It needs to be a lot closer than this if they’re going to be a fracture.

Arno Kopecky That’s what I’m trying to say, yes. I just don’t see it happening. But you never know in these days. Nobody really saw Appadurai mounting the challenge that she did and she really impressed everyone. And I think it’s a testament to her organizational skills and also to the urgency that there is a real massive climate contingency in this province and people really are worried and she really tapped into that and, you know, whatever. I should also clarify. No part of me thinks that the patriotic campaign and dogwood that they were scheming to cheat. They genuinely saw themselves as organizing in the way that all movements do and indeed, in the way that the NDP which arose as a muckrakinging sort of social movement seeking political office that’s the image that Appadurai and her campaign made themselves in. And so where that movement goes from here is going to be a real question that only time can tell. So stay tuned. Let’s talk in 100 days when Eby announces his new policies. Maybe we’ll do that. It’s always fascinating to explore a kind of fight for the soul of a political party particularly one in the middle of forming government. So thank you.

Arno Kopecky Thank you, Jordan. It was really great to talk to you, as always.

Jordan Arno Kopecky covering the NDP leadership race for Canada’s National Observer. That was the big story, if you’ll recall a couple of weeks ago on this program, we spoke about Toronto’s municipal election. Specifically, we spoke about how nobody cared about Toronto’s municipal election, and it would probably lead to basically every incumbent getting reelected. That part was true. What I didn’t understand at the time was just how few people cared. So this is depressing. The turnout numbers for Toronto’s municipal election held on Monday night are in. Just under 30% of eligible voters in Toronto cast a ballot. Yes, that is an all time low. In fact, it is 6% lower than the previous all time low. So for those of you outside of Toronto, feel free to make fun of 70% of the people in this city. And for those of us in this city, you get the government you vote for or the one you don’t vote for. You can find, if you’re interested, all the results of the Toronto election, including councilors by ward, the mayor’s race, and even school trustees by going to Toronto dot City news dot CA. You can find the Big Story, of course, by heading to thebictorypodcast CA. You can find us on Twitter at thebigstory FPN. You can offer us some feedback via email. Hello at thebigstorypodcast CA, and you can call us anytime 416-935-5935 and leave a voicemail. You can find this podcast everywhere. You get podcasts. If you have a smart speaker in your house, you can ask it to play the Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.