Jim Quail

Re-fighting the 2011 election in 2015

Jim Quail — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 19:32:37 +0000

Chip in to keep stories like these coming.

There has been lots of analysis of the marathon Canadian election campaign, some of it reasonably sound, including about why the NDP plunged from first to third place so dramatically. However, the commentary has missed a central point.

The failure of Egypt's democratic revolution

Jim Quail — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 20:22:21 +0000

Toppling a dictatorship takes great courage and solidarity. But replacing it with something materially better can take a lot more than that – political organization, skill, patience and discipline.

That is evident today in Egypt. Dropping Mubarak was in many ways an act of collective heroism, but we should not be altogether surprised to see the fruits of that struggle now falling into jeopardy.

B.C. government is running out of (natural) gas

Jim Quail — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 19:17:05 +0000

The B.C. government has now admitted that its budget is way off-target, and has blamed a significant part of the problem on falling natural gas revenues.

Possible autumn 2012 B.C. election?

Jim Quail — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 17:54:03 +0000

B.C.’s next non-binding "fixed" provincial election date isn’t scheduled until May 14 2013, but I think there is an increasing possibility that we’ll be going to the polls sooner than that. Not because the government is anxious to refresh its mandate, but because too many wheels are falling off the governing party.

I won’t list all the catastrophes that have beset Christy Clark’s BC Liberal coalition of federal Liberals and Conservatives.

A comment on the NDP leadership process

Jim Quail — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:36:32 +0000

At a dinner-party a while ago, I drew some sharp disagreement by commenting that one-member-one-vote is a poor way to select a party leader. While it has the outward form of more intense democracy, it sterilizes the democratic process.

Selecting an internal party leader is a fundamentally different kind of process from fighting an external election for government. One-member-one-vote leadership selection eliminates most of the real politics (in the sense of space for strategy to be played out) and turns it into a kind of mass wager. It reduces the membership to a vast scatter of individuals, and makes it difficult or impossible for the various perspectives and lines of thought to work themselves through in the decision-making process.

Christy Clark's bind

Jim Quail — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 22:59:37 +0000

The way that the B.C. political scene has reacted to the collapse of public confidence in the provincial Liberal government has posed a painful dilemma for Premier Clark.

Here’s the problem: Clark’s Liberals are really a coalition of Liberals and Conservatives, aimed at keeping the New Democratic Party out of power. Coalition members retain their distinct (and generally hostile) federal partisan affiliations. Clark’s own Liberal party is really an arrangement of convenience, a kind of truce between Liberals and Conservatives on the provincial front.

Site C and the Kitimat LNG export terminal

Jim Quail — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 22:27:15 +0000

While controversy and First Nations resistance have held up Enbridge's plans for an oil pipeline across northern B.C. for export via tanker through Kitimat, there is another massive pipeline-for-export project following much the same track which is forging ahead, with relatively little notice or notoriety.

Encana, Apache Canada and EOG Resources are partners in a project to construct a natural gas pipeline to feed a huge liquefaction plant near Kitimat, to load liquefied natural gas (LNG) onto tankers for export. It is slated for opening in 2015.

Double-dip recesssion?

Jim Quail — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:12:02 +0000

Looking around me, and reading the daily news, I wonder if things felt like this in August of 1929 -- everyone acting as though there weren't something really nasty and plainly visible about to happen, unless people awoke and took more decisive action very soon.

The BC Hydro Review

Jim Quail — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 19:56:40 +0000

On one level, the B.C. government's new Review of BC Hydro marks an about-face by the Liberals under Christy Clark, calling quits to Gordon Campbell's projection of a "green energy powerhouse." On a deeper level, however, it represents a deepening of the Campbell agenda. Campbell's notion was that we'd become massive exporters of clean electricity mined from our rivers and wind, sold at a premium into the power-hungry California market. This represented a major shift in the mandate of BC Hydro.

From its inception, BC Hydro's mission was to provide safe, reliable, low-cost electricity to British Columbians. Campbell changed this: Hydro was to become a booster and sales agent for private sector electrical generation corporations.

Vancouver hockey rioters: Thatcher's children

Jim Quail — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 18:12:03 +0000

The push is on to identify and prosecute looters and vandals caught on digital images during the rampage following the Vancouver Canucks’ loss of the final Stanley Cup game. I suggest that people take a moment to look deeper into the events of Wednesday June 15. They provide a rare opportunity to see contemporary Canadian culture more clearly. The nihilistic orgy of self-gratification can tell us a lot about what we are becoming. It is like a lens focused on what happens when we are degraded from producers into consumers, from creative into passive beings, and from a society seeking happiness into a mass of individuals seeking fun.

The New Political Situation

Jim Quail — Wed, 04 May 2011 05:09:36 +0000

The choice for May 2

Jim Quail — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 16:48:24 +0000

How to cast your vote on May 2? Voters need to ask themselves which is the most important of these three questions:

1. who is their local MP,
2. who is the official opposition, or
3. who runs the government of Canada.

If your answer is 1, you obviously have no clue how our system really works. Your local MP is essentially a bum in a seat in Parliament, a cipher in the tally that determines how the blocks of whipped votes add up in the chamber. Even if your MP's bum sits in the ranks of cabinet, their role is to obey the edicts of the Prime Minister's Office.

If it's 2, you're not much ahead of No. 1. The ultimate Canadian trivia question would be to name past Leaders of the Opposition.

Federal election complicates life for new B.C. premier

Jim Quail — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 18:35:58 +0000

The federal election-call has enormously complicated the political challenges facing newly-anointed B.C. Liberal Premier Christy Clark.

Her most pressing immediate tasks are to re-unite her strained centre-right coalition, and to get through the pummeling that awaits the government in the June referendum on the Harmonized Sales Tax. Beyond those issues she needs to determine whether an autumn election is politically feasible. Otherwise she must stand for election personally, probably in the by-election for Gordon Campbell's vacated seat.

All of those tasks are now much, much more difficult.

Federal election and B.C. Liberal Party unity

Law and order starts at the top

Jim Quail — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 02:38:01 +0000

The feudal divine right of kings doctrine held that the monarch was selected by God, and therefore above the law. It is evident that the Harper Government (TM reg'd) believes that this doctrine applies to itself. Repeated castigation by the courts for ignoring the constitutional rights of Canadians, repeated castigation by the Speaker of the Commons for subverting Canadian democracy... none of this has any meaning so long as the message can be spun to salvage their decrepit political hides.

The Politics of Post-Campbell BC

Jim Quail — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 18:54:26 +0000

The BC NDP should not bet on the Liberal government disintegrating under Premier Christy Clark.

Sure, there are tensions within the Liberal centre-right coalition. (What coalition hasn’t gone through that?) Sure, Clark has been known to engage her mouth faster than her brain from time to time. (Who hasn’t?) But the Official Opposition will have to adapt to the new situation, and realize that it can’t win by sparring with the ghost of Gordon Campbell.

That being said, Clark and her Liberal government face difficult challenges on the way to winning a fourth term in office.