Failure to connect?

By Glen Hansman

Election day, as a group of us stood with signs at the corner of Commercial & 12th Avenue, a young woman passed by. We had been waving at cars, holding up our kids-on-sticks that displayed pro-education messages, greeting passengers as they got of their bus, and talking to quite a few of the pedestrians who passed by. But this young woman was the first who openly admitted that she wasn’t planning on voting. She didn’t know what the issues were, she said, or what the political parties stood for.

But she did stick around for a couple minutes to talk with us, pulling out her headphones to hear more. “Are you a university student?” we asked. No, not yet—but she’s thinking about it, though the cost of tuition was worrisome for her. “Then you’re probably concerned about the minimum wage too,” we threw in. “Did you know that BC currently has the lowest minimum wage in the country, and that the NDP promises to raise the minimum wage right away? That will help you save a bit more for tuition, which they plan on lowering too…” No, she didn’t know those were components of the NDP platform, nor did she know that the Liberals had no plans to address either issue.

A couple hours later, it was all over. Disappointment was the general mood. Where were the voters? How could the Liberals have been re-elected after eight years of cuts to health and education, eight years of contract stripping, eight years of job losses, eight years of privatization, eight years of environmental deregulation, eight years of abusing legislative authority, and eight years of failing to address child poverty and homelessness?

In the last few days of the campaign, our local office sent out numerous communications to members by mail, by phone, by text message, by voice broadcast, and by e-mail. We encouraged members to forward messages on to their friends and families, to talk to neighbours, and to the parents of their students. We showed up at Canuck games and street corners with our signs and kids-on-sticks, we hung clotheslines on school fences to air the Liberals’ dirty laundry. Make public education a vote-determining issue—the success of which is hard to calculate on a provincial level, but necessary for us to do nonetheless. Why? Because our students deserve better and our members deserve better. The political context is the bargaining context, and the bargaining context is the political context. We cannot separate the two, and we have the obligation of trying to ensure the best climate for bargaining—not make improvements for our members and for our students.

But here we are, 24 months before our collective agreements expire, and with a Liberal government still in place.

So why was there a failure to connect? Is the public truly apathetic, or so easily duped by the promise of stability and so-called “strong leadership”? I don’t think so. I think the public deserves a lot more credit than that.

I think the responsibility for failing to connect rests on the opposition, in part because of a drift to the political right to appease business interests, but also in part due to a hollow re-branding. During the campaign, Take Back Your BC seemed to only mean We’re not Gordo.

That’s unfortunate because the NDP had fantastic candidates around the province. They also had great things in their platform. The public should have known about and should have been discussing these things.

So why did the young woman with whom we spoke on election day not know about the minimum-wage campaign, and the NDP’s commitment to that? It’s because the NDP, as an organization, didn’t do the work that it should have been doing.

The party that claims to be for working people needs to be out actually talking to working people, building their platform for working people, and focusing their messaging on what they plan to do to improve the lives of working people. We know the individual candidates are doing this, but it’s what the whole party needs to live and breathe, otherwise in four years we’ll be exactly where we are now.

And perhaps it takes all of us—teachers and all union members—getting involved from within or re-committing to being actively involved from within, and staying engaged through the next set of trustee elections in 2011 and provincial elections in 2013.

Glen Hansman is president, Vancouver Elementary School Teachers’ Association.