Chronicle of a death foretold

Two narratives collided head-on in spectacular fashion late Wednesday night when the BC NDP disqualified Anjali Appadurai from the party’s leadership race, alleging she broke multiple campaign rules, so clearing the way for David Eby to become the premier of B.C.

The first went like this: B.C.’s NDP is the most progressive provincial government in Canada — a precious thing in a time of surging right-wing sentiment. Eby, a younger, more progressive version of John Horgan, had the near-total support of his caucus to push the party even further in that direction — until a 32-year-old climate activist who has never held office launched an insurgent leadership campaign, illegally recruiting thousands of new members whose leadership votes likely would have landed her in the premier’s office. That victory, had it been allowed, would have burned the party down in the name of trying to improve it, guaranteeing a BC Liberal government in 2024.

Here’s how the other story goes: The BC NDP’s progressive credentials end where climate policy begins. At a time when heat domes, atmospheric rivers and wildfires are destroying the fabric of this province, costing billions of dollars each year, killing hundreds of people and displacing tens of thousands more, the party remains beholden to fossil fuel interests. The success of Appadurai’s campaign was no sign of cheating; it was a clear sign of the valid frustration felt by thousands of climate-conscious citizens whose sense of betrayal at the hands of a climate-indifferent government was only heightened by their candidate’s disqualification.

It’s OK to have mixed feelings about all this. In fact, it would be irrational not to, because both narratives hold some truth. Until both sides can acknowledge that, the rift between B.C.’s NDP and the province’s environmental movement will only deepen, to their mutual detriment.

Eric Denhoff, the NDP’s former deputy minister of Aboriginal affairs, was not the only B.C. New Democrat I spoke to who expressed admiration for Appadurai’s vision while remaining firmly opposed to her candidacy. He explained why he felt Appadurai represented such a threat to both the NDP and the goal of climate action.

“Say [she] wins the leadership,” Denhoff said, painting a picture in which Premier Appadurai immediately cancels the Coastal GasLink pipeline and bans all old-growth logging, as she’d promised to do. She would also cast the future of the Site C dam into serious doubt and launch fresh legal proceedings against the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, he said.

“The question is, do you think she could somehow work her magic to get caucus onside?” Denhoff described this as “an absolute nightmare scenario” for the BC NDP. “She wouldn’t get their support, and so then you’d have another leadership race in weeks or months.” Either she’d be kicked out of office or she’d put the government on the hook for tens of billions of dollars in cancelled contracts. Whichever came first, Denhoff said, the only thing Appadurai’s victory would have accomplished was a “guarantee that a government comes in that is way less progressive than the NDP.”

But here’s the other way to see it. “We are at the 11th minute of the 11th hour here on a number of fronts, and we need to do better,” said Alexandra Woodsworth, campaigns manager for Dogwood, the advocacy group at the heart of this collision story. As everyone who’s followed this saga now knows, members of Dogwood, the self-described “largest non-partisan citizen action network” in B.C., signed up thousands of new NDP members during Appadurai’s campaign.

Woodsworth acknowledges the risk that an Appadurai premiership might have posed to the NDP’s electoral prospects — “that would have been a very interesting time in B.C. politics” — but she echoed Appadurai’s insistence that the party’s incremental approach to climate policy represents the greater threat. “We are not going to build the world we want to see by acting out of fear,” Woodsworth told me the morning after Appadurai was disqualified. “We need to go out and fight for that world.”

In this version of events, Appadurai’s run for the leadership was no hostile takeover. It was a tactical leap of faith by the leader of a movement cast in the NDP’s own mold, a movement trying desperately to steer society away from the brick wall it’s racing toward. What’s more, it worked — Appadurai’s army of climate justice warriors took advantage of the NDP’s own rules and caught the party with its pants down. And that success, Woodsworth argues, suggests Appadurai’s victory might not have been the political kryptonite the party’s establishment portrays it as. “There is no foregone conclusion here,” Woodsworth said.

According to both Dogwood and the Appadurai campaign, the same cannot be said of the investigation that led to their disqualification. Like Appadurai, Woodsworth categorically denies the charge that Dogwood collaborated with the campaign. Yet she acknowledges that she, the campaign manager for Dogwood, helped draft some of Appadurai’s campaign literature on a volunteer basis. When I asked if that wasn’t an admission of guilt, Woodsworth echoed the defence Appadurai made in an open letter: “They changed the rules as the race progressed.” Elizabeth Cull, the NDP’s chief electoral officer and author of the disqualification report, “wanted to retroactively find evidence of a foregone conclusion.”

“That’s the narrative for people who broke the rules and are trying to rationalize their way out of this,” Shane Simpson, a longtime NDP MLA who served as minister of social development and poverty reduction until his retirement in 2020, told me. “One of the things to understand is that the rules changed considerably in 2017. When the government ended corporate and union donations, and essentially said those groups could not participate in the same way, it also affected leadership campaigns. Dogwood should have known that you can’t hire phone banks, you can’t phone your mailing list, you can’t buy ads, in the same way a union couldn’t write a cheque for $50,000 for David Eby to run his campaign.”

A popular counterargument in this saga has invoked a letter the Steelworkers Union wrote to its members, urging them to sign up and vote for Eby, as proof of a double standard. But the Steelworkers Union didn’t collaborate with Eby’s campaign in any way, and no one — including Dogwood or Appadurai — is suggesting they did. That’s the key difference.

“Those are the rules,” Simpson said. “They are more stringent than the rules were pre-2017, but if you want to be leader of the party, if you want to be premier of British Columbia, then you have some responsibility to understand the rules.”

Justly or not, Appadurai’s campaign lost the battle over process. She has been disqualified, the race is over. But what about the battle for the vision she represents, of the need for this province to embrace a far more aggressive posture towards climate justice?

“What’s sad about the last couple of weeks is that it’s made it so clear the degree of control the fossil fuel lobbyists hold over the BC NDP,” said Monte Paulsen, a former journalist for The Tyee who is now a climate change specialist with the building-design firm RDH. Like many progressive voters in B.C., Paulsen had let his NDP membership lapse in recent years, then renewed it once Appadurai entered the race. “I thought, 'Wow, this is a smart young woman with a good message.' A normal party would see that as a good thing.”

Paulsen feels a healthy party embraces the influx of new membership. “Five or 10 thousand new members and all we have to do is move forward on climate a little bit? What’s the problem with that? A normal party would take this approach from Appadurai and say, ‘Hey, this is great.’ But the fossil fuel lobbyists have the opposite response.”

In Paulsen’s view, it wasn’t even the prospect of an Appadurai victory that concerned the fossil fuel lobby but her mere presence in the campaign. “They’re not worried about her becoming the premier,” he said. “They’re worried about her doing exactly what she proposed to do, which is put out a platform and have a public debate for several months about the role of fossil fuel development in British Columbia. And it’s the fossil fuel lobby embedded in the BC NDP that was afraid of that dialogue.”

The true extent of the fossil fuel lobby’s influence over NDP policy is debatable, but the province’s ongoing subsidies for the industry and the fact that industry lobbyists log multiple meetings with the B.C. government per day do lend some credence to this view, which is deafeningly echoed by Appadurai’s camp on social media and beyond.

“Many of us backed Appadurai because we felt like it would be a healthy thing for the NDP to have a debate about climate,” Paulsen said. “And what we were shown instead is that the NDP is absolutely not going to have a debate about climate.”

Unsurprisingly, the NDP establishment disagrees.

Denhoff described the leadership race as a “battle between incrementalism and ‘let’s do it now.’ And the problem is nobody has convinced the electorate yet, to our failure, that [climate] urgency requires the kind of draconian action that it does.” Denhoff insisted that “the fault isn’t the NDP in government. The fault is all of us not being able to communicate the urgency of climate change to the electorate and present them with solutions so that they go, ‘Yeah, I’m willing to suck it up and do this.’ Because right now, support for climate change is a mile wide and an inch deep.”

Poll after poll confirms Denhoff’s observation, to say nothing of the public reaction to high gasoline prices and the roaring success of that other candidate who flooded his party’s leadership race with new members: Pierre Poilievre.

So, what now? Has the NDP destroyed its credibility, as so many of Appadurai’s followers claim? And will Appadurai’s vision of a climate-conscious BC NDP go down with the ship of her campaign? Will she and her movement go to war with the party?

“We have proven to this party that there is an enormous appetite for visionary leadership, and I hope that the party has heard that call,” Appadurai said at her press conference on Thursday, the day after she was disqualified. “There’s a lot of disillusionment, but I don’t think that’s a reason to rip up our memberships, and I won’t be ripping up my membership… What I’m interested in is seeing this party have a healthier relationship with its grassroots.”

Simpson believes, “the people of British Columbia will forget about this by the new year.” By the time the next general election comes around in 2024, he added, “their concern isn’t going to be the internal machinations of the NDP or the Green Party or the environmental movement. It’s going to be, ‘I have challenges for me and my family and my life, and what are you going to do to help me to deal with those challenges?’ And if David Eby and the government can support people and meet those challenges, then they’re going to do OK.”

“The reality is that David Eby has a year and a half to earn my trust,” said Paulsen, “and I really hope he does. I hope he proves me wrong.”

“I think the only way out of this is for [the NDP] to have some kind of rapprochement and bring Appadurai in,” said Denhoff. “Otherwise, what’s the solution? Two years of fighting each other in the trenches and then letting the other guys walk in and take the horse out of the barn.”

“This process really mobilized and built up a huge amount of momentum and excitement around politics and change in a way I haven’t seen on issue-based campaigns in a long time,” said Woodsworth. “It’s really fired up a lot of people. And a lot of that hope was thrown in our faces last night, but my hope is that people do stay, those who signed up, with the idea that the NDP could be a vehicle for the kind of transformative changes that we all want.”

Woodsworth did allow that “my biggest regret is around the way that this has reinforced the idea of politics as dirty and cynical.” That lament is one of the few things both sides can surely now agree on — though each describes the other as the cause of that cynicism.

Nevertheless, there remains plenty of hope for progressives and government alike to salvage from the wreckage of this leadership race. The NDP is still in power and seemingly united behind the new leader, with two years to mend fences. Appadurai’s campaign has, at the very least, demonstrated the climate community’s influence. That influence is sure to grow in lockstep with the physical damages of climate change itself.

Eby, who nobody has ever accused of stupidity or political naiveté, can only ignore that influence at his — and all of our — peril.