Juno News - September 28, 2020


The BC NDP： Diversity vs. Democracy


Episode Stats

Length

7 minutes

Words per Minute

156.85846

Word Count

1,195

Sentence Count

58


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Last week, BC Premier John Horgan announced that the province would be
00:00:08.880 going into an election on October 24, 2020. Though there were rumours that an
00:00:14.640 early election would be called, this was about a year earlier than expected, and
00:00:19.320 it has really angered some people who are still convinced that we should never
00:00:23.280 be leaving our houses because of COVID, but I digress. As the parties were
00:00:28.120 lining up their candidates, a squabble emerged in the riding of Stikine, which
00:00:33.180 is in northern BC. The squabble is centred around the BC NDP's equity mandate, which
00:00:38.740 was adopted by the party in 2011. Under this equity policy, elected female NDP
00:00:45.580 MLAs who retire can only be replaced by another woman. Male MLAs who retire will
00:00:52.460 have to be replaced by either a woman or an indigenous person, visible minority,
00:00:57.660 LGBTQ person, or someone with a disability. So basically, if you are a
00:01:03.180 heterosexual, able-bodied white male, you are not welcome to run for the BC NDP.
00:01:09.360 However, we learned over these past several days that this policy is not as absolute
00:01:14.940 as we thought. It turns out that if you're a heterosexual, able-bodied white male
00:01:19.680 that the BC NDP really likes, like former Member of Parliament Nathan Cullen, then
00:01:25.560 they will happily throw an indigenous woman candidate under the bus in order to
00:01:30.280 quickly acclaim the white male as the candidate. Let me explain. A woman named
00:01:36.060 Anita McPhee publicly announced her intention to enter the NDP nomination
00:01:40.480 contest in the riding of Stikine, as the incumbent MLA Doug Donaldson is retiring.
00:01:46.860 McPhee is the former president of the Tall Tan Nation in BC. However, former NDP MP Nathan Cullen
00:01:55.440 also announced he would be running for the nomination in that riding. McPhee then said,
00:02:00.820 well, hold on, you are a heterosexual, able-bodied white male. Per the party rules,
00:02:06.000 you are out. You cannot run in this nomination. And here's where it gets kind of shady. McPhee submitted
00:02:12.620 her paperwork, but the party said that two of the signatories on her papers were not BC NDP members,
00:02:18.860 which McPhee says is false. So while McPhee was trying to rectify the situation and prove the
00:02:25.100 memberships of these two signatories, the party was kind of non-responsive and then ultimately declared
00:02:31.660 Nathan Cullen was the candidate for Stikine. And McPhee first found that out on social media,
00:02:37.020 before the party even bothered to email her. Here's McPhee herself explaining on CBC radio.
00:02:43.260 I submitted my papers by Friday night. By late Sunday night, I was told that two of my signatories
00:02:51.500 didn't qualify because they weren't members, which wasn't true. They were members. They have,
00:02:56.700 they had proof that they were members. And we emailed and then I never heard anything back.
00:03:01.900 The party says that, as you just mentioned, the two of your nominating member signatures were missing,
00:03:07.900 or they weren't members of the party, as you just told us. Was there no time to sort that out before
00:03:15.100 they confirmed Nathan Cullen's nomination? You know, there was time to sort that out because
00:03:19.820 I submitted my forms on Friday and they got it on late Friday night. And I sent an email asking,
00:03:28.380 you know, is that, did you receive my nomination? I never heard anything until late Sunday night,
00:03:34.860 until there was no time to sort it out. But they said there was still time. So I had my signatories
00:03:42.540 send their memberships confirmation in, and then I didn't hear anything. And then I see on social
00:03:48.140 media that I'm disqualified. And then I received the email. Party officials then started saying that McPhee
00:03:55.820 said she didn't want to be associated with the NDP anymore after running for a federal NDP nomination
00:04:01.980 in 2019. But McPhee denies this. You know what, I didn't say that I didn't want to be associated with
00:04:07.740 the NDP. Anybody knows that as an indigenous person or a person of color, that when you run an election,
00:04:14.380 it's a very difficult process. It's difficult to get resources. It's, you know, the timing,
00:04:20.620 the support as an, you know, there's an equity mandate there for a reason.
00:04:26.780 The party released a statement saying that they had undergone an extensive search for an equity
00:04:31.980 seeking candidate. But after they couldn't secure one, that's when they went with Nathan Cullen.
00:04:37.020 And due to this signature problem with Anita McPhee's papers, she just could not enter the race in time.
00:04:43.740 So it's pretty clear here from what we can see that Anita McPhee was deliberately shut out of the
00:04:48.860 nomination contest because the party wanted to go with star candidate Nathan Cullen while pretending
00:04:55.020 that they were not in direct violation of their own equity policy. McPhee is now considering legal action.
00:05:03.180 Now, I wonder how heterosexual, able-bodied white males who have been tossed aside in the past due to
00:05:09.260 this equity policy feel upon seeing that the equity policy ultimately doesn't matter to the party
00:05:16.060 as long as there's a valuable white male candidate present that they really want to run. Earlier this
00:05:22.540 month, Doug Holmes submitted his paperwork to the BC NDP to run for nomination in South Okanagan,
00:05:29.420 West Kootenay after being encouraged by the party to do so. But then Toni Boot came along and she was
00:05:36.940 quickly acclaimed as the candidate for diversity reasons and no nomination contest was held.
00:05:44.140 One of the first controversies related to the equity policy was in 2016 when people were heckling
00:05:51.100 Columbia River Revelstoke NDP candidate Jerry Taft about why he was the candidate for the NDP
00:05:57.580 when they supposedly had this equity mandate in place. So Taft, who had a wife and kid, was then forced
00:06:04.540 to come out as bisexual, or at least tell people he was bisexual. And in 2017, Ian Morrison was prevented
00:06:12.940 by the BC NDP from running in the Cowichan Valley nomination contest, which ultimately led him to
00:06:19.260 leave the party. Now I'm not a member of the BC NDP, so I guess in one sense I don't really care if they
00:06:25.260 embarrass themselves like this or if they institute these poorly thought out policies. I think having an
00:06:30.460 equity mandate is a terrible idea, but if you're going to institute one, then you have to abide by it.
00:06:38.700 Because what I do care about is principles, and what they did to Anita McPhee was really slimy and gross,
00:06:45.180 and it goes to show that when these people make these diversity and equity declarations and statements,
00:06:51.500 it's all for show. Because in the end, they'll be willing to break their own rules once a white male
00:06:57.420 that they really like comes along. The BC NDP should just be honest with themselves and with everyone else,
00:07:03.820 and scrap this equity mandate and say, yeah, it just wasn't really working. And I know that all
00:07:09.580 political parties do fishy things, but if that equity mandate didn't exist, then maybe Nathan Cullen
00:07:15.500 and Anita McPhee could have just both entered their names in the nomination race and run against each
00:07:20.540 other fairly without any shady party intervention. I'm Lindsay Shepherd with True North. Thanks so much for watching.