As elucidated first by Mario Puzo, time spent with thugs and gangsters often ends with an equine crown staining the bedding; for flirting with Jim Green’s Vision, Vancouver’s progressives went to bed on election night with the head of a Trojan horse between the sheets.

A city with legalized slot machines is bound to see relationships, businesses and lives destroyed by those who gamble unwisely. But the colossally misfired coup by the Friends of Larry Campbell/Vision Vancouver – a myopic assembly of backroom dealers, bureaucrats and twentysomething apparatchiks-in-training, drained already of any political vitality and
infused with the kind of grey, on-message, soulless talking-point cynicism normally associated with party hacks twice their age – is certain to go down in history as the costliest, most destructive and least fruitful political gamble on record.

Watching the stunned, red-faced (always!) Jim Green concede the election – pugnacious, still, but looking to be on the verge of tears – the rough, bullying visage we’ve seen until now was transformed, swept by total surprise, meaning that the Vision crew were not only callous, they were stupid: They bought their own hype, thought that their goon would get in
despite his authoritarian streak, thought that the developers, the big money and the media would waltz away from the NPA permanently, in more than simply a marriage of convenience with their erstwhile ‘friends’ in the VDLC. They sabotaged a decades-old progressive municipal machine, mortgaged the future of leftist politics in the city, and for what? A handful of councilors under an NPA mayoralty and no prospects whatsoever.

This is what happens when the Jim Greens of the world imbibe their own delusions, exchanging a currency of false hopes amongst each other with such rapidity and lack of reflection that soon they’re willing to extend themselves a line of credit, using bullshit as collateral. This is what happens as the result of a failure to contextualize the ‘landslide victory’ of 2002 as the result of the NPA’s implosion, the galvanization of myriad East-side communities around the WoodSquat, and the free ride we got from the media for tapping a centrist outsider with a TV show for mayor. This is what happens when that victory is totally squandered by power-hungry politicos crazy with hubris, who betray the party’s platform and paint those who won’t as socialist dinosaurs and airy ideologues. This is also, it must be said, what happens when the COPE executive – charged with negotiating on
behalf of the membership with the Vision extortionists – instead negotiates on behalf of Vision with the COPE rank-and-file.

In the coming days, there will no doubt come a cacophony from the Vision camp, an accusatory din admonishing the paleomarxist COPE-supporters who didn’t circle the wagons properly and who handed the city to the NPA. Luminaries like Nathan Allen – who wrote a Vision newsletter disguised as a weekly column in the thankfully-defunct Terminal City – might express how Larry Campbell could have flown around the world, reversing the earth’s rotation, turning back time to prevent Sullivan’s win if only Tim Louis’s wheelchair weren’t made of kryptonite.

So it’s in our interest – as we set out over the next three years to save the electoral voice of Vancouver’s working class and marginalized communities, COPE – to set the record straight quickly, and inalterably, so that the intellectual acrobatics of Green, Campbell, Allevato, and whomever else aren’t able to posit themselves as the official story.

It’s hard to say when exactly the problem started inalterably on the path that it has taken; my own feeling is that the decision not to run David Cadman or a similarly well-positioned COPE stalwart in 2002 opened the door to the current difficulties. But that’s not the important question at this point; what’s important now is a simple fact.

They lost. They lost because their project was stillborn and ill-conceived, ham-fistedly carried out through blackmail, bad faith and misplaced optimism. Blairite elements in the parties (and coalitions) of social democracy around the world often put themselves forward as the voices of reason and pragmatism – but in this case, visions through rose-coloured
glasses kept reality at bay. It must be hard for Green supporters to accept, but I’m sure Bob Rennie, at least, will be okay.

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