Seven Oaks Magazine.

Libby Davies is entering her third term as MP for Vancouver East, having been elected by 10,000 votes over her nearest challenger -- her campaign represented the widest margin of victory for the NDP in the recent federal election. Davies has been active as a community organizer in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver for over 30 years. She was a founder of the Downtown Eastside Residents’ Association (DERA) in 1973 and served on city council for five consecutive terms beginning in 1982 before entering federal politics in 1997. Seven Oaks spoke with her by phone from her office in Ottawa where she has been participating in NDP caucus meetings as the party prepares for the fall sessions of parliament.

1) Seven Oaks: While I must offer congratulations on your successful incumbency, reaction to the NDP’s stronger showing in this year’s election seems mixed. Why do you think this is the case?

Libby Davies: Well I think there was an expectation that the NDP would win more seats. The fact that our popular vote went up but didn’t translate into more seats was disappointing, certainly to us, and the people. That’s a reflection of this terrible first-past-the-post electoral system that we run under. I remember Jack Layton after the election saying that it took an average of 36,000 votes to elect one liberal and it took over 100,000 votes to elect one New Democrat, you know…based on the overall votes and the number of seats that we have. So that tells you how systemically biased the system is. It does vary across the country. I know that here in B.C. we were much more optimistic on election day than people were in Ontario. On election night we would have loved to have gotten Ian Waddell in, and we were hoping like hell for Kennedy Stewart. Overall the NDP vote went up significantly in B.C -- 26 per cent I think we ended up with -- but we ended up with only 5 members. I know from talking to the Ontario people that they were almost completely shut out because of strategic voting -- and there’s no question that strategic voting hurt us too. I mean basically Paul Martin ‘saved his bacon,’ as they say, by creating fear. People were genuinely concerned about the Conservatives. I think probably we needed to have done a stronger push-back on the whole strategic voting thing in the last few days of the campaign. We probably didn’t do that strongly enough and directly enough to counter Martin’s fear campaign. But you know, overall we had a good increase, and I think now there’s strong evidence of how we need to address a serious structural question [in our electoral system] and that is to move to some sort of proportional representation system.

2) S.O.: How was the platform of this year’s NDP different from that of the past couple of federal elections?

Davies: First of all, it was much more comprehensive. Second of all, it had the strongest ever representation and theme of a sustainable environment and economy. The main slogan was “a green and prosperous Canada where nobody is left behind.” I was tremendously proud of the platform in regards to the environment. I mean we got a higher rating from groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club than they gave the Green Party, and we can credit Jack for that -- it was his personal commitment coming through. He got a very strong environmental program throughout the platform. It was a good process that we went through to get it, and the feedback I got was good. Best we’ve ever had. Now that isn’t to say that there isn’t room for improvement -- there were little glitches here and there…but overall it was great. Oh, and the other thing I need to say is that we had the most detailed analysis and disclosure of any party on what our program cost and how we would achieve it.

3) S.O.: You won your riding of Vancouver East by a landslide margin, doing much better than any other NDP candidate in B.C., or in the rest of the country for that matter. Why do you think this was the case?

Davies: I think it’s seven years of hard work. I got really good feedback from people that they like having an MP that is a strong fighter on issues. I think in some ways it’s a really good argument that people like it when you take strong positions so even if they don’t agree with you, they know where you stand because you’re not fudging it. And I’ve done that. I’ve been very outspoken on things like the drug issue from day one when some people told me I was crazy and that I’d be defeated on that -- you know, I wasn’t [defeated] and it was the right thing to do. Same on questions like the sex trade where I’ve taken very strong positions. To me it’s like showing leadership at the local level and also the way you work. It’s not just what you stand for, it’s how you do your politics. I’ve learnt more and more that that’s equally as important as what you stand for…

There’s also a whole number of reasons why I did better. The Liberal candidate ran a terrible campaign, you know, she attacked the hell out of me personally and I think it backfired. We’ve got seven years of hard work there and we have provided tremendous service to people. You know a lot of people ignore that, they think it’s just all about politics, the media and all of that. I take service very, very seriously -- I learnt that at City Hall. Actually helping people with individual problems, they never forget that. In my riding people are facing tremendous problems. Many are barely surviving and when you take the time to help someone in a very real way, it might be just a little thing, but people don’t forget that. Again, to me, it’s how you do your politics. It’s not only about this big picture stuff, it’s actually about small things that can actually help someone with something that’s going on in their life. It may be that you write back to someone or you listen to them… you know it’s those small things -- and I think a lot of MPs ignore those things. I don’t.

4) S.O.: Do you think that voting patterns have anything to do with the location of affluent neighborhoods in Vancouver or elsewhere?

Davies: Oh, it’s a huge issue for candidates who live in urban ridings where basically the urban riding represents both a low-income area and a very affluent one. I know Peggy Nash was probably defeated because of that and also because of strategic voting. But her riding of Parkdale-High Park [in Toronto] has some very affluent areas, but it has a lot of very working class areas too. Vancouver-Centre would be another reflection of that, you know, so a lot of the urban ridings are like that and you have a real mixture. I know a lot of people don’t think about class questions anymore, but it does exist and affect voting patterns. In a lot of urban ridings it makes a huge difference. Another example would be Toronto-Centre with Michael Shapcott who is a terrific candidate. The riding includes Rosedale, which is like Shaughnessy, but it also includes the whole gay community and a lot of co-ops so you know, there you’re seeing very different kinds of votes take place. So yes, it would make a huge difference in the outcome of an election.

5) S.O.: And I guess that’s another argument in favor of proportional representation and against arbitrary riding lines?

Davies: Yes exactly. A proportional system, I think, gives a much fairer weighting for how people are actually voting. With first-past-the-post you can have some races where you’re winning with a little more than 30 per cent of the vote and where one part of the riding may really dominate the outcome of the election. So again proportional representation where your vote is being reflected both geographically but also in terms of the proportion that the party gets overall is a balance to that, and I think overall much better.

6) S.O.: How happy are you with how the COPE city council has approached the major issues that affect your constituency like social housing, safe-injection sites and addressing police conduct?

Davies: Well the first two I’m very happy with. I think the COPE council has advocated very hard for better housing. I mean they’ve changed the bylaws to legalize secondary suites. They brought in the anti-conversion bylaw. For many years in the Downtown Eastside, hotels and rooming houses would convert to other uses, so we would lose what are called SROs [Single Room Occupancy] and that’s not good housing, but it’s better than being on the street. So for years we tried to get an anti-conversion bylaw passed, to say that if there was conversion, they have to replace the units [lost] – and we finally have that. Also the whole secondary suite thing is huge, and when I was on council Gordon Campbell completely screwed around with secondary suites by making them more illegal and shutting them down. You know a lot of students live in them, a lot of single parents live in secondary suites – and the COPE council has done a really good job on that plus they have done a really good job of fighting for social housing generally.

The safe injection sites have been tremendous. I’ve done a lot of work on that too, but to have the support of the city has been critical. If it had been Phillip Owen and an NPA council, I think he would have had a tough time with it. With Larry Campbell and COPE it was guaranteed that it was going to happen, and I think that whole situation has been very successful.

The third thing, policing, I’m a little more critical of. You know the police, to a large extent, operate in their own way. But COPE got in a really difficult wrangle with them over their budget and it came out that the police had some charter right that they could go into a deficit with – which was not true. I think the police actually really manipulated council, and I think that some of the COPE people knowingly or unknowingly let that happen. I was always very opposed to the police sweeps that they had in the Downtown Eastside. If you remember it was called ‘Operation Torpedo,’ of which the name itself was very offensive. I’ve been around a long time and you can put 50 cops or a hundred cops, whatever -- you can put them out on the street for a week, a month, however long – you can ‘clean up the streets’ but what have you done? Well you’ve pushed drug issues into other neighborhoods and you’ve driven people underground and there’s lots of evidence form various organizations, including people at the health board, who have shown that from a health point of view and what’s happening to drug users they are actually worse off. Suffice to say, I have been critical and I do have questions about the policing aspect. We have to make sure that enforcement doesn’t become the major tool of the so-called four pillar approach. It’s the easiest one to bring out because people are legitimately concerned about safety, they are legitimately concerned about what’s happening on the streets. But to just let the police just play on people’s fears is the oldest trick in the book. I’ve now dealt with it in two elections with my Liberal opponents where they’ve played on people’s fears to come down heavy with a law-and-order agenda. It’s the wrong thing to do though, it doesn’t solve problems. Enforcement is certainly part of the strategy, but I’ve had some concerns about the enforcement aspects that have gone on.

7) S.O.: What are the major issues you hope to address when parliament resumes in the Fall?

Davies: Well we’re just debating that right now in our caucus. We had our first caucus meeting last Thursday. As a result of our first meeting I can tell you that our caucus and our leader, Jack Layton, came out and identified three things that are sort of urgent. The first one was Star Wars. Paul Martin is about to sign a deal with the U.S. for Canada’s participation in Star Wars, possibly by the end of the summer. There’s no mandate from parliament, there’s no mandate from the Canadian people to do anything of the sort. Of course, the NDP was very opposed to that, so we want to just literally raise the alarm bells because this is imminent. The second one was healthcare, because Martin is meeting with all the premiers at the end of the summer, and we will be pushing very, very hard to say that one, we have to have stable funding; two, we have to meet the Romanow recommendations; and three, we have to stop the privatization that’s taking place – we’re the only party saying that. Finally, he identified proportional representation as kind of a structural question that we are going to keep pushing because we think it’s so important. We will bring some sort of initiative to parliament on PR in September making it clear that this will be a priority for us.

Now this week we will likely identify more issues that we think are key, but I don’t know what they are yet because we haven’t had the discussion…It’s going to be a very interesting debate for us given what we hope will be a very important role for us to play in parliament. I mean I’ve got my own ideas and I’ll be part of that but our caucus will decide that. What we will do is hopefully set up advocacy teams where our MPs work in groups with people in other organizations to work on various campaigns like stopping Star Wars, like making sure Kyoto is implemented, like childcare. This is what I really like about Jack, he’s much more action-oriented. I mean a lot of stuff happens in parliament, but he has a very good understanding that what we do in parliament is linked to and is part of the capacity overall of social movements and the labour movement to help bring about change. And when we work together, not necessarily in a formal way, but in an informal way through various campaigns, that’s when we’re really beginning to move things. What we do in parliament is very critical, but it’s the way we work outside of that, and I think you’ll see us pay much more attention to that in the coming year.