So, to summarise:
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NDP party brass choose their successor, David Eby
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Eby thinks he has it in the bag and proceeds to do nothing. No campaigning, no signing up new members. Literally nothing, just waits for his coronation
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Appadurai enters stage left and signs up over 10,000 new members with a fairly radical environmentalist platform
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The due date for signing up new members passes, making it impossible for Eby to catch up
So now, essentially Appadurai beat the BC NDP at their own game. She followed all the rules and humiliated the BC NDP party brass.
Now, the BCNDP is in a lose lose situation: Either:
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Go ahead with their planned leadership race which Eby is nearly guaranteed to lose
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Disqualify Appadurai on bogus grounds, look like absolute cheating establishment bureaucrats, lose untold amount of credibility particularly among young voters (who are an essential demographic for them), and lose thousands of party members
Yep, 100%. Except somehow with even more arrogance and incompetence by the establishment.
Multiple federal MPs have called them out for their bullshit including Matthew Green (who called it "bullshit" on Twitter) as well as Nikki Ashton.
I honestly wonder what the federal NDP is going to do if they (inevitably) disqualify her. I can only hope they'd consider cutting ties, or at least discontinue the automatic membership pairing of the two, because they're going to lose a LOT of mf members.
So for Jagmeet has been a disappointment in calling out BCNDP for anything so I don’t expect much.
I reckon he's waiting to see how it plays out before he says anything. He's definitely paying attention to what's going on.
And, I hate to bring up the whole race card thing, but someone with the life experience of Jagmeet is probably not going to appreciate the optics of a (let's be honest) largely old white boys' club of the BCNDP quashing the rising campaign of a young, idealistic east Indian woman based on bullshit allegations.
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They did it. They disqualified her.
Utterly brazen rat fuckery.
The irony is that Eby could certainly have won a legitimate contest if he tried at all. I assume the party thought they'd save time and effort by skipping to what they thought would be an inevitable conclusion, forgetting that the process matters. Best case scenario is another mandate with an asterisk on the premiere's name. Worst case, they lose the next election and the province is run by the BC condo developer party for the next 20 years.
if he tried at all.
Right? He fucked the dog all the while Anjali was signing up thousands of people.
He could have done exceedingly basic leadership bid tasks like:
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Sign up new members
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Put forward policy proposals
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Justify his leadership bid in any way shape or form
And he did none of that. Nothing, absolutely nothing.
I am so fucking pissed right now. Honestly I didn't even want Anjali as leader, I wasn't even going to vote for her. But now? The BCNDP is going to receive a very angry email tomorrow with my membership (of nearly 20 years) resignation, and will not receive a single vote from me ever again.
FUCK THE BC NDP :agony-consuming:
Yep. I actually like Eby. I don't love him, and he's still a lib, but I prefer him to Horgan, and wouldn't have been mad to see him win a straight leadership race. This is one of the more impressive unforced errors in Canadian politics.
but I prefer him to Horgan
why? I don't really know anything about him
Eby endeared himself to me when he beat Christy Clark in her own riding, so that's part of it, but he's also been one of the main forces behind understanding the housing affordability crisis. Even though he hasn't quite followed the premise to its logical conclusions, I remember him as being one of the few people at the time who was able to articulate that the housing market is being affected by investment capital, and that merely building more things wasn't going to solve any problems. Coming out of many years where the province was essentially just a place where people could launder money and park capital through real estate, having someone buck that trend and at least try to air the more fundamental issues was a breath of fresh air.
Also, I don't think much of Horgan. At a time when there was a need and political will to do more radical things, he played the role of administrator. He spent most of his time as premier directing traffic. Meanwhile, the opposition has been trying to figure out how to get back in so they can privatize all the crown corps and eliminate taxes on real estate developers. I don't necessarily think Eby will be that much more radical than Hogan, but I'm not sure I've seen evidence that Horgan has any vision or perspective at all.
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It's too bad because as far as establishment politicians go I actually liked Horgan, and I had a pretty positive impression of Eby before this.
Now Eby's been caught with his metaphorical pants down, and I can only hope he does the right thing.
It's actually amazing the extent to which they have forgotten politics 101: campaign, give people a reason to vote for you, etc etc. They just thought they could shoehorn in their anointed successor and it somehow never occurred to them that someone else might sign up for the leadership race that they themselves started. What the fuck were they thinking?
On top of that, their knee-jerk reaction to her campaign was that the fucking Green party (!?) was behind it all?? Did they forget that the public exists?
If by "the right thing" you mean give fossil corporations billions in subsidies, you know he will
