BC Vote Managing Editor Stephen Irving poses with Prime Minister Jean Chretien, November 2002.
What does it mean to be non-partisan in 2011?
This question has been on my mind a lot lately. Having been recently invited to redevelop BC Vote, a unique political blog aimed at providing an online forum for non-partisan political discussion, I was at once excited and stumped. Where was I even supposed to begin?
My introduction to partisan politics took place in 2001, when my pal Max Fawcett and I entered the murky world of federal youth politics as undergraduates at the University of British Columbia. I was excited. I hoped I could make change from the inside. I looked forward to talking about policy with likeminded colleagues, the camaraderie associated with political affiliation and the opportunity to rub shoulders with the political elite in this country.
The twelve months that followed gave me the political education of a lifetime. Caught between the political mudslinging and backstabbing of a leadership race, I couldn’t extricate myself from the political process fast enough. I wasn’t alone in my disillusionment. Many of those I entered federal youth politics with all grew equally disinterested. In our youthful naivite, we’d thought that partisan politics would prepare us to become the leaders of tomorrow, that our ideas would help change the shape of the country. Instead, it turned out that we were little more than electoral cannon fodder, and the enemy was within our own ranks.
After a little over a year, I casually tossed my political membership card into the circular file. The political process I had believed in and which I had respected so much felt instead like an exercise in self-defeating futility. Partisan politics, I concluded, were a waste of any intelligent person’s time and possibly the slowest way to affect meaningful change in our society
Despite this, I have never lost my passion for Canadian politics, and have remained a keen observer to the political process at both the federal and provincial levels. And while a part of me has always missed the thrills of political involvement, I knew partisan politics was not the avenue through which I would pursue it.
In June 2010, after several years of sitting on the political sidelines, I began talking with Jeca Glor-Bell, a good friend and the past-president of the Sierra Club of Canada, about re-engaging in the political process. In early September, we hosted a meeting aimed at not only re-engaging our legions of smart but politically disengaged friends but also at re-enagaging ourselves and identifying the best way to do this.
Despite the fact that many of my friends cared deeply about their society and understood the impact that partisan politics had on their lives, what was most interesting about these discussions was the realization that any sort of engagement in partisan politics had been almost entirely rejected as a viable way of making change in society. The political parties had failed.
Those conversations got the juices flowing and as so often happens in life, events conspired to feed that growing interest. It was by Nicole Garton-Jones, a lawyer at Heritage Law, to develop BC Vote, that you’re here reading this right now.
Our goal with BC Vote is to foster a political dialogue for the rest of us, a space that promotes a politics of inclusion, not division. We want to create forum that aims to puts an end to the polarization of politics in a province that’s already the most polarized in the entire country. And with federal, provincial, and municipal elections all occurring in British Columbia this year, the timing couldn’t be more perfect. We’re young, we’re ambitious, and while we’re not always going to get it right we’re certainly going to have fun trying. Join the conversation.
Photo credit: Diana Murphy, Office of the Prime Minister, 2002.
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