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British Columbia premier-designate John Horgan prepares to make a statement following a non-confidence vote in Victoria. Photograph: Kevin Light/Reuters

British Columbias Liberal government has been defeated in a non-confidence vote, as expected, paving the way for the left-leaning New Democrats to rule the western Canadian province for the first time in 16 years.

Such a prospect has unnerved investors in Canadas third-most populous province, not least owners of oil and gas projects, such as Kinder Morgan Incs C$7.4bn Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, which the New Democratic party (NDP) has vowed to halt.

But an NDP government, which has to be propped up by the third-place Green party to achieve a slim parliamentary majority of one, is fragile, and few expect it to survive the four-year term.

On Thursday, seven weeks after a knife-edge election, NDP and Green lawmakers used their 44 votes in the 87-member legislature to pass a non-confidence amendment to the Liberal governments Throne Speech.

After the vote, NDP leader John Horgan told reporters he had met the provinces nominal head, Lieutenant-Governor Judith Guichon, and that she had invited him to form a new government, making him British Columbias next premier.

Well have access to government documents tomorrow to start working on a transition, Horgan said. I cant predict when that (transition) will be, but its going to be soon.

Incumbent premier Christy Clark told media she offered her resignation to Guichon, but asked for a dissolution of the legislature, which the lieutenant-governor did not grant.

Dissolution would trigger another election. While Guichon technically has that power, such a move would go against convention for the largely ceremonial leader.

Guichon said in a statement she will accept Clarks resignation.

The NDP and Greens struck an agreement last month to oust the right-leaning British Columbia Liberal party unaffiliated with the left-leaning federal Liberal party of prime minister Justin Trudeau after a 9 May election reduced Clarks party to a minority.

The NDP and Greens, which will form the provinces first minority government in 65 years, have accused the Liberals of trying to retain power after the election by stealing their election promises and introducing them as last-minute legislation to delay being voted out.

Yet those same promises could be hard to deliver under an NDP government, which needs Green cooperation and every legislator to be present for every vote to pass laws, said University of British Columbia political science professor Hamish Telford.

The NDP may decide on its own accord that it needs to have a fresh election, he said.

Continued here:
No-confidence vote for British Columbia Liberals delivers blow to pipeline project - The Guardian

By Arvin Temkar By Arvin Temkar June 30 at 8:40 AM

I have an Independence Day tradition: I like to listen to songs about America. My favorites tend to be critical of this country in some way, such as Woody Guthries This Land Is Your Land or Bruce Springsteens Born in the USA. These arent the flag-waving anthems their titles suggest; theyre searing indictments of a nation that failed its citizens by leaving them poor, stuck and feeling as Springsteen sings like a dog thats been beat too much. On our day of national pride, when celebratory words such as freedom and liberty are hurled about like Roman candles, it feels important to remain clear-eyed about our faults.

But at some point in the day, perhaps after taking in a greed-bashing punk tune or Nina Simones burning civil rights lament Mississippi Goddam, I have a secret favorite: Lee Greenwoods God Bless the USA. Its a song my fellow liberals love to hate. I love it.

Yes, it is overwrought and jingoistic. It glorifies war. It trumpets self-righteousness. Theres a reason Greenwood was invited to perform the song at the inaugurations of the last four Republican presidents, including Donald America First Trump.

Im proud to be an American, where at least I know Im free, the song famously declares. Its exactly the kind of vapid Independence Day rhetoric I cant stand. Not everything about our country is rainbows and unicorns. What about government surveillance? Institutionalized racism? Children whose futures are determined by the Zip codes where theyre born ?

And yet I still find myself moved by this song. Maybe its because I grew up surrounded by soldiers in Camp Zama, a U.S. Army base in Japan. I remember visiting home from college and seeing a soldier I knew sing the song one night at the local VFW, where my friend was a bartender. The soldiers voice, unexpectedly beautiful, gave me chills.

Or maybe its because even though my mother is from the Philippines and my father is from India, I have always identified first as American. Or maybe its simply the line, so magnificent in its crescendo: Cause there aint no doubt, I love this land.

Because despite the nations flaws, I do love this land. I am proud to be an American. And God Bless the USA, despite its flaws, beautifully captures that sentiment. The melody is an earworm, the swells are triumphant, and the emotion though a bit syrupy is authentic. I am impressed by its rawness, its conviction that we are one people and that we should be free. I admire its unabashed enthusiasm, its soft solemnity.

Im reminded of a story about another Independence Day standard: America the Beautiful. Ray Charless enduring version appears on the album A Message From the People, released in 1972, not long after the height of the civil rights movement.

Charles revised the songs lyrics, leaving out phrases such as pilgrim feet and alabaster cities ... undimmed by human tears. He later explained: Some of the verses were just too white for me, so I cut them out and sang the verses about the beauty of the country and the bravery of the soldiers. Then I put a little country church back beat on it and turned it my way.

When a black magazine criticized Charles for selling out by singing the song, he said his attitude toward America was like that of a mother chastising a child: You may be a pain in the ass, you may be bad, but child, you belong to me.

I know that feeling. It is a sense of immense love, even if that love is sometimes tinged by disappointment. When Greenwood sings in God Bless the USA that hed gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today, its easy to understand where that sentiment comes from. You fight for what you love.

I adore God Bless the USA, but, like Charles, I want to offer my own variation of the song to turn it my way. Its clearly a tribute to the armed forces, and I dont deny the honor in that. But when I listen this Independence Day, Ill also be thinking of the men and women who defended this country and its values in other ways: people like Edward R. Murrow, the broadcaster who risked his career to confront the demagogic Sen. Joe McCarthy; Harvey Milk, who helped pass gay rights legislation in San Francisco before he was assassinated; and Rosa Parks, whose courageous defiance was a spark for the civil rights movement, in which many were killed.

I think, too, of James Baldwin, who wrote in Notes of a Native Son that I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

For that, as the man says, Ill gladly stand up.

Twitter: @atemkar

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See original here:
My fellow liberals hate Lee Greenwood's 'God Bless the USA.' I love it. - Washington Post

Updated June 30, 2017 14:38:11

Liberals in Victoria claim the party's religious right is stacking branches with Mormons and Catholic groups in a drive to pre-select more conservative candidates.

It comes amid a heated debate in the New South Wales division over whether to adopt a Victorian-style "plebiscite" model to empower branch members.

Currently, candidates in NSW are chosen by a mix of branch representatives and party officials, a system critics claim is run by "factional warlords".

The Victorian model, introduced in 2008, allows party members of two years standing to vote in Lower House pre-selections in their electorates.

Sources have told the ABC the Victorian system is more open and democratic and has seen talented MPs including Josh Frydenberg, Kelly O'Dwyer and Dan Tehan win pre-selection.

Others claim it has also encouraged rampant branch-stacking.

Members of the party's executive have been accused of "actively recruiting" Mormons and conservative Catholics to branches across Victoria, which some fear could eventually lead to more conservative candidates winning pre-selection.

While the Liberals prides themselves on being a broad church, the ABC has been told the recruits are often motivated by "single issues" like same-sex marriage or euthanasia.

There are concerns this is distorting the values of the Liberal Party, which is shifting towards the right, but others argue it is part of a broad recruitment drive aimed at arresting a serious decline in membership numbers.

Victorian State Executive member Marcus Baastian said the party has been targeting business groups, young professionals and different cultural groups as well as religious organisations.

He hit back at claims the party was "swinging to the right", saying the accusation was designed to undermine efforts to modernise the state division.

"Recruitment in Victoria has delivered fantastic results in lowering our average age, increasing our party membership and ensuring we have campaigners on the ground in our marginal seats to help out candidates at election time," he told the ABC.

The battle over plebiscite pre-selections in NSW will come to a head at next month's "futures convention" where delegates will debate Tony Abbott's push to adopt a plebiscite or "one member, one vote" model.

Mr Bastiaan, who is considered a controversial figure in the party, is firmly behind Mr Abbott's push and has told the NSW division its duty was "to be relevant, forward footed and ensure it is a membership organisation that respects the very people who vote for it".

In a video to members attending a pre-convention event in Sydney tomorrow, he warned: "Without a strong New South Wales, we cannot win and hold Government."

Those pushing for change in NSW point to the Liberal's dwindling membership and narrow support base, arguing that giving people a say will revive the party.

But, for many, this is also a battle for control between a divided right faction and a dominant left.

The NSW State Council last year rejected Mr Abbott's motion to change the preselection process and voted in favour of a one put by Mr Turnbull and NSW Premier Mike Baird to debate the issue and broader party reforms at this year's futures convention.

Anyone will be able to attend and some party members have told the ABC they fear it will be ambushed by Mr Abbott's hard-right loyalists whose ultimate goal is to damage Malcolm Turnbull.

The Prime Minister supports plebiscites in principle, but the left faction to which he is aligned has been campaigning against it, fearing it could open the door to branch stacking in the state.

According to Mr Abbott, change to the NSW Liberal Party is "unstoppable" and most now concede that is the case.

"Nobody wants to leave that conference with the same system we have now"," a NSW Liberal source said.

"There has got to be change."

Topics: liberals, government-and-politics, federal---state-issues, federal-government, political-parties, community-and-society, religion-and-beliefs, australia, nsw, vic

First posted June 30, 2017 14:29:49

Original post:
Victorian Liberals claim right faction stacking branches with Mormons and Catholics - ABC Online

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As someone who voted for Barack Obama twice, supported the Affordable Care Act, and could be persuaded to vote for the right kind of single-payer system, I've found the entire health-care debate over the past several months deeply depressing. That's no doubt why my first instinct was to cheer when reading a recent rant against the right from an editor at The Huffington Post.

The transparently titled opinion column, "I Don't Know How to Explain to You That You Should Care About Other People," is a perfect expression of our political moment in its utter exasperation at those on the other side of a policy debate, but even more so in how it casts these partisan opponents as moral monsters with whom communication, let alone persuasion, is simply impossible.

I admit that it does often feel that way these days, especially when it comes to the House and Senate bills to remake the nation's health-care system, since so much of the discussion has been conducted by Republicans in undeniable bad faith with bills primarily designed to cut or eliminate taxes dishonestly described by leaders in Congress, as well as the president, as efforts to make health care more affordable. (The tax cuts ensure that health care would in fact become much less affordable for millions of people.)

But the instinct to cheer on the argument should be resisted.

The fact is that most intelligent and informed people on the right do not oppose progressive policies because they're stingy bastards who don't give a damn about their fellow citizens. It's true that this may describe some Republicans. There are probably a non-trivial number, especially those unduly influenced by the odious ideas of Ayn Rand, who do come close to viewing the poor as parasitic moochers. But many, many others the vast majority, in my experience do not take this position. They believe, instead, that progressive policies do more harm than good for the very people they're designed to help.

Consider the minimum wage. Many conservatives oppose raising it, especially as high as $15/hour, as some municipalities around the country have opted to do over the last few years. Do they take this position because they prefer lower-wage workers to struggle? No. They take this position because they understand basic principles of economics, which predict that raising costs for businesses that employ low-wage workers will lead them to make fewer hires, thereby hurting these workers overall. (A study released earlier this week seems to indicate that this is precisely what's been happening in Seattle since the city began incrementally raising its minimum wage.)

The same holds for the concerns that led the original neoconservatives to make various proposals for reforming crime and welfare during the 1970s and '80s proposals that powerfully influenced policymaking at the local and federal levels during the 1990s.

My point isn't to make a case for these policies (though I think many of them were defensible in the context of the time). The point is to recognize that the proposals were made with the intent of improving the lives of the poor, crime victims, and others, not with the intent of hurting them, or of giving the rich a post-spending-cut tax break. (While it's true that most of these conservatives supported tax cuts as well, those cuts, too, were justified as a spur to economic growth and job creation that would benefit everyone.)

It's certainly easier and more morally satisfying for those on the left to presume that the right is just motivated by rank selfishness. But it's no more true at an individual level than it is as the level of public policy debate.

Though there's been considerable dispute about studies purporting to show that conservatives are more generous than liberals when it comes to private charity, the most fair-minded critics don't claim the opposite that only people on the left care about the well-being of their fellow citizens. The critics claim, rather, that ideology is an insignificant variable in determining who gives to charity, and how much.

So much for having to explain to Republicans as a group why they "should care about other people."

Now, it may well be that Republicans are more inclined toward generosity when it comes to private charity than they are with regard to government programs. Is that foolish? Could conservatives do more social good if they supported tax hikes and policies devised and run by the federal government? That's an empirically testable proposition, the outcome of which just might change some minds on the right.

But only if liberals, progressives, and democratic socialists resist the temptation to flatter themselves and demonize their opponents and keep up the hard, unglamorous, sometimes infuriating work of trying to persuade.

View original post here:
Why can't self-satisfied liberals admit that conservatives care about people, too? - The Week Magazine

We live in a time of catastrophic political experiments. Americans are learning how far the institutions of civil society can protect democratic norms in the face of an autocratically minded president. The British are about to find out how much economic pain they can endure for the privilege of flipping the bird to Europe. Italians may soon hand the reins of power to a clown literally.

For this reason, the results of the recent legislative election in France feel as miraculous as a lantern suddenly lowered into a cave. With President Emmanuel Macrons Republic on the Move party having gained a solid majority of seats in the National Assembly, France is about to show the world how far liberalism can succeed in a profoundly illiberal era. Macron himself prefers the label neither left nor right to liberal, a word that in French carries the purely pejorative meaning of laissez faire but he is recognizably a Third Way liberal in the mold of Bill Clinton or Tony Blair. The fact that the French have traditionally viewed liberals as heartless servants of capitalism makes his success that much more remarkable.

Macron has begun meeting with representatives of business and labor in order to push through his plan to end Frances statist tradition of negotiating work rules at the national level. He plans to issue an executive order this summer, permitting industry-wide or firm-level negotiations with labor that will allow variation in the workweek and enable firms to more easily hire and fire employees. When his predecessors, Franois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, attempted to reform the labor market, massive street demonstrations forced them to back off. The main French union has already set September 12 as a day of action against the proposed reform. However, Macron may have both the grit and the political support to push his plans through.

Next year, Macron hopes to implement reforms that will regularize a fragmented pension system and convert unemployment insurance into a source of lifelong career training. At the same time, he hopes to increase the minimum wage, cut the amount deducted from the average paycheck for social welfare programs, and invest 50 billion euros over five years into training, green energy, and other fields. If he can even make serious headway on that immensely ambitious agenda, Macron may manage to restore the tattered French belief in politics and the state. He may even drain some of the poison from the word liberal.

Still, it is not because governments are too statist that liberalism is in crisis in the West; thats a distinctly French problem, requiring a distinctly French solution. What has provoked the crisis is a widespread sense among middle- and working-class voters that they have been left behind both economically and culturally in a globalized world where jobs, money, ideas, and people sweep across the planet with little regard for borders or traditions or national identity. That, in its many variations, is what accounts for Donald Trump and Brexit and the National Front and the illiberal democracy of Hungarys prime minister, Viktor Orban. The Macron experiment is thus even more portentous, and even more difficult, than it seems.

The Macron insiders whom I met during the election are acutely aware of the need to address the disaffection of industrial workers, village dwellers, the unemployed, and others. They believe that the economic reforms and targeted investments he has planned will create new opportunities for those groups and thus win at least grudging support from far-right and far-left voters who loathe him. There is a view recently expressed in Edward Luces book The Retreat of Western Liberalism that the fear and anger toward Islam, and the resentment toward elites seen to be soft on Islam, are ultimately caused by frustration over declining economic prospects and thus can be cured, or at least brought under control, with the medicine of economic policy. But nationalism afflicts prosperous countries like Sweden, as well as stagnant ones like France or Hungary. Liberals are much too inclined to see values as the ephemeral consequences of real i.e., economic conditions. Thats why Americans on the left think that Republicans have used some sort of black magic to persuade working-class whites to vote for them despite the GOPs plutocratic policies.

In France, issues of culture, identity, and nation center on the countrys large population of North African immigrants. During the campaign, Marine Le Pen, the head of the far-right National Front, pledged to reduce immigration to an impossible 10,000 people a year (from a current figure of about 200,000), while Franois Fillon, the candidate of the center-right Les Rpublicains, said he would amend the constitution in order to cut down the flow. Even former Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls openly criticized German Chancellor Angela Merkel for accepting so many Syrian refugees.

Macron is as liberal on matters of identity as he is on the economy, though there is very little political hay to be made on the left side of the issue. In his campaign book, Revolution, he asks, How can we insist that our fellow citizens believe in the Republic if some among us use one of our founding principles, lacit the secular code to tell them that they have no place in it? Macron defends the right of Muslim women in universities to wear the hijab and in one debate ridiculed Le Pen for making a burning issue of the burkini, an Islam-inspired full-body swimsuit. He speaks of immigration as a source of economic and national strength the classic liberal position and, in a rebuke to Valls, thanked Merkel for defending European values by accepting refugees.

Of course, Macron is a calculating politician. He has promised to institute a more humane asylum system so as to quickly separate those who merit protection from those who must be expeditiously deported. While during the campaign, and in his book, he repeatedly asserted that France needs no new law to deal with terrorism, his government is now promulgating a bill that would, in effect, make the current state of emergency a matter of standing law, transferring many powers from the judiciary to the Interior Ministry a measure that has drawn a howl of protest from the editors of the left-of-center Le Monde. (The government has now promised to soften the measure.)

But Macrons policies are much likelier to inflame nationalist opinion than they are to mollify it. He is the supreme representative of the French elite, and on the right his policies on immigration and refugees are seen as signs of elite indifference to the situation of ordinary Frenchmen and women. Christian, my French teacher when I was in Paris this spring, called himself un dplorable a fan of Trump and Le Pen. Christian raged at the West African immigrants who increasingly dominated the life of Montreuil, the town outside Paris where he lived, and at cosmopolitan elites (like me) who, he thought, held traditionalists like him in contempt. In the midst of one of our innumerable arguments, Christian would say, You and I cant talk to each other. We had too little in common even to find common ground.

Ive heard this sense of estrangement from supporters of the nationalist right in Hungary, Poland, Sweden, Germany, and in France. And, of course, it lies at the core of Donald Trumps appeal. The fact is that while the state really does have levers to dislodge economic frustration, there is relatively little it can do to assuage fears of eroding national identity at least without capitulating to the right. Macron has to hope that the economics-first theorists of the liberal crisis are correct. That, perhaps, is the true magnitude of the experiment he has embarked upon.

Photo credit:ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP/Getty Images

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View original post here:
Can Nationalists Ever Make Good Liberals? - Foreign Policy (blog)