On Monday night the Canucks scored twice in the first period, apparently. I say apparently because I wasn’t watching the hockey game, I was on a conference call with twenty BC riding presidents, most of the LPCBC executive, and two members of the LPC National Board of Directors.
In BC. During a Canuck Playoff game. I think this says a fair amount about the commitment of the BC team to rebuilding our party.
The call was in advance of the National Board meeting call. Craig Munroe, President of the LPCBC and member of the National Board, and Steve Kukucha, VP English of the LPC, took the time to listen to the concerns and opinions of everyone on the call.
Before that call, I had a public meeting of my riding executive. We invited members, past members and everyone who identified themselves as Liberal during the election campaign. At that meeting I listened to the thoughts and concerns of all of those people, and I shared that information with Craig and Steve on our call.
This is how the system is designed to work. And in BC, it seems to be working well.
As to what we actually discussed? I can tell you this. For the most part, everyone on our BC call agreed with having an extraordinary convention of the party to ask the membership to delay leadership for 12 to 24 months. Almost everyone on the call agreed that the interim leader should not run for leadership in that race. And everyone on the call agreed that the interim leader should not try to negotiate a merger with any other party.
In early January, we are going to have a convention of the party. At that convention, we are going to elect just under half the National Board of Directors (the other half is made up of PTA and Commissions Presidents). I expect that there will be a fierce battle for control of the NBoD from many areas of the party. I think this is a good thing, and it is how democracy works. I also expect that any of the current NBoD members who run in that election will have a very rough time of it.
But.
What do we do between now and then? There are calls all over the internets for Alf Apps to resign. There are also calls for the entire NBoD to resign. My question is this: to what end?
Someone needs to steer this ship from a governance and administrative perspective between now and convention. If the NBoD resigns, who’s going to do that work? There is no way to pull a face-to-face delegated convention together much sooner than January. There just aren’t that many venues out their that can hold the thousands of delegates we’ll have at a convention, and those that are out there tend to be booked months if not years in advance.
Sure, I guess Alf resigning would be a symbolic gesture that might make some people in the party happy, but having the entire NBoD resign is just wrong headed, in my opinion. I don’t even really care if Alf wants to stay on till January.
The grassroots of this party is being listened to, perhaps in a way that hasn’t happened in many, many years. The decision to holds the extraordinary convention is a clear indication of that. We have 4 years to rebuild this party. I think we need to trust that the fundamentals of our organization are strong, and work within those fundamentals to affect the change we want to see.
Join the party. Join the Victory fund. Get involved in your riding association. These three things are going to have an impact. They will change the party.
