"How we got to be so divided as a province" is easy to explain: the intrusion and empowerment of movement parties lacking legitimacy in our system of government and intolerant of differences of point of view even within their own party organizations.
Canada is a constitutional monarchy, a Westminster parliamentary democracy, and a highly centralized federal state. Over and over these central facts of our political and constitutional identity and realities are ignored in today's partisan political experience and in supposed political science (knowledge).
Movements have become the source of dysfunction and the means to pit movement agendas vs movement agendas instead of representing in the manner of representative democracy. The flaws of direct democracy populist agendas and vulnerability to demagoguery inherent in all forms of populism leads naturally to division and to intolerance even within movement and party ranks. "True believers" in dogmatic statements of movement objectives harden views rather than seek the "art of the possible" development of compromise and consensus amidst different points of view.
Social democratic movements vs conservative movements - both of them inherently self-contradictory and resistent to fair expression and reason in their pursuit of movement purity and agendas - are where we need to look to discover how Canadian politics and not merely provincialism has become so divided and, well, provincial.
Eco-socialists and their partisan opponents who have replaced genuine environmentalism and fair critique across B.C.'s political landscape, no less than the movement ideological.
"How we got to be so divided as a province" is easy to explain: the intrusion and empowerment of movement parties lacking legitimacy in our system of government and intolerant of differences of point of view even within their own party organizations.
Canada is a constitutional monarchy, a Westminster parliamentary democracy, and a highly centralized federal state. Over and over these central facts of our political and constitutional identity and realities are ignored in today's partisan political experience and in supposed political science (knowledge).
Movements have become the source of dysfunction and the means to pit movement agendas vs movement agendas instead of representing in the manner of representative democracy. The flaws of direct democracy populist agendas and vulnerability to demagoguery inherent in all forms of populism leads naturally to division and to intolerance even within movement and party ranks. "True believers" in dogmatic statements of movement objectives harden views rather than seek the "art of the possible" development of compromise and consensus amidst different points of view.
Social democratic movements vs conservative movements - both of them inherently self-contradictory and resistent to fair expression and reason in their pursuit of movement purity and agendas - are where we need to look to discover how Canadian politics and not merely provincialism has become so divided and, well, provincial.
Eco-socialists and their partisan opponents who have replaced genuine environmentalism and fair critique across B.C.'s political landscape, no less than the movement ideological.