While reading all the happy news about that International communist/socialist group’s collapse which I wrote about in a previous post, today, I popped over to another fave of mine, the PeoplesVoice.ca, just to check on their socialism progress and make sure they’re not dead too, and I also didn’t hear about that. This is the Canadian Communist Party’s online socialist voice (“Canada’s leading socialist newspaper,” they call themselves), with which, many Canadian politicians are, um, comrades (example).
Turns out they’re still alive. Yey. Olivia Chow and other NDP and media folks will be happy.
And once again they don’t disappoint. One very recent article reviews a book by former (mercifully) NDP MP Libby Davies, who always struck me as a particularly loathsome communist. I’ve written several times over the years about how she started out as a member of COPE — a Vancouver city political party — under whom she served as an alderman for years before running for the NDP.
Now, see, the bone I have to pick is that I’d often written about how COPE was really a communist party, but nobody believed me. Too extreme, Joel! Couldn’t be! Tone-down the rhetoric, dude! (Etc). I’ve pointed out how even Wikipedia — which, yeah, is super trusty, but I could never find another source — says COPE was formed by a couple of extreme leftists “along with activists from the British Columbia New Democratic Party and the Communist Party of British Columbia.” Still no love from my myriad fans and haters. In fact, I’d get really aggressive emails hurled at me by COPE and NDP-lovers for weeks, and more than a few from conservatives (or “conservatives”) who chastised me for being too extreme in my language and my use of the word “communist,” and how “that won’t help our cause,” et al.
Here’s how the PeoplesVoice.ca writer ends his June 2019 review of former NDP MP Davies’ new book:
…However (and there are always “howevers”), I do have one sizable quibble. Like the otherwise very useful 1993 book “COPE: 1968-1993, Working for Vancouver”, “Outside In” omits any mention of the Communist Party. I say this not out of sectarian pique, but because the Communist Party was the single most important political force behind the formation of COPE and its early political progress, a story that Davies knows well.
Many Communists ran as COPE candidates over the decades, and a large number were elected to Council, School Board and Park Board. The tendency to ignore this record is one factor behind the internecine fractures that damaged COPE in later years, although it recovered to elect several candidates in the 2018 civic campaign.
Whether intentionally or not, those who write the Communist Party out of the record do a disservice to the struggle for socialist change in Canada. That’s an unfortunate flaw in this very powerful book.
Huh. That communist expert says it’s all about the communists. Where was he when I was getting tut-tutted by all those idiots?
So yeah. Maybe it’s time for y’all to shutty uppy.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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