| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 53

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Donna Vogel, Challenging Politics: COPE, Electoral Politics and Social Movements (Halifax: Fernwood Books 2003).

THIS BOOK is a welcome addition to the handful of academic studies of contemporary municipal politics in Canada. Its focus is on the major party of the left in the City of Vancouver. That party, called the Coalition [originally the Committee] of Progressive Electors (COPE), has been an important force in Vancouver politics since it was formed in 1968. It shared power in a centre-left coalition on the municipal council in 1982–86 and controlled the School Board in 1980–82 and 1984–86 (although the provincial government dismissed the Board and put it under trusteeship mid-way through the latter term). After more than a decade and a half in opposition, COPE came back to power in November 2002, winning control of the School Board, the Parks Board, and the municipal council. Larry Campbell — the model for feisty coroner, Da Vinci, on Da Vinci's inquest on CBC — became mayor, and as such is now the most prominent "progressive" politician in the province of British Columbia.

The fact that there is any sort of party in control of its municipal council makes Vancouver unusual. The city has had a party-system of sorts since the late 1930s, although there have been long periods in which the right-wing NPA (Non-Partisan Association) has been overwhelmingly predominant. Vogel's book focuses on a period of great hope and massive disappointment for the left in Vancouver. In 1990, Jim Green of the Downtown Eastside Residents Association (DERA) ran for mayor under the COPE banner and gave the incumbent, Gordon Campbell, a close race. COPE took half the seats on Council, and hoped to build on that strength in the next election. The following year, the NDP took control provincially under Mike Harcourt, who, although never part of COPE, had worked closely with it as Mayor of Vancouver in the early 1980s. Unfortunately for COPE, the NDP provincial government lost popularity very quickly, and COPE itself suffered disastrous defeats in the 1993 and 1996 municipal elections (it only slightly recovered in 1999). Vogel began her research in 1992, when COPE was trying to open itself up to the new social movements in hopes of establishing a wider and more effective coalition. She brought her study to an end after the new-style COPE suffered its second great defeat in 1996.

There is a brief postscript to the book that deals with COPE's stunning and in many ways surprising success in the 2002 elections. The reader who wants to understand how COPE re-built itself after it reached its nadir in 1996 will not find an answer here. The focus is very much on the political issues and experiences of the 1980s and early 1990s. Vogel sees that the challenge COPE faced in that period was much the same as the one that other orthodox, labour-based parties of the left had faced. The new social movements demanded a new politics, but it was not clear how that new politics could be accommodated without abandoning the core concerns (and the core constituency) of the old socialist movement. Vogel does a good job of summarizing the differences between a Marxist or labourist perspective on the one hand and new social movement theory on the other. Her prose is clean and clear, which is not often the case in discussions of this kind. She sets out her own, neo-Gramscian position as an alternative, and brings that perspective to bear in analyzing similar cases elsewhere (Eurosocialism, American civic radicalism, the Montréal Citizens' Movement), as well as the case that particularly concerns her. She offers a good brief summary of the political history of Vancouver, and connects her story to the changing economy and demography of the city. There is much that is useful here, especially for those who are relatively unfamiliar with Vancouver or with debates on the left after the 1960s.

That said, the empirical core of the book is in its study of the internal politics of COPE in the 1992–97 period. Again, there is much that is of interest, but the account is surprisingly brief and thin, given that Vogel did so much primary research (archival study, interviews, and direct observation). The main struggle was between those who wanted to keep COPE true to its organizational and ideological principles and those who wanted to open it up to a broader range of progressive social forces. The people in the second group got their way, but there was no electoral or organizational pay-off in the short term. Vogel interprets this failure in neo-Gramscian terms, but there is not enough detail in her account to make this interpretation convincing. The larger question to which her story relates is the connection between parties of the left and the new social movements (environmentalism, feminism, multiculturalism, native rights, gay and lesbian rights, etc.), but Vogel tells almost nothing about the organization and activity of social movements in Vancouver. She says almost nothing about the substantive issues that people were discussing at the time. She scarcely says anything about the NDP, even though the NDP were in power (with a predominantly Vancouver leadership) throughout that period. The federal NDP caucus gets even less attention. It is as if COPE were a huge, powerful organization that dominated politics on the left, rather than a weak municipal party struggling for survival. Vogel recognizes that weakness implicitly, but she seems not to see that her neo-Gramscian approach demands a much wider analytical frame than she offers us.

One curious feature of the book is that it fails to recognize how extraordinary it was that the Communist Party of Canada had played such a "key role in COPE from its inception in 1968 until the early 1990s." (81) Vogel notes the deleterious effects of the split in (and ultimate collapse of) the CPC in 1989–92. "In a real sense, the end of the CP created a vacuum within COPE that has never been adequately filled." (82) Indeed, but what a thing it was that this relatively mainstream political party relied so heavily on Communist organizing — not in the 1930s and 1940s, but in the 1970s and 1980s. The organizers were relatively orthodox Communists, not Maoists. How did they do it, when their comrades elsewhere were so obviously failing? Vogel gives us no insight, because she treats the Communist role as an unremarkable fact about COPE. It was an open secret in Vancouver that the Communists were a major force within COPE, and yet this had much less effect on the party's electoral appeal than one might have expected.

The other curious omission is any discussion of the role of local government. Municipalities do not have the same constitutional status as provinces. Their legislative powers are limited, their fiscal resources are meager, and they are extremely vulnerable to the policy decisions of the senior governments. In Vancouver's case, the city proper includes less than a quarter of the population of the metropolitan area. Many of the key local services are under direct provincial control. The challenges faced by a progressive municipal government — be it the Harcourt-led council of the early 1980s or the one controlled by Larry Campbell and COPE now — are qualitatively different from the ones that a provincial or federal government faces. The COPE activists were aware of this, but Vogel gives us little sense of where that awareness led.

A neo-Gramscian perspective leads to the recognition that politics is ultimately a struggle for hegemony. Municipal politics can only be one element in such a struggle, but it is nonetheless an important element. Vogel is right to see that the success or failure of COPE is a crucial part of the story of the Canadian left. She might have written a big book on the subject: a book that viewed the wider politics of the left in Vancouver through the prism of COPE and that related that wider politics to the politics of other communities. Such a book might have enabled some new thinking about political possibilities. The book she has actually written is smaller and less challenging. It frames the struggles within COPE in the same terms that were being used fifteen or twenty years ago. Up to a point that is fine, but it ought to be evident now that the frames we used then were more defective than we knew. Vogel's book poses two important challenges: to broaden and deepen the study of local politics, so that we begin to understand how and why people are mobilized politically; and, to re-think the simplistic nostrums of left politics (not excluding the ones now associated with Gramsci's name).


Warren Magnusson University of Victoria

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