THE WAY I SEE IT

We, The Work Less Party, compared to the other municipal parties in Vancouver are like the proverbial elephant in the room. The usual suspects in the line up for the mayor’s race, with their attendant presses, along with corporate developers and real estate moguls try to pretend we’re not here. Particularly the developers. And on second thought they aren’t pretending. Flipping high end condos like hot cakes while racing after Gordon Campbell to the Olympic finish line of unparalleled goodies they certainly can’t be bothered by any dark horses in the race. When push comes to shove they know their money will act as steroids to the mayoral contestants. And of course it does. However, the elephant is stirring.

Because we offer something enormously different from the polite chit chat that Vision mayoral candidates have offered. Vision is being described as “left of centre.” Left of centre politically? How can this be when Vision is primarily funded by developers and corporations? “Left of centre of the moon” makes about as much sense. We all know that “them who pays the piper picks the tune”. And it is this very playing the tunes the piper pays for that built the environmental, economical and social mud hole we’ve all been herded and gate locked into.

Still, there are ways out of this mud hole. But not by believing the sweet talk of banal politicians who try to convince us that we can save our way of life with a little bit of system tinkering. The Work Less Party is not about saving our way of life. We are about saving our very lives, and the lives of our children and grandchildren and those of the populace at large. And the only way to do this is to start accepting, talking about and implementing the concept of “zero growth”.

There is no other way out. It is the lusting after the idea of continuous growth that is killing our planet and everything on it that breathes oxygen. But how could the fact of zero growth be accomplished without bringing commerce to an absolute stand still? Without creating even more homelessness, more ill health, more drug addictions, more crime, more everything heinous that is washing over our city as it is? Well, we have a secret. It’s a secret you already know. It’s called sharing. Does sharing our way out of a municipal, provincial and national mess sound too silly to actually say out loud? That’s because we’ve all been so brain damaged by relentless corporate propaganda that we think the main, if indeed not the only, smart, respectable human quality that can operate in our society is one of greed. But it isn’t. At some level, we all know that greed is not the main motive for living. And in the weeks and months ahead we will be expound on this ancient but ever new concept at length.