As we stare down a climate crisis and a hard-right political wave, women activists are setting out to transform electoral politics in Canada. But are the parties ready for them?
On November 26, 2018, a packed elementary school gym in Edmonton, Alberta, is charged with excitement. It’s the NDP nomination meeting for the contested federal candidacy in Edmonton-Strathcona, where Paige Gorsak waits to hear the results of her campaign. The NDP riding association only planned for a maximum of 200 people, so hundreds of young mothers with strollers, seniors, and oilpatch workers stand impatiently at the back and line the school hallways. Gorsak, then a 26-year-old master’s student and co-founder of Climate Justice Edmonton who ran an openly socialist campaign, makes her speech to a room full of people who are genuinely excited about electoral politics – many for the first time in their lives. In her five-week campaign, her team raised $5,000, gained over 100 volunteers, and boosted the NDP membership by over 25 per cent. Slowly, the NDP members cast their ballots. The vote is in: Gorsak loses by only 19 votes.
I watched Gorsak’s campaign explode on social media, and saw friends from the campaign fight for a woman who defies the centrist standard of electoral politics. I had recently begun volunteering with the Green Party in my home province of Prince Edward Island and had been struggling with the classic questions any young leftist must face when considering electoral politics. Can we change systems from within? Can reform be meaningful or is it a distraction from revolution? Is voting as harm reduction strategic or cynical?
Six months after her landmark campaign, I interviewed Gorsak about why she decided to get involved in electoral politics. Like me, Gorsak had grappled with the usefulness of electoral politics and the ethics of working within colonial governance systems.
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Denne historien er fra July/August 2019-utgaven av Briarpatch.
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