Greg Renouf

Congratulations to Emily Lowan on her victory in Saanich North and the Islands. Running for office takes enormous grit, and whatever the political differences, nobody can deny the sheer hustle and energy her campaign brought to the doorstep. Today is her day to celebrate. Her speech last night spoke directly to issues so many British Columbians are feeling deeply: crushing rents, long waits for family doctors, and the exhaustion of working multiple jobs just to stay afloat. Those anxieties are real, and they deserve real answers. Where her message runs off the rails, and was on the nose for many, is in the intellectual playbook she chose to summon at the podium. Invoking the late David Graeber - the anarchist anthropologist and chief theorist behind Occupy Wall Street - Lowan quoted his line that the world is an experiment that “we make and could just as easily make differently.” It sounds poetic in an election hall, but let’s remember what Graeber’s philosophy actually is. He wasn't arguing for better daycare funding or incremental transit tweaks. He was an uncompromising revolutionary who wrote: “Direct action is the open defiance of an illegitimate authority... it is an insistence on acting as if one is already free, and in doing so, exposing the violence at the heart of the state.” This isn't an abstract debate from Zuccotti Park fifteen years ago. Right here in British Columbia, we see this eco-anarchist doctrine (rejected by 90% of voters, btw) playing out in real time, where activist networks deploy blockades to obstruct First Nations who have chosen to pursue economic options, equity ownership, and major project partnerships in their own territories. That is the most glaring flaw at the heart of the anarchist critique. While invoking Indigenous rights as an abstract slogan, this mindset routinely overrides the actual, self-determined aspirations of Indigenous communities that are choosing economic independence and shared prosperity over perpetual reliance on government transfers. About one in ten B.C. voters backed the Greens this election. Yet I suspect very few of those well-meaning citizens have taken the time to truly examine what this strain of green thinking entails. It doesn't seek to refine our economic system. It seeks to dismantle it. At the same time, what British Columbia does not need is an equal and opposite reaction to Graeber-think. Retreating into our own ideological bunkers and answering dogma with hardline polarization is a guaranteed path to conflict, not reconciliation. You cannot fund community health centres, electrify transit grids, or pay nurses’ salaries with protest theory. Those services are underwritten by royalties, payroll taxes, and the tangible economic engine of B.C. - mining, forestry, energy, ports, and trade. Tomorrow when La Rose vs HMTK opens in a Vancouver courtroom, an object lesson will be on display of what happens when Graeber-styled thinking occurs in the wild, where the goal is for the tail to wag the dog. I’ll be watching it closely. I genuinely wish Emily the best as she steps into the Legislature. The transition from movement activist to accountable lawmaker is where ideology collides with balance sheets and physical reality. That’s a transition every British Columbian has a stake in seeing succeed.