Editor:
I just had the incredible privilege to present at the Women Deliver 2023 conference in Kigali, Rwanda with friends and colleagues from Uganda, Rwanda and Canada, and to learn about the state of human rights of women and girls around the world.
While in Rwanda, I attended four genocide memorials where visiting groups are taught that the 1994 slaughter of 1,000,000 Tutsi people and Hutu sympathizers over roughly 100 days was the result of many years of colonial practices designed specifically to split and control the population.
Yet what they have accomplished in the 30 years since by working together is nothing short of incredible. They have reimagined and are rebuilding their society as one people — Rwandans; not Tutsis and Hutus. #TeamRwanda, if you will.
Arriving back in New Westminster, I happened to be part of three different conversations in less than 24 hours around the need to create and foster an opposition in our tiny municipal government to “stop the groupthink.” To “shake things up a bit.” And partly based on my recent travels, I could not disagree more.
To be clear, I have often complained that one party mostly runs all three levels of politics in B.C.; the party that mashes together organized labour — which fastidiously ignores the most marginalized farm workers in favour of groups with more money to tithe — with a long list of legitimate social concerns unfairly tossed aside by the entitled under the simple epithet of "woke."
Despite my complaints, I just cannot support opposition for opposition’s sake amongst such a small group. I can barely watch our new city council (online) now. Political grandstanding, time wasting, staff bullying in plain sight, fight picking, scheming, tedious and useless amendments that make the process of approving a motion into an embarrassing joke — none of this is “good” opposition. Who does it serve other than the politically ambitious and the angry? What does it accomplish for the average citizen? How does it actually improve our city?
Having been involved in for-profit and non-profit governance for many years, the current council with a nascent opposition appears as a horribly dysfunctional high school debate club.
Our small city does not need a culture of division and opposition to get things done. It doesn’t need people taking up airtime for their own political benefit. It needs #TeamNewWest listening to a broad range of citizens, designing responsible policy and working together strategically with staff to make this city a better place and culture for everyone — both now and into the future.
We can do better than this, and I encourage all members of council to build a strong culture with each other, for each other and for us; not against each other, for themselves.
Jennifer Thompson
