Beyond Band Aids and Bailouts: Public Solutions In Critical Times
Public Interest Alberta’s Annual Advocacy Conference: keynote presentation by Judy Rebick. Chateau Louis Conference Centre (11727 Kingsway Ave). Fri, Apr 3 (7pm). Tickets: $15. Info: www.pialberta.org.

The left in Canada has it’s share of problems, and focusing on being right rather than solving problems is one of them.

Long-time lefty activist and author Judy Rebick, who has worked for social change longer than many of the people reading this interview have been alive, opens up a healthy debate in her new book, Transforming Power: From the Personal to the Political. She heralds emerging ideas from participatory democracy in Bolivia to the North American “green jobs” movement, and will make you think differently about power, and what it really means to work for social change.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. The former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women and the current CAW-Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy is the keynote speaker at this year’s Public Interest Alberta conference.

Rebick, who also co-founded the progressive news and commentary site rabble.ca, describes the next evolution of politics and advocacy as not just copying the web 2.0 and networking tactics of Barack Obama, but also adapting those tools to solve local problems.

SEE Magazine spoke with Rebick over the phone from her Ryerson University office. Here’s what she had to say about burnout, the green movement’s genius moment, and proper democratic representation.

SEE Magazine: At the start of the book, you write that in 2005 you realized you were at the “end of [your] rope in terms of political activism.” How did you get to that point?

Judy Rebick: I’d been a mad social activist for a while. [When] I was able to take a step back… I realized that it had been some time since the left had made any gains. I didn’t know where I was going anymore. Or where progressive movements were going. The women’s movement was in decline. The movements that were still around were very institutionalized. The left, despite the rise of the anti-globalization movement in 2001, didn’t seem to be having more impact.

SEE: Were you happy with the way rabble.ca turned out?

JR: It was a success. It is a great space for people on the left to talk to each other … but it was very hard for rabble to have an influence beyond the area we were already influencing. The alternative media, as important as it is, in a way preaches to the choir…. It was good, but it wasn’t enough for me. 

SEE: What has the left lost by not reaching across political lines?

JR: That’s the kind of exercise in regret that I don’t really like. My generation achieved a lot. The women’s movement reached out to large numbers of women. The civil rights movement reached out to huge numbers, as well as the environmental movement. We are able to reach out to masses of people though the our issue movements, but I think the political left in Canada was unable to get out of a certain ideological bind.… Instead of recognizing that all tactics have a role, we have to be right all the time. And that reduces the number of people involved because they don’t like the confrontation.

SEE: The Greenpeace campaigner here, Mike Hudema, talks about green jobs and reaching across to labour. In the book, you quote Majora Carter, an activist from South Bronx, calling environmentalism the new civil rights movement.

JR: There’s this huge environmental movement in California that has managed to influence the government to spend a lot of money on sustainability. By tapping into that movement, there was new energy and resources. [Van Jones, author of The Green Collar Economy] started to develop his ideas, and managed to convince this large group in California, environmentalists and conservationists, to put their time and energy into projects that would also solve the terrible problems of poverty and racism. This was a genius moment. Network politics is very powerful in terms of bringing in all kinds of people who weren’t involved before, and unleashing creativity. That doesn’t fit very well with the existing systems. The whole idea of representative politics becomes discredited, and our whole system is based on the representative system.

SEE: That worries me, because it may reinforce the idea that elections don’t matter.

JR: That’s not what I’m saying.... Only the people who have the most radical views would say elections don’t matter; we don’t need political parties. What I’m saying is that we have to transform power. We can’t get rid of power. To me representation should mean RE-presentation. It should mean for me as a leader, my goal is to RE-present what people are saying to me. Like an aboriginal chief who … bases their presentation on what all the others have said. Obama did that in his campaign when he said, “I need you to do this.” That was revolutionary. That’s why they won. They didn’t try to control it… You make the path by walking. So it’s not that you follow what Obama did, but you learn from what he did and apply it to what you are doing.