David Emerson, the new Conservative cabinet member, who was elected a couple of weeks ago in my riding (Vancouver-Kingsway) as a Liberal told the Vancouver Sun that he doesn’t expect the anger directed at him for his defection to the Conservatives will linger.
Emerson, the multi-millionaire timber executive, who by-passed the local nomination route as one of Paul Martin’s “star candidates” in the previous election was pretty clear about his distain for the little people in Vancouver-Kingsway (of whom 82% voted against the Conservatives). Emerson told the Sun:
“There are some people who are angry at me and cannot shake it. That may have an impact. But I’m not aware of people who are in the positions that are relevant to what I have to deal with and feel that way. In fact, I’ve had an awful lot of very positive support with the people involved on the issues that I’m working on.”
There you have it, the problem with capitalist liberal-democracy in a nutshell, the voters are not “relevant” to what the politicians have to deal with.
Of course BC corporate interests love Emerson, as do the right-wing Liberals running the province and Emerson clearly sees those folks as relevant.
Follow
Where do you get off equating “the voters” of Vancouver-Kingsway with the “people who are angry at [Emerson] and cannot shake it”? Many of the people who’ve been protesting Emerson’s change of parties are not voters of V-K, and most of the voters of V-K have not been protesting his change of parties.
Without an effective recall mechanism, there’s no objective way to determine what “the voters” want in this case (or any other).