[mobglob-discuss] Alicia Barsallo's speech at nomination campaign kick-off

[Alan Ward]

Speech by Alicia Barsallo on the occasion of her announcement
that she will seek the NDP nomination in Vancouver-Kingsway Provincial

2 November 2003 – Collingwood Neighbourhood House
___________________________________________________________
                                         - OUR APOLOGIES FOR ANY
DUPLICATES -

I am a visible minority person.

I am one of the dark new Canadians who come from places the realities of
which almost never come up in the news.

I come from a place where there are hungry children at the door of
restaurants waiting to see what you leave on the plate.  They are children
of the sun, of the wind, nobody owns them, nobody wants them.  They live
short lives, even shorter lives than those who get to be farm hands or
factory workers.

I am one of those who once she was in Canada polished her language to avoid
discrimination.  I am one of those who entered the political fray, out of
memories but also out of recognition of the present.


My political life started at a young age back in Peru:  helping strikers;
marching shoulder to shoulder with students against the war in Vietnam;
visiting political prisoners; getting my first hints of the feminist
movement; living in peasant villages to find out about massacres and
distribute the information when the police were not looking.

Then it was BC, the challenge of a new reality with wider democratic margins
and a qualitatively better place for women.

I joined Hilda Thomas, Margaret Birrell and other dynamic political women in
infusing higher political goals and activism into the NDP women’s rights
committee in the mid-seventies.  At the same time, and in the aftermath of
Pat Lowther's death, I joined the NDP’s Open Caucus, a meeting of minds of
the left.

In 1976 I got to march to stop the extradition of American Indian Movement
leader Leonard Peltier.  I was also part of the October 14th one-day general
strike against Trudeau’s wage controls.  The workers’ march -organized at
the call of the Canadian Labour Congress-  covered the Granville bridge from
one end to the other.

I next found myself working with Jean Lawrence and others to further the
rights of UBC’s clerical workers.

In the eighties, I worked and studied at UBC,  using the summers to publish
PERU LINK to challenge the myth that the killing of innocents in Peru was a
war against terrorism.

While doing this, in 1983, I experienced the wonder of BC’s Solidarity
movement.  Daily, open strategy sessions, and spirited marches of 60,000 and
70,000, almost brought down the Bennett government.

I obtained a teaching degree from UBC, and while working as a teacher, I
heeded the call to fight anti-refugee bills and the unfairness of the
Immigration Act in the nineties.  I also went through law school, and got
published.

I was imprisoned during a visit to Peru in 1994 and freed by Canadian
government pressure after an outpour of solidarity from many Canadians.

And in the years 1999 and 2000, when the media unleashed its unrelenting
attack on the Clark government, I worked with Patricia Andrade, Andrew
Adler, Connie Hubbs, Alan Ward, Annalissa Magleo, Bill McMichael to form a
coalition to denounce the aggressive unti-democratic bias in the media.
AFAIR [Action for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting], followed the BC
Liberal fanfare all the way to the largest BC Liberal recall rally in
Nanaimo where we displayed a large banner that read “Give us news, not right
wing propaganda.”


It was Jim and Eva Manly –Jim a United Church Minister and previously a
Member of Parliament, and Eva, a film maker- who urged me to run as NDP
candidate in Vancouver-Kingsway in 2001.

I won the nomination, and after a one-month campaign, run by a handful of
wonderful people, came close to beating the Liberal.

Afterwards, the task became building the riding and preventing further
erosion of grassroots autonomy inside the BC NDP.

The 2001 election campaign underscored for me the importance of addressing
workers and people living in poverty but also the importance of addressing
our neighbours who are better off and the small businesses in the area.

With our principles on our lapels, we included them in our visits and
addressed them in every election pamphlet.  Invaluable to us was the advice
and help of Barry Morley, President of the Community Business and
Professionals Association of Canada.


I have been involved in political action all my life, from my youth in Peru
to my three decades in BC.

I have seen the enemy early on, and recognize its approach; the difference
between Peru and BC is not so large.  The rights we assume to be inviolable
are really quite fragile and we have to fight for them.  It is this
connection that brings me here again before you.


I am the candidate and the anti-candidate.

I run because you need somebody like me to reform the NDP, and to join the
voices of those most affected by BC Liberal policies.  You need me to sow a
new respect for our politics, not only amidst the most disadvantaged in our
society, but amidst our middle classes.

We need to fight because the draconian measures of the BC Liberals have hurt
our young, our old, and those who are already very poor.

We need to fight because the silhouette of the Honduran maquiladora lingers
close to the lowest paid jobs in rich North America.


And the fight must go on before, during and beyond the election.


The corporate right has its bought-and-paid-for media to praise its every
move.  It doesn’t need to call our neighbours to action.  The right does not
need to call on our neighbours to participate in public life.  All the right
needs, is for our neighbours to see the world through television, through
the lying lens of a monopolized and co-opted media.

With us, the story is different.  We don’t have their machinery.  We don’t
own the media.  Our challenge is to weave a broad network of communication
and mobilization.


The seniors of BC have taught us what the public can do through
mobilization.

Remember the BC Liberals wanted to take away seniors’ bus passes?  Well,
they backed off.  They could see that mobilization among the seniors was not
going to stop and that the issue could become a rallying point for all
sectors of society.


Parliamentarians who stand for social justice, can only succeed, when people
who don’t attend forums or rallies, know what’s what, and have had enough.
Fighters for social justice lack power and make no sense without a movement
behind us.


This is why I think it’s funny how to calls for action, to calls for
solidarity, some of our friends reply: “Wait until the next election when we
can send a few more people to the legislature.”  As if the election of a few
MLAs were to magically create a movement and a network of connections to
correct the lies and innuendos spread by the corporate media.

The flaw in this political analysis is to think that those collecting
millionnaire profits out of the BC Liberal privatizations, are going to roll
over and play dead, just because we elect a few more people.  They won’t!
We have to make them!


It will be tens of thousands of organized British Columbians that will make
it clear to corporate bosses that we will not let them take away our
livelihood and destroy our province, and, achieving such a movement is going
to take much argument at union and party meetings.  It’s going to take
clarity, and a lot of door-knocking.

I can help with this, and I can help with regaining trust in the NDP,
because when elected MLA, try me, I will set the example.  I will be proof
of what principles, down-to-earth strategies, and inclusiveness, mean in a
new NDP.


I am, and will remain, a worker.

As an MLA I will only accept what I would be earning as a teacher.  The rest
of my salary will go to the most active progressive organizations in the
riding.  This is because it is not proper for someone who is representing
people, among whom, there are many whose jobs have been taken away from
them, who have yet to achieve pay equity, or who are being hit with a
six-dollar-an-hour wage, to earn the salary of a CEO.


Compañeros, sisters and brothers,
come with me so that together we may work out the strategy and fight the
battle.  Join the nomination campaign, and keep me working.  Send me to
fight for you in the legislature.  I will not disappoint you.
___________________________________________
Published by the ALICIA FOR KINSWAY campaign committee.
You can contact Alicia Barsallo at 604-879-3246.