On a brisk fall morning, Darlene navigated through the crowd of commuters to a seat on the Seabus in North Vancouver. She had an appointment with ICBC concerning a serious fender-bender in the parking lot of a recreation centre - involving an ambulance, of all things. With a stressful week nearing an end, she looked forward to a getaway with friends at Whistler. It would make for a nice break from her night classes in English Literature.
Although Darlene is a character of my invention, the particulars in her imaginary week are not: a province-wide system of community/regional colleges, the Seabus, the resort area of Blackcomb and Whistler, and even the BC Ambulance Service.
Most British Columbians take the above for granted, but they were all initiated during a narrow window of time in the province, from 1972 to 1975.
A former city planner, Bob Williams became the Minister of Lands, Forests and Water Resources in the NDP government led by premier Dave Barrett. If Barrett was the heart of the new administration, Williams was the brains, guts and muscle. He was a social engineer who believed capital could be put to productive social purposes without beggaring the business class, and he had a hand in almost all the government’s major initiatives.
(Above: from the Bob Williams memorial)
The joint accomplishments of Barrett and Williams included the Agricultural Land Reserve, a ministry for consumer protection, a department of housing, Robson Square, a revamped labour relations act, ICBC, community health boards, The Burns Lake Nature Development Corporation, The Coordinated Law Enforcement Unit, the doubling of BC Parks from 3 million to 6 million acres, and as mentioned above, a province-wide upgrade for ambulance service.
“Most people don't know that ambulances were Cadillacs when I was young,” recalled Williams in a 2012 talk. “And if somehow you crammed the body in, and the attendants had to crawl in beside you. A team in Saanich designed the modern ambulance, which became the standard for North America.”
Liberating energies, not regulating them
Williams wasn’t interested in incremental, penny-ante policy programs. On the night of the NDP victory in 1972, he and Barrett sat in the back corner of the Only Café in the Downtown Eastside, scribbling down many of programs the incoming government would launch. Earlier that day, the former city planner heard a terrified caller on the Jack Webster radio show ask if the election could be annulled by a meeting at the Vancouver Club.
“To business leaders, the image of Williams wheeling and dealing in the BC economy, treating the province as his game board, with the provincial treasury at his disposal, was a nightmare prospect that seemed to have become reality,” wrote Geoff Meggs and Rod Mickleburgh in The Art of the Impossible: David Barrett and the NDP in Power 1972-1975.
“I am a socialist who believes in free enterprise,” Williams declared back in 1964. No mere theoretician of the left lacking power to effect change, he combined his intellectual understanding of how capital worked with a capacity to leverage the BC treasury into funding socially progressive programs with net productive economic results.
The East Sider stepped on a lot of toes in the process of reshaping the province. He was sued multiple times, and he’s still not remembered fondly by some British Columbians who resisted the significant changes he fought for. He was a fierce enemy of both government and corporate bureaucracy, and he didn’t suffer fools gladly. He often wielded his sharp mind and sonorous voice like a weapon. His hot temper was legendary, and one time I caught a flash of it directed at others. I suspect much of this, appropriate or otherwise, came out of the disconnect in seeing how things are and what they might be. While his impatience rankled some, it was tempered by a gentleness and geniality appreciated by those, like me, who got to know him a bit.
Williams believed government intervention was necessary to liberate individual energies, not regulate them, and unlike mainstream CCF and NDP policy makers, he was not committed to nationalization. Private ownership, co-op ownership and public ownership all had a place in his ideal world. [Andrew] Petter considered him a pragmatist, “a decentralist calling for a break-up of the monopolies in favour of a plethora of small-scale private and cooperative enterprises.”
- The Art of the Impossible: David Barrett and the NDP in Power, 1972-1975.
In the waning days of the Barrett administration’s second term, Bob recalled, “some of us had come to the conclusion that our real job was to transfer power to the people.” With this in mind, he went on to help create Vancity's community and business programs. No longer constrained by regional politics, he took an interest in Italy’s most economically productive area, Emilio Romagna, renowned for the world’s highest concentration of cooperative businesses and services.
Impressed with what he found in the region, Williams and others initiated Vancity’s annual Bologna Program for Cooperative Studies. In the summer of 2005, I seized the opportunity to join in, taking a week of classes at the downtown SFU campus followed by three weeks in Italy. Field trips alternated with seminars at Europe's oldest university campus in Bologna, where I studied briefly under the looming presence of economics professor Stefano Zamagni, the world’s reigning academic authority on business cooperatives.
I fondly recall the conversations I had with Bob as we vectored on bus from one cooperative to another. He asked me if I had ever seen the BBC comedy series “Yes, Minister.” I knew of it, but hadn’t watched it regularly. “It’s a totally accurate representation of legislative politics!” he exclaimed. According to Bob, the show’s obnoxious unelected aide, who continually undermines the efforts of the elected minister, perfectly represented the standard-issue government bureaucrat who works overtime to preserve the status quo. He knew the type well.
The restless many and the prosperous few
The extraordinary three-year period of the Barrett government has mostly gone down the memory hole. I suspect in part because it counters the media-mediated myth that socialist governments can only deliver debt, dependency, and inefficiency. The Barrett government's legacy is still with us in British Columbia, although some of it has already been dismantled and sold for scrap by a succession of BC Liberal governments. (And in their own way, the recent BC NDP administrations has been even more disappointing.)
Fifty years ago in Canada, elected governments could still successfully take an oppositional stance against vested interests, in favour of the common good. Today’s governments, civic to national, are increasingly handcuffed by transnational agreements and captured regulatory agencies that ensure the corporate class remains untroubled by the electorate.
In a time of globalized kleptocracy, the odds seem to be stacked against genuine progressive politics, even by those who now claim to represent the working class. At least for the present moment, the ‘restless many’ appear to have been corralled and hoodwinked by the ‘prosperous few.’
Bob probably would have said that’s all the more reason to struggle on.
When I was in Italy with the Vancity study group, it was the height of the Iraq war (precipitated by the Bush regime’s nefarious hallucination of Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction”). Bob confided to me that he struggled to not wake up every morning feeling “despair”, and I believe this is what drove him on. He could see in many of the ways the world was broken, and as an activist thinker who knew how some of the political machinery worked, he wasn’t content to sit back and watch the gears grinding away toward corruption, cronyism and collapse. He was determined to do what he could to improve the lot of the common man, woman, and child - regionally and beyond.
As far as I know, Williams was no Buddhist. Yet I don’t think it’s a total stretch to describe him as a Bodhisattva - that is, someone with a compassionate commitment to help others achieve liberation from suffering. I like to think of him as “Bobhisattva.” A wise, caring and capable man who put his shoulder to the wheel of life, and against all odds, moved it on the west coast of Canada.
“When you love you create. Bob embodied, I think, what the political philosopher Hannah Arendt called ‘amor mundi,’ or love of the world. This is not love as its commonly used, but what Arendt characterized as a willingness to look pain, exploitation and desolation directly in the face and not through some remote, platitudinous haze, and to plant our feet firmly in that reality, and to act.”
- Ed Etmanski, Bob Williams’ memorial, Sept. 16
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Fascinating and timely piece since we're going to vote soon and perhaps need a reminder of what a real politician with guts and ideas looks like. May we see his like again; we need people like him more than ever. Thanks for a great tribute. I have sent it to my finds and family.
Thanks for this great tribute to a great man. I knew of Bob Williams as a serious mover and shaker in our province, but this podcast interview from a few years ago really humanized him for me. Thankfully he was able to go on making great advancements long after being an elected politician
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/below-the-radar/id1359315967?i=1000424534080