Arjun, there is life after politics

I was browsing Arjun Singh’s Your Kamloops blog and came across an entry titled “It Sucks Not to Be At The UBCM Convention This Year.” I suspect Arjun misses politics and being involved in making policy. He wrote it awhile ago, but it got me thinking about comparisons between last week’s B.C. Chamber of Commerce convention in Vancouver, and UBCM (Union of B.C. Municipalities) and FCM Federation of Canadian Municipalities) conventions.

It was my third B.C. chamber AGM, and I attended a half dozen UBCM conventions and about three FCM conventions.

There are many similarities between them, and some differences. The UBCM and FCM conventions begin with a day of tours and golf and such in which no business whatsoever gets accomplished, and I always used to skip that and arrive the second day. Though the chamber has a couple of nice dinners, it gets right down to business Thursday morning and works right through to Saturday night’s president’s gala.

 

While the UBCM and FCM include workshops, the chamber focuses more on interesting speakers relating to the theme of that year’s conference. Where they’re most similar is in resolutions directed at senior levels of government. These policy sessions are the most important, and exhausting, part of the conferences. They’re all debated and voted upon in much the same manner. But whereas the municipal policy sessions are pretty much a free-for-all, the chamber’s are more organized and strategized.

Frankly, I prefer the way the UBCM and FCM do it — though councils certainly lobby for their own resolutions, there’s little if any coordination on how to vote on resolutions from other councils. You vote according to your own opinion. At the chamber, you’re supposed to vote as a caucus, which has caused me problems a time or two when I voted contrary to what the Kamloops group wanted.

But I find the chamber AGMs every bit as exciting as the municipal conventions, and they have some damn good speakers. This year, for example, we got to hear Premier Gordon Campbell, several B.C. cabinet ministers,  a federal cabinet minister, Olympics CEO John Furlong, hockey star Scott Niedermayer, an excellent media panel, and a guy name David Pollak, who was New York campaign chief in the Obama campaign. I got to needle Pollak about Canada’s win over the U.S. in Olympics hockey, asked  Economic Development Minister Iain Black about the Aboriginal Cogeneration Corp. project, had a quiet debate with Walt Cobb (who’s served both as a mayor and an MLA) about capping the business share of municipal taxes, and reminisced about local politics with Barriere’s Bill Kershaw.

The chamber is only one of several organizations whose boards or committees I continue to be part of, but it’s an important one. Here’s the thing, Arjun. Politics is an addiction that can’t be cured, but it can be managed. It should be one phase in community involvement, not the ultimate objective. There is life after UBCM.