Front Burner - 'Not illegal': Ousted B.C. NDP leadership candidate speaks out

Episode Date: October 21, 2022

On Wednesday night, B.C. NDP leadership candidate Anjali Appadurai was disqualified from the race, clearing the path for the coronation of her competitor, David Eby, who will become the province’s premier. After an investigation, Appadurai was disqualified for allegedly having "engaged in serious improper conduct'' by working with third parties for membership drives on her behalf and for allegedly soliciting ”fraudulent memberships.” Appadurai says her removal was a political hit job and that the NDP was threatened by her team's ability to out-organize her opponent. Today on Front Burner, Appadurai joins us.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. On Wednesday night, a young, up-and-coming star of B.C.'s leftist climate movement was disqualified from her run to become leader of the province's NDP party. The B.C. NDP leadership race is no longer a race. The party's executive says the candidate, Anjali Apadurai, broke the rules,

and that an investigation showed she allegedly coordinated with this environmental group to sign up members on her behalf. Also, that her campaign worked with this group to solicit quote fraudulent members. This has been a difficult road for everyone, some challenges along the way to be sure, but I'm confident that the work of the table officers and the executive of the BCNDP have been thorough, have been exhaustive. But Anjali and her supporters are fighting back. They say they didn't break the rules, that this investigation had a predetermined conclusion, and that essentially this was a political hit job.

They don't want to see a young climate activist, woman of color, be disqualified on baseless accusations. The argument really comes down to how much did our campaign communicate with those other third-party campaigns? Because it's not their membership drive that was the problem. It's whether we had any connection with them and whether we accepted that help in any way. And I maintain that we did not. Anjali and her supporters say her campaign threatened the NDP party establishment,

and that they were out-organizing the NDP's preferred candidate, Dave Eby, who I should mention will now effectively be crowned Premier of British Columbia. Now there are questions about what this internal rift means for the future of the party. Anjali Apadurai is here with me now to discuss all of this. Angelia, thank you so much for being with me today. We're very appreciative. Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. So look, I know you think that this disqualification was politically motivated, and I want to get into why you think that is in a little bit. But before we do, I think we have to

start by going through the specific accusations against you here. And so the first rule you are alleged to have broken is that leadership candidates, they're not allowed to coordinate or strategize with a third party that has its own money and resources, right? And so the chief electoral officer who conducted the investigation says that you slash your campaign asked this environmental group, Dogwood, to sign up members to the BC NDP for you on your behalf, and that they obliged that request. What's your response to that accusation? Yeah, there's a number of pieces to that. So first of all, when we kicked off our campaign, it was in early August, we had read the elections rules, and it was very clear that the rules around what

third parties were and were not allowed to do were really just about general elections and did not apply to leadership races. That was the understanding that we went in with. Even keeping that aside, we weren't coordinating with third parties in any way. And I'll get into that a bit in a minute. But leadership races were not part of the rules for third parties as per election law, except when it comes to political donations. The rules about maximum donations apply to leadership races, to general elections, to all third parties. That was the basis of our understanding right up until the end of August. And then on August 31st, we received a bulletin from the CEO that essentially was a rule change. But what it was, was taking those elections rules that apply to general elections and

applying them to leadership races, essentially changing the interpretation of the rules, expanding, widely expanding the interpretation of the rules. And then she sort of sent that out in a bulletin. And we were taken aback. Our reasonable interpretation, as backed up by legal advice, was quite different, but we immediately began complying with her new interpretation. And then the problematic piece was that she then applied that new interpretation that she'd sent out at the end of August retroactively to activities that happened weeks before. Yeah. And so I guess her position is that those rules always existed. I mean, I know you don't think that those rules are always existed, but I think her position is that those rules always existed. And she points to this meeting

that you had on August 6th, where like a high ranking member from that environmental group, Dogwood was there. A bunch of other people were there as well. You were there. And this request went out to help you sign up members. And she points to this as evidence that there was strategizing coordination between these groups. And so would you define that as coordination? groups. And so would you define that as coordination? No. So this is another piece, right? So a lot of the CEO's argument comes down to this August 6th Zoom call. And this was a call that I hosted. I had for weeks prior to that been deliberating whether I should do this, whether I should throw my hat in the ring. And it was a very difficult decision to make. And so I did what I think is a very common thing to do. I put out the word through my networks and my communities to host a meeting where we would

deliberate this together and see if there was going to be interest in us turning this into a leadership race. And so I invited a whole bunch of these organizations. We invited Dogwood. We invited what would be considered third-party organizations. These are all the folks in my network. And the idea was to ask the question, are you interested in turning this into a race? If I were to put my hat in the ring, and if I were to bring these ideas forward, would you be interested in turning this into a contest of ideas? If not, I wasn't going to run because this is an incredibly, obviously difficult thing to do. And I only wanted to do it if it really turned into a contest of

ideas. When I look back on that Zoom call, it's a really beautiful example of grassroots organizing. And so what I see on that Zoom call is us saying, should we do this? Is there interest from the community? And the community is saying, absolutely, there is. By the end of that meeting, so there was, I did not have a campaign before that meeting. By the end of that meeting, it was clear. The report seems have a campaign before that meeting. By the end of that meeting, it was clear. I mean, I think the report seems to suggest that you had an email address and a bank account. Oh, yeah. They would say like, that's a campaign, I think would be their position.

Exactly. That's their position. And I think that that position demonstrates a lack of understanding about grassroots organizing, because what we had was basic things to be prepared for a meeting like that. I had set up a Gmail address, you know, it's not exactly a professional. It was not a campaign email. We had set up a donation, we had set up a donation thing. That was also, you know, a 10 minute process. So we had basic pieces in place just in case there was a green light. But once the campaign kicked off, all of those were thrown out the window and actual official campaign materials were created. You know, I totally reject the notion that we had, you know, a full fledged campaign in place before that Zoom call. And we and that Zoom call is somehow evidence of us colluding or coordinating

with third parties. After that Zoom call, we kicked off the campaign. And then after that, there was a clear boundary. We were like, all right, you guys go off and do your thing. We're going to go off and do our thing. So if that boundary was up, you know, one piece of evidence put forward in the report is about these emails sent out by Dogwood encouraging people to sign up as members of the BCNDP, which is fine. They can encourage people on their own, as we've said, to sign up for the BCNDP. But then to email your campaign to let them know that they had signed up, I would imagine that this is a way for you to kind of keep track of numbers. And why is that not evidence of some sort of coordination,

a strategy, working together? Yeah, we announced that email on the August 6th Zoom call because we knew that if we were going to do this and if we were going to sign up folks across the province to participate in the race, there is no way to track that. There's no way that we would have that information. The tool that we set up was this very crude, like, here's one email, it's a bucket for everyone who signs up in this race who feels represented by this candidate. And so there's nothing legal about that at all. It was simply a tool that we put out into the world to get a very vague sense of what was happening with this leadership race. So a lot of this argument comes down to how much did we solicit or coordinate? Because then that would mean that all the resources that went into those initiatives would have been improper political donations to our campaign.

The links that she uses to establish that coordination are the August 6 Zoom call, which was a pre-campaign call, and the fact that there were two folks who work at Dogwood who were after-hours volunteers on our campaign in those first couple chaotic weeks. And why is that not problematic to you, to have two people who have a day job at this third-party organization and then are working on your campaign as well at the same time? Oh, because that's totally above board.

You're absolutely allowed to volunteer. They were, you know, they copy-edited some emails, so they were not in strategic or decision-making roles. The rule changes did affect that. And then we scrambled to ensure that there was an even clearer boundary after the rule changes happened. But the volunteering after hours in non-strategic roles, you know, in two instances was absolutely not evidence of coordination between the two campaigns. There was no high level communication. We had no idea how they were operating their campaign. And so the links between the two campaigns are really those volunteers and the August 6 Zoom call.

And to me, in my that the presence of those folks, you know, like obviously there was communication to bring them in to help with, you know, copyediting the emails or drafting e-blasts. The inference there was that because we had that level of communication, we must have had deeper communication. And I reject that inference. And she uses, you know, my credibility as part of the argument. I think there are, there's a lot of assumptions built into this report to support that very, very tenuous

connection between our campaign and a third party. You know, it's also, I'm an activist, and I come out of these networks. And everyone in my personal and professional networks are, well, most of my friends are from these networks as well. And they have these professional affiliations. And so we were very careful about the professional boundaries. But the volunteers, or two of the volunteers that we were tapping were from my network, and they were from that third party. I maintain that that is absolutely not evidence of collusion between our campaign and a third party. the second big accusation i want to go through with you and then i want to get to some of the bigger issues here is that your campaign via the environmental group dogwood solicited quote fraudulent memberships from people so basically my understanding is that they were telling some Green Party members to pause their membership and join the NDP to come vote for you. And the

investigator found, quote, this seriously undermined the integrity of the BC NDP membership list. And how do you respond to that accusation? So again, you know, whatever Dogwood was doing was not connected to our campaign. And so there's, well, there's a couple layers to this. First of all, any new member of the BCNDP that's come from another party is an absolutely legitimate and above board thing. I welcomed the fact that there were folks cancelling memberships from other parties and coming over to the BCNDP because that's evidence that there's now a candidate that they see themselves reflected in. And it's our job, myself and my opponent, it's our job as the candidates to give them a reason to stay. And so I think that's a welcome thing to encourage folks to be inspired by a potential shift in direction. So that's a good thing. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth

to say, hey, jump over, you know, temporarily. And if your preferred candidate doesn't win, you can jump back. But again, that's not illegal. And the second layer, more important layer of that is that is not something our campaign promoted or asked for or solicited. We signed up a whole bunch of members through a tried and true model of grassroots organizing that was decentralized across the province. And I just, I think that what the CEO finds so hard to believe is that that model is so incredibly powerful. It's so powerful that we don't even know how many memberships we signed up. How many do you think you signed up?

Well, we had not a clue until the rumors started leaking out from the party. And since then, I've heard, you know, I've heard 8,000, I've heard 10,000, I've heard 12,000. And once I heard 14,000. We know that we reached thousands and thousands of people, our own paid ads, you know, our paid ads ran for about a week. And we, we generated 600,000 impressions and 19,000 clicks to the BCNDP website. Obviously, a smaller fraction of those folks actually ended up signing up, but 19,000 clicks straight to the website is no small feat. We didn't need a third party to do that. no small feat. We didn't need a third party to do that. You've said you think this investigation into your campaign had a predetermined conclusion. You've also said that this move to disqualify you is, quote, not an anomaly, but the culmination of a pattern of treatment. I just wonder if you

could elaborate for me, like, what do you what do you mean by that? Those comments? me? Like, what do you, what do you mean by that? Those comments? Yeah, well, when we first stepped into the race, uh, after that August 6th meeting, uh, you know, assigned roles and, um, and the person who was, um, our designated representative, uh, was like, okay, well, I'm going to establish a relationship with the CEO. Cause we're going to be, you know, communicating with her, and she's the one governing the race, and reached out to the CEO, and from the get-go, the interactions weren't very pleasant. You know, we reached out, we asked for an in-person meeting, she said she wanted to keep everything in writing, and then from the communication from then on, from my understanding, The communication from then on, from my understanding, was interrogative, sometimes hostile and cold, and some questions were left unanswered. Our designated rep said that she'd asked about 15 questions that went unanswered. received a constant stream of questioning and interrogation from the party that required so much capacity to respond to. There was an official complaint from my opponent's campaign

and that took a lot of capacity as well. But a lot of it was the party asking us to provide documentation, extensive documentation of all of our activities, essentially there was suspicion from the very beginning. It was not an assumption of good faith. It was an assumption of illegitimacy. So why do you think that there was, you know, in your words, this assumption, this suspicion around you? Like, why would the party want to have a predetermined conclusion here if you're like a young up-and-coming candidate signing up members to their party like that that seems like something yeah the ndp should be jazzed about no yeah well i think there's a few things i mean i acknowledge i'm this this must have been a shock

to everyone involved you know i fully recognize that i'm coming out of the blue as someone who is young and who has no government experience. For a political culture that really relies on folks going through the correct channels, that must have been a whole bunch of flags and quite a shock to accept. I think the thought of a leader of the party, a premier who had not held elected office before, must have been quite alarming to them. I get that. I'm not, you know, arrogantly trying to assume that this would have been an easy ride. I mean, I'm absolutely ready to lead because I feel that the ideas that we've brought to this race and the type of leadership I believe we need in these extraordinary times is something that I understand and I'm tapped into. And I don't think it would have been an easy ride at all. This would have been an incredibly difficult, steep learning curve.

You know, the caucus would have had to come together around a whole different kind of vision. Yeah, what is that vision and And why is that vision so different than the current vision of the BC NDP party? Well, the vision is that we need an emergency level response to the intersecting crises that we're living through. And the tone and the communication from the leadership of the party is an incredibly powerful and necessary part of that leadership,

of what the province needs to come together in what needs to be a collective undertaking, similar to what we experienced in the wartime and similar to what we experienced in the first year of the pandemic. a collective sense of emergency, a collective sense of social solidarity in the face of a very large and looming common enemy. And an acknowledgement that that emergency response has to look like a deep public investment in our public systems, a turn of the ship away from a corporate-driven, extractive-driven economy and towards something that's a lot more made in BC, a much stronger social safety net, even though the NDP has done a wonderful job and certainly better than any

other party in building our social safety net, but we need to go so much further and fundamentally a very, very strong signal from leadership that we're going to do what it takes to transition our economy immediately off of fossil fuels and towards something more sustainable and less destructive. Now, are you saying, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I also just want to be clear here. Are you saying that you feel that the structure that exists now in the BCNDP party was threatened by those positions that you have, by those ideas? I definitely think so. I think that the party has veered, certainly in the last five years, away from even what it was in 2014. You know, in 2014, you know, John Horgan was talking about cancelling Site C.

Nine billion dollars that we don't have for a project that we are told by an assessment that was done less than a year ago by the federal government that we don't need right now. And how LNG is bad for British Columbia. They said from wellhead to waterline, we were going to have the cleanest LNG in the world. 70% of the emissions in the current configuration are not covered by their legislation. We voted against that bill. And, you know, talking about putting people before profit.

talking about putting people before profit. And now we have a government that's investing in LNG for the future at a time when we need to be moving in the opposite direction, at a time where we're missing every single climate target that we've set, making a mockery of our own climate plan. So there are contradictions that are apparent to anyone who's been a member of this party for a long time and to the rest of the province. And yeah, certainly this would be lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem.

Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to,

50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. 50% of them do not know their own household income. That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I've seen you say that your disqualification was the nuclear option

and one that actually you think threatens to rip your party apart. Why do you say that? Well, I think that what my entry into the leadership race ended up doing was opening this conversation that's been bubbling below the surface. And for that, I'm grateful. And it's actually kind of a couple of concurrent conversations. One is, you know, about the future of the province in terms of responding to the climate crisis, to the health care crisis, to these intersecting crises.

What are we going to do about fossil fuels? That kind of thing. And then the second conversation is about the democracy of our party and the relationship between the decision-making parts of the party and the grassroots. That's what my candidacy really kind of represented, was an interrogation of that relationship. And I think that the disqualification

option shuts down that conversation in a way that isn't good for any party involved. It's not good for my opponent. It doesn't set him up well to kick off his leadership. It's not good for for my supporters who really had hope and who were really engaging in good faith in this conversation about the province's future. Not that that conversation is going to end, but, you know, in the leadership race it is. demonstrating that they're willing to disqualify a candidate that represents a threat to centralized power, rather than to allow the race to go on, the contest of ideas to flourish. And, you know, that would be uncomfortable and challenging, but absolutely necessary. And to allow the members to choose.

What are you going to do now? Well, my commitment is always to strengthening, you know, that last thing I talked about, that connection between social movements and institutionalized power. I don't think that we're going to be able to deliver the transformational changes that we so badly need without those two parts of democracy engaging with each other in a more fulsome way. So whatever that looks like for me, just before I entered the leadership race, I had founded an organization called the Padma Center for Climate Justice

that was focused on building collective power among global South diasporic groups towards a more progressive climate agenda. I will probably continue doing that work. And then who knows? The work is just beginning. Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you for making the time. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. All right, that is all for this week. Front Burner was produced this week by Imogen Burchard, Mackenzie Cameron, Lauren Donnelly, Shannon Higgins, and Derek Vanderwyk. Our sound design was by Sam McNulty and also Mackenzie Cameron.

Our music is by Joseph Chavisvin. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Locos, and I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.