Mable & The Wood
Why isn't Vancouver-Kensington MLA Mable Elmore in the B.C. cabinet?
Down to earth, friendly, and outgoing woman. Most are older but there are a couple of young ones. They think very different from most people & they are really creative.
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- Mable Elmore's mother, Maria, moved to Canada in 1965 from the island of Cebu in the Philippines.
It's a question that some Filipino Canadians are asking after they signed an open letter pleading with Premier John Horgan to include her after she won her fourth straight election in her constituency.
Rather than being invited onto the executive council, the first MLA ever elected of Filipinx ancestry was named parliamentary secretary for seniors' services and long-term care.
And the community is upset about this.
Sixteen of Horgan's ministers and ministers of state have less experience in the legislature than Elmore, who was part of the group of MLAs first elected in 2009.
Horgan only appointed Elmore to one of the nine cabinet committees: the working group on mental health, addictions, and homelessness.
It's chaired by David Eby (first elected in 2013) and its vice chair is Sheila Malcolmson (first elected to the legislature in 2019).
Albeit, there are other NDP MLAs who've been in the legislature longer than Elmore and who were kept out of cabinet: Nanaimo–North Cowichan's Doug Routley (first elected in 2005), Vancouver–West End's Spencer Chandra Herbert (first elected in a by-election in 2008), and Surrey–Fleetwood's Jagrup Brar (first elected in a by-election in 2004, defeated in 2013, and returned to the legislature in 2017).
But Elmore is female in a party that prizes gender parity in cabinet.
Plus, she's the only MLA whose mother was born in the Philippines, which is one of the largest source countries for immigrants to Canada. This community has consistently supported the NDP in recent years. And she's the only one who has made a habit of appearing at news conferences on behalf of migrant workers.
Meanwhile, a rookie MLA who's never been elected to any public office—Jennifer Whiteside—was named minister of education with a $6.7-billion budget and sits on four cabinet committees. It doesn't seem fair.
That's why I too have been asking myself why Horgan didn't include Elmore in cabinet.
It's particularly puzzling in light of Elmore's conduct since being elected.
Mable And The Wood Walkthrough
Elmore demonstrated loyalty
In 2010 when 13 NDP MLAs raised concerns about the direction of the party under then leader Carole James, Elmore leapt to her defence as a loyal lieutenant. Later, Elmore became deputy finance critic to James, who was the finance critic.
Elmore also worked extremely hard to rally members of her community to support Adrian Dix's successful leadership run in 2011. Dix probably wouldn't have won without her backing.
I recall Dix telling me back then what an outstanding organizer Elmore was.
Then in 2015, she sought the NDP federal nomination in Vancouver East. She narrowly lost to Jenny Kwan, who had lined up enormous support from establishment figures in the community.
This demonstrated once again that Elmore is an able organizer who can inspire her supporters.
And in office, she has frequently advocated on behalf of marginalized people, including live-in caregivers. That's one reason why she's attracted so much support in the Filipinx community.
She's also started a public conversation about introducing Tagalog instruction into some B.C. schools.
Does the problem date back to 2004?
Nobody can peer into the mind of John Horgan or his chief of staff, Geoff Meggs to know why Elmore remains on the backbenches, notwithstanding her loyalty to the cause.
I'm hoping that it doesn't go back to an interview she gave in 2004 to a tiny online publication called Seven Oaks. It was created by some student radicals at SFU, some of whom have gone on to become fairly high-profile Vancouver residents.
The interview concerned the U.S.-led war on Iraq in 2003, which Elmore vehemently opposed as a union activist when she was driving a bus for a living.
Here's a snippet of that interview:
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Seven Oaks: What kind of reactions have you received—because you’re a rank-and-file activist—from your co-workers and your fellow union member in your local to some of the anti-war work that you’ve been doing in the union?
Mable Elmore: It’s been tough. And I’m in a male-dominated union, we’re ninety per cent men, and a lot of middle-aged brothers and I’m in the minority; I’m an activist, I’m a lesbian of colour, and out in the union, and so it’s kind of hitting all those fronts. And in terms of the anti-war stuff, it’s really been a struggle. We have vocal Zionists in our worksites, and we’ve had to battle them, and—really, I’d characterize it as 'battles,’ in terms of turning our executive members around, and bringing educationals into our workplace, and being shut out by management, and having to have our workshops outside of the worksite, and facing continual backlash. But the backlash is also a sign of making progress. So that’s how we take that perspective, but, it’s been tough but we’re going to continue to push. We’re signing up more and more members [to the Peace and Justice Committee], and that’s continuing that mobilizing, and that hasn’t been easy.
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One of Elmore's statements in that interview—'We have vocal Zionists in our worksites'—came back to haunt her five years later after she was elected to the B.C. legislature.
Members of the press gallery started hounding James about this. So James held a news conference at which she said that the 'comments were clearly unacceptable and they were offensive'. And Elmore issued an apology.
Keep in mind that the term Zionist is regularly used in the Israeli media. The Zionist movement emerged from Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl's call for fellow Jews to migrate to the land now known as Israel.
Many Jews embraced Zionism in the 20th century but a sizeable minority didn't. Some non-Jews were also Zionists, moving to Israel as young adults to work on kibbutzim to support the Jewish state.
Back in 2003, Elmore was correct in opposing Canadian participation in the war in Iraq, given that it was based on two big lies.
The first lie was that Iraq's then dictator, Saddam Hussein, had weapons of mass destruction. The second lie was that he was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden.
Yet for simply using the word Zionists, Elmore was somehow painted as anti-Jewish when there are many high-profile Jewish people in Vancouver who also opposed the U.S.-led attack on Iraq. And when Elmore apologized five years later as a new MLA under pressure from her leader, this irritated former colleagues in the antiwar movement.
Community wants a role model in cabinet
It was sad to see back then. And it's sad to see that now, 12 years later, Elmore remains on the NDP backbenches while those with far less B.C. legislative experience have been catapulted to great heights.
Is she still being punished for making honestly felt comments to a tiny publication 16 years ago? We'll likely never know the answer to that question.
But one thing is clear: some in the Filipinx community are very irritated with the premier.
They want one of their own in cabinet so she can serve as a role model for their children and grandchildren, much as Kamala Harris is doing today for South Asian and Black families as the U.S. vice president–elect.
And this community outrage is not good news for NDP politicians like Adrian Dix, Don Davies, Jenny Kwan, Garry Begg, George Chow, and Bowinn Ma, who all have significant Filipinx populations in their constituencies.
Stonewood Flooring
If Horgan wants to calm the waters, he might want to reverse this snub at the earliest opportunity.