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Lauren Semple and Cheryl Lien can barely contain their excitement as the tour bus arrives at Transfer Beach in Ladysmith.
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NDP uses Singh's appeal, social media to attract younger environmental voters – Vancouver Sun
But it’s a balancing act if party is to hold onto traditional union support
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The 20-somethings squeal and jump as the door opens and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh emerges. They are among the cheering crowd of 200, mostly party volunteers, who jostle for a selfie and a moment with their leader during a quick stop in a riding the NDP believes is theirs to take back from the Green incumbent.
“Young voters feel disenfranchised and they need someone to inspire them, and I think that’s what Jagmeet brings,” says Semple. “He tells us ‘we can do this’ and ‘we can make change.’ He is spreading that message through the channels that young people use.”
These women represent the young voters the party is trying to court through social media channels and through candidates and platforms that highlight millennials’ concerns, including climate change.
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But some political observers caution that while the party may need young voters, it must also retain its traditional union support.
“They’ve always had to do a bit of a dance with labour,” said Gerald Baier, a University of B.C. political science professor.
That labour support is not guaranteed.
Although the Canadian Labour Congress and the B.C. Federation of Labour have endorsed the NDP in this election, union leaders like Geoff Dawe, the president of Local 2 of the Public and Private Workers of Canada, said that doesn’t mean union members will automatically vote NDP.
“In the past, our national group backed the NDP, and we do have a Jack Layton poster in our local office right now,” said Dawe, whose local represents 600 workers at the pulp mill in Crofton, on Vancouver Island.
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“But we were expecting a little more attention to the state of the workforce in Canada and in B.C. None of the parties are talking about labour issues. It would be nice to hear from the NDP,” he said.
So far in this campaign, the NDP’s promises of 10 days of paid sick leave, a ban on unpaid internships outside of educational programs, and raising the federal minimum wage to $20 are aimed more at younger lower-income workers than at unionized employees of the boomer generation.
The NDP is putting a lot of effort into courting the youth vote in B.C., where the party believes the climate emergency is a winner among those under the age of 40. They hope the loss of support for the Green party will help defeat the Green incumbent in Nanaimo-Ladysmith, and push the NDP over the top in other close races.
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That’s why NDP candidates with high-profile environmental credentials are running in swing ridings. Anjali Appadurai, the former climate justice lead for the Sierra Club of B.C., is the party’s candidate in Vancouver–Granville. And Avi Lewis is running in West Vancouver–Sunshine Coast–Sea to Sky Country. He has traditional bona fides as the grandson of former federal NDP leader David Lewis and the son of former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis. He also has climate change credentials gained by co-writing “The Leap Manifesto” with his wife Naomi Klein. It calls for an end to fossil fuels, and a moratorium on pipelines forms the basis of the party’s environmental policies.
The party is also targeting young voters by using TikTok, the most downloaded app on the planet, where anyone can get thousands of views by uploading 15 seconds of content. It’s also planning to ramp up its social media campaigns on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. Singh will also appear in the Nintendo game “Animal Crossing” to entice young gamers to cast their ballot.
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However, Baier said it’s not enough to have followers on social media.
“Young voters often don’t turn out to vote,” he explained. “You have to knock on doors and get people out to vote, and I think that will be even more important this time around when turnout is expected to be low.”
The NDP’s campaign strategist for B.C., Glen Sanford, says the party will use “modelling behaviour” to get out the vote among social media users.
“We will use examples on social media so young people are able to see other young people voting,” said Sanford. “Not using big-time influencers, but peers. What you will see during advance polls is showing people how easy it is to vote and that this is something that a lot of young people are doing.”
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The party will also rely on help from the provincial NDP to get the vote out.
Although Premier John Horgan has not come out directly to support his federal counterpart, hundreds of provincial party volunteers and many staff, including one of the premier’s communications directors, are now working full-time on the federal campaign in B.C.
Baier believes Singh could benefit from the party’s provincial success.
“One of the things that has changed in B.C. is that Horgan got seats where the NDP never had, like in suburban Metro Vancouver, and I think that is the kind of rising tide that may lift all boats,” said Baier.
Party strategists looking at the polls know that the dead heat between the Liberals and Conservatives means they need to brace for the traditional attack by Liberals, who will say a vote for the NDP is a vote for Conservatives.
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That is why in the final days of the campaign, Singh will be talking about how the Liberals and the Conservatives ganged up to defeat NDP bills on pharmacare and a tax on corporations that earned record-breaking profits during the pandemic.
It’s a message that organizers like Sanford will be pushing in B.C.
“When people look at Trudeau and O’Toole, they see leaders that are really on the side of the ultrarich, and they know that Singh isn’t and I really think that’s the defining difference,” he said.
It’s the defining difference the NDP hopes will resonate with B.C. voters, no matter what their age.
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Sometimes, you just have to return to the classics.
That’s especially true as Halloween approaches. While you queue up your spooky movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror movies from the past 70 years for inspiration, and what AP writers had to say about them when they were first released.
We resurrected excerpts from these reviews, edited for clarity, from the dead — did they stand the test of time?
“Rear Window” (1954)
“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick pulled off by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg, sets him up at an apartment window where he can observe, among other things, a murder across the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is laid out before you, as seen through the eyes of a Peeping Tom.
James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others make it good fun.
— Bob Thomas
“Halloween” (1978)
At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis is starring in a creepy little thriller film called “Halloween.”
Until now, Jamie’s main achievement has been as a regular on the “Operation Petticoat” TV series. Jamie is much prouder of “Halloween,” though it is obviously an exploitation picture aimed at the thrill market.
The idea for “Halloween” sprang from independent producer-distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a terror-tale involving a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill fashioned a script about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown intending to murder his sister’s friends.
— Bob Thomas
“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)
“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one nail-biting sequence to another. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including closeups of skinned corpses. The squeamish had best stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”
Ted Tally adapted the Thomas Harris novel with great skill, and Demme twists the suspense almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is carried a tad too far, though it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.
Such a tale as “The Silence of the Lambs” requires accomplished actors to pull it off. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She provides steely intelligence, with enough vulnerability to sustain the suspense. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.
— Bob Thomas
“Scream” (1996)
In this smart, witty homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are being killed in the same gruesome fashion as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.
If it sounds like the script of every other horror movie to come and go at the local movie theater, it’s not.
By turns terrifying and funny, “Scream” — written by newcomer David Williamson — is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its references to Wes Craven’s competitors in gore.
— Ned Kilkelly
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
Imaginative, intense and stunning are a few words that come to mind with “The Blair Witch Project.”
“Blair Witch” is the supposed footage found after three student filmmakers disappear in the woods of western Maryland while shooting a documentary about a legendary witch.
The filmmakers want us to believe the footage is real, the story is real, that three young people died and we are witnessing the final days of their lives. It isn’t. It’s all fiction.
But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, take us to the edge of belief, squirming in our seats the whole way. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.
— Christy Lemire
“Saw” (2004)
The fright flick “Saw” is consistent, if nothing else.
This serial-killer tale is inanely plotted, badly written, poorly acted, coarsely directed, hideously photographed and clumsily edited, all these ingredients leading to a yawner of a surprise ending. To top it off, the music’s bad, too.
You could forgive all (well, not all, or even, fractionally, much) of the movie’s flaws if there were any chills or scares to this sordid little horror affair.
But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who developed the story together, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantry and ugliness.
— David Germain
Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.
“Paranormal Activity” (2009)
The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.
The entire film takes place at the couple’s cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads.
The thinness of the premise is laid bare toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” owns a raw, primal potency, proving again that, to the mind, suggestion has as much power as a sledgehammer to the skull.
— Glenn Whipp
Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three stars out of four.
“The Conjuring” (2013)
As sympathetic, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted-house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average fright fest.
“The Conjuring,” which boasts incredulously of being their most fearsome, previously unknown case, is built very in the ’70s-style mold of “Amityville” and, if one is kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its aspirations to such a lineage.
But as effectively crafted as “The Conjuring” is, it’s lacking the raw, haunting power of the models it falls shy of. “The Exorcist” is a high standard, though; “The Conjuring” is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “The Conjuring” two and half stars out of four.
“Get Out” (2017)
Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.”
In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has — as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?”
It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films — never the most inclusive of genres — the Black dude is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Get Out” three stars out of four.
“Hereditary” (2018)
In Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”
A night out with “Hereditary” is many things, but you won’t confuse it for an evening of healing and therapy. It’s more like the opposite.
Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying and good that you have to see it, even if you shouldn’t want to, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.
The hype is mostly justified.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Hereditary” three stars out of four.
Read the full review here. ___
Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.
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