News and Features
James Moore's Rise To Political Power
By Charles Campbell published Nov 1, 2010
On a June evening rich with the portents of summer, the top-floor reception room of the Vancouver Art Gallery teems with dandy white shirts and elegant black dresses. It’s the opening-night gala of the Vancouver International Jazz Festival, and credits are about to roll. In the knot of people between the stage and the fire escape stands an imposing yet unfamiliar figure—a man wearing a dark suit and a pale pink shirt that are well-tailored but not quite hip. ames Moore, the MP for Port Moody–Westwood–Port Coquitlam and Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages, steps out of the pocket and onto the stage. He announces that the festival will get a special grant of $615,000 from Industry Canada’s Marquee Tourism Events Program, a mark of the festival’s international stature. Then he takes his swing. “Governments need to step up and support the arts, not step back.” Moore doesn’t name Gordon Campbell and the BC Liberals, but the target is clear. The federal Conservatives did not cut arts funding, as the BC Liberals did, in the wake of the global economic pratfall.
In fact, the Conservatives have lately delivered the biggest arts-funding budgets in Canadian history. Not what you would expect from the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose remark during the 2008 election campaign that arts galas and funding don’t resonate with “ordinary people” boomeranged so badly in Quebec that it may have cost him a parliamentary majority.
Politicians don’t last long if they make the same mistake twice. James Moore has been sent down from the mountain to the city to spread the new Harper gospel, and he’s been working the message hard. Last fall in Vancouver, he called provincial cuts “potentially devastating.” The local media ignored him.
Tonight, at the VAG, Mayor Gregor Robertson is the star. He opens his remarks with a homily: “There’s nothing better than the arts to bring people together for a beautiful summer.” Then he plays the bongos. It’s Gregor who will make the six o’clock news.
Moore has always been a bit of an outsider. As a teenager in Coquitlam, he was a high-school contrarian fixated on American politics; his 1994 Centennial Secondary School yearbook entry declares that “multiculturalism doesn’t work” and praises Richard Nixon and Oliver North. “My future plans are to meet my idols (Rush H. Limbaugh and Ronald W. Reagan), then to pursue a career in politics.” He studied business, economics, and political science at Douglas College and the University of Northern British Columbia, then worked briefly for 1040 AM, at that time a struggling Vancouver radio station.
