By Bill Cleverley, Victoria Times Colonist, 1 December 2002
Ben congratulates his opponent Alan Lowe the night of the 2002 election. Credit: John McKay, Times Colonist
Unwanted by much of the left and discounted by the right, Ben Isitt turned a lot of heads when he claimed a third of the vote in last month’s campaign for the Victoria mayoralty.
Not bad for a 24-year-old pony-tailed, bearded radical better known as a perennial protester than a serious political candidate.
This isn’t a guy searching for a salable political compromise — Isitt’s a socialist and not afraid to say it.
Some pundits called the left’s resurgence in B.C.’s recent municipal elections a wake-up call for Premier Gordon Campbell’s Liberals. Isitt’s showing of 5,047 votes might serve the same purpose for New Democratic Party organizers agonizing over the future of their party.
Consider this. Isitt, with two key 24-year-old strategists, a corps of about 40 dedicated volunteers and a limited war chest of about $9,000, managed to grab one out of every three votes in Victoria’s mayoral race. He even beat incumbent Alan Lowe in Fernwood, prompting his supporters to dub him that neighbourhood’s mayor.
Isitt was born in Winnipeg, the only child of an upper-middle class family that moved to Oak Bay when he was a teenager. His father, Julian, is a senior civil servant with the B.C. government.
Ben Isitt said he comes by his socialism honestly.
“My parents haven’t been active in politics but they’ve always been left-leaning,” he said. “I’ve always been brought up with those values. So it wasn’t like I made a fundamental break, but I’m probably a bit more out there, a bit more to the left than my parents.”
A straight-A student and medal-winning track athlete at Oak Bay high, Isitt took time in his senior year to backpack through the United States. The trip, he said, was an eye-opener as he witnessed “glaring poverty” first-hand. It also served as his introduction to radicalism.
“It was the last couple years of high school that I sort of took the turn toward the radical left,” he recalled in an interview. “I bought my first socialist newspaper when I was in Boston on my backpacking trip. It was right outside of Harvard University. So it was the Ivy League where I was introduced to Marxian socialism.”
It was in a high school history course that he developed a taste for politics: he was one of only two students who argued from the left in a debate about socialism versus capitalism. By the time he entered UVic in 1996, he was clearly on the left and became involved with a variety of activist groups.
Although influenced by Marxism, Isitt is politically savvy enough not to label himself.
“I’m a socialist. There’s a lot of alarm bells that go off with people and a lot of left-wingers are lumped in with the Russian experience, which I clearly don’t identify with. I’m definitely a socialist and I don’t feel any need to qualify that.”
Feeling burned out after his first year of university, Isitt decided to travel. He saved enough money working as a staff member and lifeguard at a camp on Saltspring Island to spend eight months journeying through 28 countries in Europe and the Middle East. He even spent a couple of months on an Israeli kibbutz, gardening and working in the laundry and dining hall.
The trip confirmed his politics and sparked an interest in journalism and writing. He returned to UVic in 1998, where he earned an undergraduate degree in history with a professional writing minor and served as news editor of the student newspaper, The Martlet. Now he is on a full fellowship at UVic, writing his master’s thesis on the labour movement from a western Canadian perspective.
In his off-hours, he enjoys hiking and camping. Ultimately, he would like to teach history at UVic.
Passionate about his beliefs, Isitt became well-known locally over the past few years for his activism. That included helping to organize a student walkout a year ago over the war in Afghanistan. That was where he met his partner Melissa Moroz, 26, communications director for a teaching assistants’ union and a graduate student in sociology at UVic.
In February, Isitt and a handful of friends started “Camp Campbell,” the tent city protest that took over the legislature lawns for 22 days. Isitt was the target of some whispered criticism because he had a home to return to, unlike many of the true homeless on the lawn. He also was not at Camp Campbell when the police finally moved in. Isitt maintains he took only a couple of nights off to sleep in his rented one-room Fernwood cottage, and when the police broke up the camp he had just left after being there and awake the previous 40 hours.
Isitt was a vocal critic of tuition increases at UVic and also was active in the Day of Defiance rally at the legislature in October. All this led to some seeing him as something of a rent-a-protester, available to carry a sign wherever a crowd gathers.
But David Turner, the former Victoria mayor who endorsed Isitt’s bid for the mayoralty — as did the Victoria Labour Council, the B.C. Government Employees Union, the B.C. branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees and the UVic NDP — rejects that suggestion.
“If people want to see it as activism for activism’s sake, I think that’s a misunderstanding of what is happening,” said Turner. “Many of those protests where you say he’s there, I’m there as well.
“What I think he’s doing, and what I think I’m doing, is trying to speak out for people who are marginalized and therefore silenced. That’s what activism does. It raises those issues.”
Isitt became involved in the race only when it became clear that the NDP-backed Victoria Civic Electors would not field a candidate against Lowe.
“My friends and I found it appalling,” Isitt said. “I mean, whatever happened to class politics? Alan Lowe might be a nice guy personally, but he still definitely represents different interests. He represents development interests; he’s backed by the Chamber of Commerce. He’s a past card-carrying member of the B.C. Liberals.
“It seemed like some people in the NDP actually thought we can work with him.”
There’s a difference, Isitt said, between having a working relationship out of necessity and actually endorsing that situation. “I don’t think a socialist should be engaged in that sort of politics.”
Isitt did not get the VCE nod because the optics weren’t right. The party didn’t want to go into the race with a long-haired radical at the top of its ticket.
“We were worried that might have cost us attention on the issues we wanted to raise in the campaign,” said Victoria Coun. Rob Fleming, one of the VCE’s main strategists.
“Running no mayoralty candidate was preferable, I think, than spending the time and resources on an untested candidate. We were worried that our mayoralty candidate would be the public face in the media for all of the candidates.”
Translation: The VCE would do more for Isitt than Isitt could do for the VCE.
Isitt said he didn’t care who carried the VCE banner as long as there was someone speaking from the left.
Politics are a big part of his life and he doesn’t rule out a return. “If the situation dictates it, I’ll run,” he says. “But I’ll also happily work on someone else’s campaign. This has never been about me wanting to be a career politician.
“I am going to be a socialist my whole life and I am going to work towards that. And if that takes the form of public office, either at the provincial or federal level, so be it.”
