Like many at my local video shop, I spent too much of last year watching Borgen, the Danish political drama not available on Netflix. What I loved about the series, besides its exploration of political, social, and sexual power, great scripts and gorgeous cast, is its fly-on-the-wall depiction of the inner workings of coalition governments and the media that cover them.
For Canadians tired of our unrepresentative one-party-rules political system, where coalition is the c-word, watching Borgen is a delicious escape, as well as topical and instructive. After all, coalitions — however vilified by Harper’s Conservatives — are how we Canadians often hash out our differences, and trigger major change: civic, social or political.
In the communications armament at the disposal of non-profits, values-based business and citizen-activists — the focus of these Toolkit for Change columns in The Tyee — coalitions could be the most powerful tool of all.
Yes, they require careful crafting and frequent maintenance, and can go sideways, leaving participants burnt-out and embittered. But, done properly, coalitions (temporary unions between two or more groups with the aim of gaining influence) can become much greater than the sum of their partners, wrong-foot their opponents, galvanize public attention — even change the world.
“They open up opportunities that otherwise would not exist,” says Bill Tieleman, the strategist and regular contributor to The Tyee, who may know as much as any Canadian about the topic. “People tend to talk in their silos, drink their own bathwater; coalitions give their partners insights into how others think and operate, and reveal (surprising) points of agreement.”
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Teaming up against HIV
Once the ground-rules are set, however, amazing things can happen. British Columbia is a world leader in addressing HIV and injection drug use thanks in large part to the work of a loose, but highly motivated and unusual coalition that came together in the late 1980s. It began with angry gay and, later, hemophiliac activists who were dying from HIV in shocking numbers. When they challenged the conventional doctor-patient hierarchy to demand a say in HIV research and care, an unprecedented coalition emerged with university researchers, infectious disease specialists and nuns from Providence Health Care/St. Paul’s Hospital.
Their goal was a cure to HIV, and by the mid 1990s St. Paul’s was at the forefront of this global campaign. It became the home of the Canadian HIV Trials Network, which gave people living with HIV a central role in the development of trial proposals. It also founded the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, whose director, Dr. Julio Montaner, was one of the team of clinicians who announced the discovery of life-saving HIV antiretroviral therapy at the World AIDS Conference in Vancouver in 1996.
When an epidemic of HIV broke out among injection drug users in Vancouver later in that decade, aboriginal leaders, drug users, and eventually the mayor teamed up with members of the established HIV coalition and lobbied successfully for harm reduction measures. First came needle exchanges, then two North American firsts: a supervised injection site and the NAOMI clinical trial (North American Opiate Medication Initiative), which demonstrated the value of medically prescribed heroin for drug-dependent individuals, for whom no other treatments were available.