There aren’t many obvious parallels between the upcoming British Columbian election and the ongoing United States election campaigns.

Narrow your scope to the U.S. Congressional election and issues facing the Pacific Northwest, particularly its urban centres, and the similarities start to stack up: housing affordability, immigration, minimum wage, homelessness.

Pramila Jayapal covers them all. The grassroots anti-racism, pro-immigrant activist turned-Washington State senator has put her name on a number of progressive bills regarding these issues, and the country has noticed. Now a federal Democratic Congressional candidate, Jayapal is one of the few endorsed by former Democratic primary candidate Bernie Sanders.

The Broadbent Institute has taken notice, too, and invited Jayapal to address its Progress Summit BC in Vancouver on Sept. 23. Currently on the campaign trail, Jayapal’s address will be pre-taped.

But The Tyee got a real-time conversation with Jayapal last week about what B.C. progressives can learn from their southern counterparts, the need to elect social movement leaders, and whether it’s possible to both campaign and govern from the left.

The Tyee: The “left” is split in both American and Canadian politics. How can progressives unite like the right has?

Pramila Jayapal: It’s about really making sure that we are articulating the values clearly, and the process of implementing those values, and the vision that we have.

The key thing is you have to pay attention to what message is resonating, and the party has to recognize that there is a shift happening, and that momentum is in a particular direction, and then be willing to embrace that. That is not always the easiest thing in the world, because it does mean that you have to take on some existing power dynamics.

But from my perspective, the coalition that we’ve built is so strong and so diverse, it includes a place for everybody who wants to stand for the vision that we represent. That includes workers, women, young people, people of colour, and older folks.

Progressive politicians often campaign from the left but govern from the centre. Why should voters trust them?

We as a progressive movement need to do a much better job of recruiting and electing people who come from the movements for justice. What happens now is a lot of people say, “I’m progressive” — and maybe they are — but they’ve never actually been in the movement fighting for those views. It’s pretty easy to get pulled away from those values once you’re in a system that’s filled with people who [aren’t progressive].

The more we can elect people who come from the movement first — they’re not politicians first, they’re movement advocates and activists first — and then they become elected officials because they know that we need to be organizing on the inside as well as the outside, the more we can develop that connection between the base and the elected official, and the more successful we’re going to be.

President Barack Obama was known as a “community organizer.” Yet he’s criticized for governing from the centre.

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He hadn’t been a community organizer for a long time. But he certainly has brought many of those principles into office on the things that we like, whether it was organizing around healthcare reform or ultimately taking really strong positions on immigration, even though he had to be pulled in that direction.

But the other thing is we just need more. [Obama’s] operating within a system that doesn’t have [progressive] people and is innately much more conservative. So unless we change that dynamic, we’re going to send a good person in to operate within a system that is flawed, by themselves, and it’s going to be much more difficult.

It’s our job to elect more people who come from the base and are movement activists, and it’s also our job to actually try to keep those people grounded in what they say they came from, whether they’ve been there recently or not.

How do progressives win over people in the middle?

If you can articulate how the economy is rigged against middle class folks, poor folks, and working people, and all the different challenges that people are facing, it gives validity to what you’re saying, and it really is a shared experience.

But the other piece that’s a little more complicated, is depending on where you are, you also have to be really careful that if you tack to trying to win over the swing or moderate vote, what you may end up doing is actually disenfranchising your strong progressive base.

Sometimes you may be in a much better situation to have a strong, bold progressive message and you might generate more inspiration and energy from a progressive base that has lost faith and trust.