Canada’s Elections: What’s the Alternative to the Tories?
By Roger Annis. Canada’s minority Conservative Party government has called a federal election for October 14. Serious issues confront voters — war in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the economic downturn that that will grow out of the U.S. financial crisis, and climate change that endangers human life on our planet. But four of the five parties in the federal parliament are avoiding serious debate on these issues.
The fifth, the labour-based New Democratic Party (NDP), has a platform that responds to many working class needs, but it is evading vital issues. Only action by trade unions and social justice movements can place working class concerns at the center of the electoral spectacle.
The Liberal Party – lesser evil?
The two leading parties — Conservatives and Liberals — have traded off the governing of Canada since the founding of the country. The Conservatives, who replaced the Liberals in power in 2006, currently take a more right-wing stance. This leads many working people to favour a vote for the Liberals as a lesser evil, but in reality there is much more continuity than difference in the successive governments of these parties.
The Liberals are campaigning aggressively as a “left” alternative to the Conservatives. The party’s supporters have disrupted NDP events, claiming that a vote for the NDP will split the “left” vote and return Conservatives to power.
The country’s largest industrial union, the Canadian Autoworkers (CAW), echoes this position with a call for “strategic voting” — support for NDP candidates in constituencies where the party has a chance of winning, and for Liberals elsewhere. CAW national president Ken Lewenza urges CAW members to “support candidates who have the best chance of defeating a Conservative.”
Many social democratic writers and thinkers, including Murray Dobbin and James Laxer, also favour the Liberals as the lesser evil choice.
A wartime election
Whichever of the two parties heads the next government, it will be a government of war.
A key feature of the Conservative record is its close warmaking alliance with U.S. imperialism in what economist and former oil industry executive John Foster terms “The New Great Game,” the neo-colonial grab for the oil and gas-producing regions of the Middle East and central Asia. Harper sought to deflect attention on the war at the outset of the campaign by announcing that he would stick to Parliament’s vote last March for withdrawal of Canadian combat troops from Kandahar in 2011.
The Liberals, who took Canada to war in Afghanistan in 2005, voted with the government in March. Both parties have massively increased military spending: a new study says that by 2012 the Canadian war in Afghanistan will have cost $22 billion.
The Green Party and the Bloc Québécois criticize the war one day and say it should continue the next.
Only one opposition party, the NDP, says it would end Canada’s war mission in Kandahar. But the NDP has not highlighted the war in its campaign, and it accepts the imperialist rationale behind the war, the idea that wealthy countries are entitled to subjugate countries and peoples by labelling them as rogue or failed states that require protection.
Democratic rights and the social wage
The Conservatives have continued Liberal policies on other fronts. Attacks on democratic rights and on the social and economic conditions of workers, especially the most vulnerable, continue. Canada conducts illegal detentions and participates in torture in the name of the “war on terrorism,” including the now-infamous kidnapping, rendition and torture of Maher Arar in 2002.
Police agencies across the country are engaged in an unprecedented wave of killings and other forms of violence against ordinary citizens. Police budgets doubled between 1997 and 2006, the last year for which statistics are available.
Meanwhile, spending cuts have been the order of the day for everything from social services to funding of arts and culture under successive Conservative and Liberal party governments. 18 people have died as a result of contamination of meat products at the country’s largest processor, Maple Leaf Foods — a direct result of cuts to food safety inspection.
A campaign of denial
The crisis in financial markets and collapse of major U.S. banks has drawn little attention in this election. All parties agree with financial industry claims that Canada will be little affected by the crisis. The NDP’s principal financial proposal in the first weeks of the campaign was for reduced credit card charges.
There is a word for all this — denial. The near-trillion-dollar bailout of some of the largest financial corporations in the world will shift more wealth to the wealthy while providing little protection against further financial crises.
Canadian capitalists have pursued many of the same predatory policies as their U.S. counterparts, and the Canadian economy is now slowing as interest rates rise, credit gets harder to obtain, and capitalists shut down production because of falling profit rates. On September 29, the Toronto Stock Exchange suffered its largest point drop in history. The livelihoods and pensions of millions of Canadians are at risk.
Green smoke
Climate change is the most hotly contested issue in this election. As a recent Socialist Voice article showed, there are only minor differences between the five major parties. None of them favours the radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that scientists are calling for.
None of the parties calls for shutting down the massive tar sands projects in western Canada, the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country: the parties disagree only on the scale that should be permitted. When NDP candidate Michael Byers declared that the projects should be “shut down,” he quickly drew a rebuke from party leader Jack Layton.
Indigenous rights and sovereignty – another disappeared issue
The more than one million Indigenous people in Canada are waging militant struggles against continued encroachment and pillaging of resources on their territories and to protest the horrendous social conditions that they are forced to endure. None of the parties supports these struggles in a meaningful way.
The Conservatives in office turned their backs on Indigenous peoples. One of their first acts in government was to repudiate the Kelowna Accord under which Indigenous leaders and the previous Liberal government agreed on $5 billion of new spending on social programs and capitalist economic development. And the Tory government made Canada one of only four countries to vote against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Chief Phil Fontaine of the Assembly of First Nations contrasts poor government spending on Indigenous needs to the vast increases on military spending in recent years. “The response we are looking for from each of the parties is next steps in regards to the eradication of First Nations poverty,” he said, urging Indigenous people to engage more actively in the election campaign.
Quebec’s alternative: the Bloc or the NDP?
In Quebec, the election is a three-way race between the Conservatives, Liberals, and Bloc Québécois. The Conservatives and Liberals oppose Quebec’s right to freely decide if it wishes to form an independent state.
The Conservatives’ aggressive war policy and cuts to arts and culture funding are unpopular, but the party has won support through its skilful manipulation of nationalist feelings. It offers a more friendly form of federalism to Quebec voters than the Liberals.
Liberal support in Quebec have been in decline for years because of the party’s unwavering hostility to the national aspirations of the Quebec people. Liberal leader Stéphane Dion was the author of the hated Clarity Act, under which the federal government claimed the power to override the results of any future referendum on Quebec sovereignty.
The nationalist Bloc Québécois, which holds the largest number of federal seats in Quebec, arose in 1990 out of the ashes of attempts at constitutional reform that would have granted more autonomy to Quebec within the Canadian state. Today, the Bloc is stagnating, unable to form or participate in a federal government and unable to lead Quebec to independence. It is also coming under fire from more conservative nationalists for its relatively progressive social policy.
The NDP hopes to capitalize on the Bloc’s stagnation to make an electoral breakthrough in Quebec. Last year, it won a surprise victory in a by-election in a Montreal riding. But the party has a long history of opposing Quebec’s national aspirations and it ducks issues of Quebec sovereignty. Polls show its support rising above 15 percent, up from 7.5% in 2006.
The NDP campaign
New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton has highlighted three key issues in the NDP’s platform – the economy, protecting the environment, and improving Canada’s mixed public/private health care system. In the 2006 election, the party scored one of its highest results in history, with 17.5 % of the vote. Polls now have it challenging the Liberal Party for second place.
The NDP has built its campaign around a string of popular proposals, including a national daycare program, increased spending on care for seniors, and more public transit. It proposes to pay for these programs by revoking a large tax cut given to corporations earlier this year and by the savings that will come from ending Canada’s combat mission in Afghanistan.
The rise in support for the NDP is a positive development for the labour and social justice movements. Its program is broadly progressive, and its opposition to the war in Afghanistan opens doors to deepen antiwar discussion and mobilization in the labour movement. The election of more NDP members would encourage a spirit of fightback and be a step towards breaking up the Conservative/Liberal duopoly in Ottawa.
That’s why the labour movement should reject the strategic voting option put forward by the CAW and others. The proponents of strategic voting exaggerate the differences between Liberals and Tories, and prevent the working class from using the election to advance its agenda and to strengthen its forces for the post-election period.
At the same time, however, an anti-capitalist program is needed to counter the NDP’s pro-capitalist outlook. Hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs have been lost in Canada in the past several years. The numbers will now grow sharply as a result of the financial crisis.
The NDP’s program voices concern about this, but its central proposal is a $2 billion subsidy to large corporations in the name of preserving jobs, including for projects dubbed “green.”
The party avoids policies that would offend Canada’s business elite. A call to nationalize the oil industry and use its profits for social and economic improvements, as Venezuela is doing, could win broad support. Similarly, it could demand the nationalization of companies that threaten to close operations when profit rates decline.
While the NDP’s program calls for an end to Canada’s “combat mission” in Afghanistan, it does not recognize the right of the Afghan people to live free of foreign intervention. It supports a continued foreign military presence there.
Electing the maximum number of NDP members is an important step for the labour movement, but it’s only a beginning. Gains can only be won by stepping up mass pressure and mobilizations.
The NDP has governed in four of Canada’s ten provinces and its record in office has always disappointed its supporters. Its leaders preach reliance on parliamentary procedure to make social and political gains, as opposed to mass mobilization and creation of new institutions of popular power. In power, the NDP has proven to be a loyal defender of capitalist interests.
Labour action
At the May 2008 convention of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), an “Action Plan” was submitted by the Executive Council and approved by delegates. It posits the building of “a broad, diverse and inclusive movement for social change,” including support for the NDP and “the political choice of unions in Quebec.” It concludes, “let us commit ourselves to continue to work in solidarity to achieve our goals and build a society that meets the needs of working people and their families.”
In the current campaign, the Congress has issued an election flyer that contains many positive proposals, but omits many of the “Action Plan” proposals and repeats flawed notions from the NDP program. It doesn’t mention the war in Afghanistan, even though the CLC convention voted overwhelmingly to call for withdrawal of Canadian troops. It does not deal with the environmental crisis or the destructive tar sands projects. Its proposals for the economy mirror those of the NDP, calling for tax breaks and subsidies to large corporations.
Needed: A new movement
What’s needed in Canada today is an anti-capitalist and socialist movement. Working people in Canada need a vision for a socialist future that will confront the horrors that the capitalist system is unleashing. We need a movement that champions such a vision, that builds mobilizations in the streets and workplaces to achieve it, and that contests for its program in the electoral arena. A socialist movement that adopted a cooperative but critical attitude toward the NDP — supporting its progressive demands while advancing a program and perspective that can help build the struggles of unions and social movements for fundamental change — would strengthen, not divide and weaken, a resurgent working class.
Such a movement is needed in Canada to help mobilize for serious action on climate change, to end Canada’s participation in the Afghanistan war, and to oppose factory shutdowns and attacks on democratic rights and the social wage.
The labour and social movements should also focus on the parts of the world where working people are building new societies. There is much to learn there, especially in Latin America where an alliance of governments including Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, is making important advances towards societies of justice and equality.
Roger Annis is a trade union activist in Vancouver, BC and was a delegate to the May 2008 Canadian Labour Congress convention.
Related Reading:
- NDP or Bloc? Quebec left debates election tactics
- Canada’s Election and the Climate Crisis: Five Parties, No Solutions
4 Comments »
4 Responses to “Canada’s Elections: What’s the Alternative to the Tories?”
Walter Lippmann on 02 Oct 2008 at 5:55 am #
Good to read your comments at the conclusion here:
“The labour and social movements should also focus on the parts of the world where working people are building new societies. There is much to learn there, especially in Latin America where an alliance of governments including Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, is making important advances towards societies of justice and equality.”
Canadians, unlike people in the United States, are lucky to live in a country where a positive example of a what a revolution can accomplish, is available to be viewed and experience by a simple airplane flight. I live in the United States where most people are forbidden by U.S. law to go to Cuba and see it for themselves. Canadians have that as one blessing you can certainly count, and many of them do.
Not that all problems have been solved in Cuba. Far from it. But to follow the Cuban story, may I recommend the CubaNews list, the free Yahoo news group which has been active now into its ninth year of service to the public? CubaNews provides a wide-range of news and information from, about and related to Cuba for your information, reflection and discussion.
Walter Lippmann
Los Angeles, California
Rachelle on 02 Oct 2008 at 1:23 pm #
Seriously??? In the countries and examples used the overall quality of life has decreased and stagnated since they have become fully socialist. The people are worse off now then ever before.
Second, how is it democratic to take away people’s choices and livelihoods and subjugated it under the government? I think it should be noted that the most economically prosperous countries with the best health care and social programs (in the quality that they provide) are all located in capitalist countries.
Marc Bonhomme on 02 Oct 2008 at 4:03 pm #
The true/false debate on how to vote
In English Canada, the majority of the social movements recommend voting for the NDP, as usual. In Quebec, the same majority recommends voting “against the Conservatives”, that is, practically speaking, for the Bloc in the vast majority of ridings in which the electorate is predominantly the French proletariat. So social movements in Quebec are to the right of those in English Canada? Right? Totally wrong. The francophone proletariat recognize the NDP for what it is, a Canadian nationalist party that does not hesitate to bash Quebec when a vote is strategic for the bourgeoisie (e.g. the “Clarity” Bill), irrespective of its nice Congress resolutions voted before and after.
Saying
“For the first time since the 1980s, the federal NDP is being considered as a valid electoral option by some, while others advocate voting for the Bloc Québécois as the best means of forestalling the re-election of the Harper government. The debate also reflects an interest among some supporters of Quebec independence in the possibility of forging new ties with progressive-minded people in English Canada.” (Richard Fidler, NDP or Bloc? Quebec left debates election tactics, September 25, 2008)
is not totally accurate. It is the usual suspects, a very small minority in Quebec solidaire, that defends the traditional anticapitalist “pinch your nose and vote NDP”. Insofar as the NDP vote option is this time marginally more popular than in the past in the general electorate, it is not because of a move to the left but because of a move to the right. The francophone proletariat is more discouraged about the independence perspective because the PQ practically rejects it itself as the ultimate consequence of its total capitulation to neoliberalism. Brightly, tactically speaking, the Conservatives understood the political opening by falsely recognising Quebec as a nation. So part of the right wing electorate of the Bloc goes to the Conservatives (Dion’s Liberals are totally discredited in the francophone electorate) and part of the left wing to the NDP. But the Bloc still remains ahead and is, lately, somewhat bouncing back.
Is a marginal increase of the NDP vote on the back of the independentist movement good news for building the unity of the multinational proletariat of the Canadian state? Absolutely not. These “new ties” would be achieved on the back of part of the francophone proletariat putting aside their strategic struggle for their liberation from the historical and still actual oppression by the Canadian state. This small turn will be reversed as soon as the Quebec proletariat awakes from its prostration in the wake of its strategic defeat, without even fighting back, first to the federal “Clarity” law in 2000, then to the Quebec Liberals’ special law of December 2005 to suppress an incipient general strike in the public sector.
There is a daydream in the English Canadian left of unifying the multinational Canadian proletariat without the necessity of taking a public stand for the independence of Quebec, and not only for the abstract right of self-determination. This left does not realise that the weakest link of the power of the Canadian bourgeoisie is not, historically or actually, the class divide or women/aboriginal oppressions but the struggle of the Quebec people for its liberation. Only this struggle, as shown in 1980 and 1995, has the capability of strategically shaking the bourgeoisie by jeopardizing its territorial base. A victory on this front would create a terrific opening for the proletariat, not only in Quebec but in Canada, to create a revolutionary dynamic.
An unbelievable opportunity was lost in the referendum of 1995 when instead of having a “love-in” rally for the independence of Quebec organised in Toronto and Vancouver by the social movements, we had one in Montreal organized by the bourgeoisie and paid for by Bay Street and Ottawa. On this crucial aspect of a revolutionary strategy, the NDP is out and the Bloc is in, even if it is from a narrow nationalist, that is (petty)-bourgeois, point of view. Even from a narrow socio-economic — Lenin would have said “economist” — point of view, the NDP is out, more so the Bloc. When there was a political space for the “third way”, one could have argued that the NDP program was a step in the right direction disregarding its pro-market stand. Not any more in these backlash times of not only “reformism without reforms” but of “reformism with counter-reforms”.
Is a cap-and-trade pro-market system and not “shutting down the massive tar sands projects” a step in the right direction to solve humanity’s ecological crisis? Is “not highlight[ing] the war in its campaign, [accepting] the imperialist rationale behind the war, not recogniz[ing] the right of the Afghan people to live free of foreign intervention [and supporting] a continued foreign military presence there” an antiwar stand? Is “reduc[ing] credit card charges [and] its central proposal [of] a $2 billion subsidy to large corporations in the name of preserving jobs, including for projects dubbed “green.”” (Roger Annis, Canada’s Elections: What’s the Alternative to the Tories?, October 1, 2008) a valid answer to the looming deep and prolonged economic crisis? Is “hiring 2500 additional police officers to patrol the Canadian streets” (Le Devoir, September 30, 2008 – my translation) a step forward to combat the Conservatives’ (and sometimes Liberals’) repressive and moral backsliding? On these dramatic issues confronting humanity, especially the proletariat and more so women and poor people, neither the NDP nor the Bloc is a step in the right direction.
Even then, Roger Annis thinks that
“The rise in support for the NDP is a positive development for the labour and social justice movements. Its program is broadly progressive, and its opposition to the war in Afghanistan opens doors to deepen antiwar discussion and mobilization in the labour movement.” [I underline]
But, somewhat contradicting himself, Roger Annis says that
“The NDP has governed in four of Canada’s ten provinces and its record in office has always disappointed its supporters. Its leaders preach reliance on parliamentary procedure to make social and political gains, as opposed to mass mobilization and creation of new institutions of popular power. [I underline] In power, the NDP has proven to be a loyal defender of capitalist interests.”
NDP type parties exist to defuse social mobilizations, not to sustain them. As far as the Quebec people and proletariat are concerned in this electoral campaign, they have mobilized themselves in the low thousands and, in the case of the artistic community, quite vocally in the bourgeois media. Those leading these mobilizations of course do it to “beat the Conservatives”. But the crux of the matter is that people, especially women, are on the street by the thousands, trusting only themselves. Will the English component of the Canadian proletariat grasp this stretched out arm or will they rather congratulate themselves in the polling booth because a few more Québécois(es) will vote for the NDP?
Marc Bonhomme, Octobre 2, 2008
Activist in ATTAC-Québec and in Québec solidaire
Richard Fidler on 23 Oct 2008 at 9:57 am #
Marc Bonhomme, a member of Québec solidaire, has expressed a different view of this debate in a comment posted on my blog, at http://tinyurl.com/6sarom, and (in French) in a document he circulated privately to his contacts.
In Marc’s view, the PTàG debate is a “diversion”, a false debate that, in the electoral context, is necessarily limited to impossible choices for socialists. As he puts it in his document, the debate reflects an insufficient consciousness in the Quebec left of “the tragic impasse it is stuck in since the strategic defeat” suffered by the unions under the Clarity Act and Charest’s antilabour laws “and its corollary, the rapid social-liberalization and electoralist diversion of the party born from the anti-neoliberal globalization protest movement”, i.e. Québec solidaire.
A call to vote for either the Bloc or the NDP wrongly suggests that those parties have some answer to the present crisis, Marc says. He concludes:
“Better the anguish of the vacuum, which pushes us to build an anticapitalist and independentist party while openly criticizing the social-liberal orientation of the Québec solidaire leadership, substituting in its place an ecosocialist orientation.”
And in his comment on my blog he argues that a marginal increase in the NDP’s vote in Quebec cannot help to build meaningful unity with the working class in English Canada. The Quebec workers can ally with the NDP only at the cost of “putting aside their strategic struggle for their liberation from the historical and still actual oppression by the Canadian state.”
The “multinational Canadian proletariat”, Marc says, cannot be unified unless the working class in English Canada takes “a public stand for the independence of Quebec, and not only for the abstract right of self-determination”. Which, of course, it is manifestly not prepared to do.
Unless and until it does so, there is little prospect for socialism in Canada or Quebec. For the key to revolutionary change in both nations lies in the secession of Quebec, the weak link in the capitalist power structure. That alone can shake the bourgeoisie by jeopardizing its territorial base. So the argument goes.
It’s a grand schema, and there is no denying that there will be no socialist revolution in Canada or Quebec that does not entail an end to Quebec’s national oppression. But are the present strategic options as stark as Marc portrays them? The strategy and tactics that would most effectively advance today’s struggles in either nation cannot be derived directly and automatically from general principles, still less grand objectives. To get from here to there requires a serious assessment of such things as mass consciousness and the historical culture and state of organization of the working class.
I think Marc tends to put the cart before the horse. It would be wonderful if the working class in English Canada fully understood the nature of Quebec’s oppression and supported the cause of Quebec’s national liberation. But is the achievement of that level of consciousness a necessary precondition to united action in the here and now with Quebec working people? History suggests otherwise. More to the point, perhaps, how can workers in English Canada be won to that necessary understanding and solidarity?
The workers movement in English Canada has indicated, on various occasions, its ability to sympathize with and defend Quebec’s right to self-determination. In 1961, the presence of several hundred Québécois at the founding convention of the NDP inspired the delegates to recognize Quebec’s national character. In 1971, an alliance between the NDP’s left-wing Waffle caucus and a strong Quebec delegation led by teachers union leader Raymond Laliberté, based on a common platform that recognized Quebec self-determination, gave Waffle candidate Jim Laxer 44% of the votes in a final leadership ballot against the establishment candidate David Lewis.
In 1976, Quebec and Canadian workers mobilized together in powerful mass actions to protest Trudeau’s wage controls. The Canadian Labour Congress and many pan-Canadian unions have long accepted the autonomy of their Quebec affiliates to develop their own organizational structures and policies — even to the point of supporting different political parties in each nation. Although the labour movement in English Canada did not mobilize in 1995 in support of Quebec independence, the CLC and some unions did issue statements supporting Quebec’s right to secede and opposing the federalist obstruction and blackmail tactics in the referendum.
Marc is right when he points to Quebec’s oppression as the major fault line in the structure of capitalist rule in Canada. But that also means, does it not, that every major step taken by the Québécois to fight their oppression and achieve national liberation will be met by antidemocratic measures by the Canadian state. We have many instances of this in Canadian history — one of the most notable being the imposition of the War Measures Act repression in October 1970, which ultimately unleashed a wave of solidarity with Quebec in the Rest of Canada and stimulated a further rise in the independence movement in Quebec. It is this democratic axis — self-determination for Quebec, opposition to repression — that has the greatest potential in English Canada to mobilize working people in support of the Québécois.
If the English-Canadian working class displays little fervour over Quebec’s national cause today, this is due not only to their Canadian nationalism but to their lack of awareness of the existence, and the nature and extent, of Quebec’s oppression, an ignorance that is fueled
in part by the decline in mobilizations by the Québécois themselves. As part of a common state structure, the working class in each nation is not completely insensitive to the moods and actions of the other. A rise in Quebec workers’ struggles would be greeted by workers in English Canada, just as any mobilization of Canadian workers — especially one in defence of Quebec’s democratic rights — would be welcomed by the Québécois. That much we know.
But it is equally clear that, for the foreseeable future, workers in English Canada will be far more receptive to defending Quebec’s democratic right of self-determination than they will be to fighting for its independence — especially when the current independence movement in Quebec is led by capitalist politicians. Socialists in English Canada can and should study and explain the nature of Quebec’s national oppression — they can disseminate the ideas of the independentists — but the case for Quebec independence has to be made primarily by the Québécois. In English Canada, the focus has to be on defending Quebec’s right to choose and to pursue its course. And, of course, building solidarity in action with the Québécois as they pursue their agenda.
– RF