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Focus On the Nation


Stockwell Takes Over the Treasury

Once More on the Harper Cabinet Shuffle Labour -
Get Ready for a Fight!

January 21, 2010

Don Currie, Editor, Focus on Socialism

Workers are going to be pressured by the federal government and corporate bosses for years to come to defer wage demands, work longer hours and pay higher taxes to pay down a war induced federal structural deficit.  In spite of government denials, cuts to social spending are a certainty after the March 4th 2010 federal budget is tabled.  Cuts will be hidden in baffle gab but they will occur. The media is trivializing the Harper Cabinet shuffle. On March 4th the Harper Government will present MP’s, locked out from their jobs by the Prime ministerial prorogation with an austerity budget . The Harper plan to stimulate the economy is a failure for the people. A huge deficit has been wrung up on behalf of banks and big investors and now the government is planning to dump that burden on the backs of working people.

The Harper-Flaherty-Day March 4th austerity budget will be cunningly designed to justify $19 billion in annual social program cuts over the next few years, to wipe out a $56 billion structural deficit resulting from handouts to private banks, the private auto sector and exempt these parasites from paying back a penny of the public handouts they have received.  The Harper Austerity Budget will cut social programs while maintaining rising expenditures of the US-NATO war in Afghanistan ,  and the ½ trillion dollar Canada First Defence Strategy.

That is the significance of Stockwell Day taking over Treasury.  With Day in charge, Canadian workers are in for a big pay cut from combined losses in social spending in health, welfare and seniors programs.   After March 4th, Day can be relied upon to facilitate the further privatization of health services.  Wage freezes on federal government employees are coming.  Federal transfer payments to the provinces will be frozen.  Provinces will be ordered to make do  and download rising costs to cash strapped municipalities already desperately short of funds to operate the public school system and provide basic services.  Without federal strings attached, provincial regimes will continue to close schools  and use federal funds to pay off Olympic Games bondholders  and fund such boondoggles as the Atlantic and Pacific Gateway projects.

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The Way I See It!

The Liberal Party Thinkers Conference, Montreal March 27, 28th 2010, was convened on the false premise that capitalism in Canada between today and 2017, the 150 Anniversary of Confederation, is still capable of progressive development.

Nothing could be more remote from the truth.

The G7 imperialist states, within which Canada is tightly enmeshed, will continue to lurch from one major crisis to another dragging the Canadian people into more chaos in the years ahead.   Integration of these leading capitalist states neither assures strength nor unity.  The more rigid the interdependence of the G7 becomes, the less these states are able to avoid being impacted by the collapse or crisis of one or another of their number.  That would seem to be axiomatic to everyone except the Liberal and Conservative Parties, both of which promote an even tighter integration of Canada in the G7.

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Ontario Communists Oppose Tory Private Member's Motion!

Equating Criticism of Israel with Hate Speech
Communist Party of Canada (Ontario)
March 2, 2010

The Communist Party of Canada (Ontario) is unequivocally opposed to the Private Members’ motion titled “Israeli Apartheid Week” moved by Tory MPP Peter Shurman (Thornhill), and passed “unanimously” by about 30 MPPs present in the Ontario Legislature last Thursday February 25th.

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$59 Billion Deficit

Kevin Page Wallops Flaherty – With the Truth!

Workers are going to be pressured by the federal government and corporate bosses for years to come to defer wage demands, work longer hours and pay higher taxes to pay down a war induced federal structural deficit.  In spite of government denials, cuts to social spending are a certainty after the March 4th 2010 federal budget is tabled.  Cuts will be hidden in baffle gab but they will occur.

It is becoming clearer everyday why Harper prorogued Parliament.  The economy is in dire straits and the government doesn’t want to answer for its pro-corporate policies.

The January 13, 2010 Report of the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) Kevin Page estimates that the Harper Conservatives have burdened Canadians workers with a huge structural deficit well into 2013. (Structural means it is permanent).  The debt is largely due to government transfers of public money to the banks to prop up a sagging stock market during the global financial crisis, to pay for the US-NATO war in Afghanistan and the half-a-trillion dollar Canada First Defence Strategy.  The CBC reported that Page estimated in October 2008 that the war would had cost taxpayers $18 billion by 2011.  All of the opposition parties including the NDP avoid talking about the war as a major factor in budget deficits.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty cheerily predicted a year ago that the government in 2008 would post a structural surplus of $13.8 billion compared to the PBO’s more realistic $3.2 structural surplus prediction.  The latest PBO study shows that both were wrong and from an essentially balanced position in 2008 the country is headed for a structural deficit of $18.9 billion by 2013-14.  That is on top of the statement of the government last September that the country was wallowing in a $59 billion fiscal deficit that would take ten years to discharge providing there was an estimated annual growth of 2.5 %.

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An Open Letter to Alex Atamanenko
On Supporting Anti-Communist Tribute to Liberty
April
7th 2010

You and I have spoken from the same platform and marched together in the same demonstrations in the cause of ending the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Because of your public stance as an NDP MP for peace, your work in defence of the family farm and organized labour, your stance on environmental issues, on women’s rights, against racism and many other worthy causes of economic and social justice, my late wife Sylvia and I publicly supported your candidature and election.

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The 2010 Speech from the Throne – The Harper Doctrine

WC O'Casey, March 3, 2010

The anti-people minority government of Steven Harper today outlined their dark and ominous vision for the Canadian people.  Playing to his narrow and reactionary support base, Harper sketched his government’s plans for a continued assault on organized labour and the working people of Canada. The Throne Speech to the 3rd session of the 40th Parliament of Canada is a continuation the Harper doctrine which began in 2004 with the rise of the united right-wing in Canada.

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Cuba Files

International Communist Review

4th European Communist Meeting on Education

 
 Australian Marxist Review

   
Lebanese CP - Monthly Bulletin No. 11

G8/G20 Imperialist Summit Toronto, ON June 26, 2010
Police Charge Patriotic Canadian Youth

30,000 Say Yes to Peace! No to NATO!

Lisbon Nov.21, 2010

Portuguese Communist Party

 Free The Cuban Five



The Latest From FOS:

  • International
    The Way I See It - Afghanistan Revisited

    Those of us who support CPA, including the members of CPS assert that anti-Sovietism was and continues to be pro-war and anti-peace. During the darkest days of the cold-war when the threat of nuclear war loomed over the planet, the Soviet Union was the main force of restraint over the worst of the US imperialist reactionary forces thirsting for war.
    Read more...


  • Marxism-Leninism
    Proposal for a New International

    The proposal last November 2009 to organize a new international having the support of left-socialist revolutionary parties in Latin America, on the initiative of Hugo Chavez, is an important development in the anti-imperialist movement urgently in need of credible communist analysis.
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  • Federal Politics
    Prime Minister Harper (Assisted by Jim Flaherty and Peter Van Loan) Leads the Whole World Forward To the New “Enlightened Sovereignty” of the 21st Century

    Prime Minister Harper’s address to the World Economic Forum (WEF)[1] in Davos Switzerland January 28, 2010 can’t be dismissed as just unctuous and vapid; it was worse than that.  Harper adopting his familiar and grating patronizing manner underwhelmed the elite audience of capitalist intellectual luminaries, by suggesting that minority Conservative Government economic policies under Harper’s leadership is the example the nations of the world must follow to emerge triumphant from the worst capitalist depression since the market crash of October 1929.
    Read more...


  • Federal Politics
    Organized Labour and the Politics of the Class Struggle Today

    A Convention of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) is always a significant event in the struggle of the working class to defeat capitalism and replace it with socialism.  Only the Communists strive to take responsibility for the whole revolutionary process underway in our own country and globally.  Every revolutionary class conscious worker is concerned that the Communist Party becomes strengthened and more effective in fulfilling its historic responsibilities to the working class of Canada and all of its peoples and for the victorious outcome of the cause of the International Communist Movement.
    Read more...


  • Federal Politics
    The Way I See It! - Some Critical Comments

    The main link that can move the entire political process forward is a clearly articulated and unambiguous revolutionary working class program to confront US-Canadian corporate power and its stranglehold on Parliament, the State, the military and the economy. That task must be the main theme of the upcoming 36th Convention of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). From the convention an appeal that reaches out to all of organized labour and the democratic forces of our country with a plan to unite electorally to defeat Harper, and decisively, will be influential within labour and garner widespread appeal with Canadian workers. That is a concentration task and if it is solved, the organizational tactics to achieve it can be worked out.
    Read more...




Polls


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What Was Said

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V.I. Lenin State and Revolution – 1916 – Volume 25 page 410 Progress Publishers Moscow 1964.


“Imperialism – the era of bank capital, the era of gigantic capitalist monopolies, of the development of monopoly capitalism into state monopoly capitalism – has clearly shown an extraordinary strengthening of the “state machine” and an unprecedented growth in its bureaucratic and military apparatus in connection with the intensification of repressive measures against the proletariat both in the monarchial and in the freest, republic countries.”

VI Lenin - Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism


“As long as capitalism remains what it is, surplus capital will be utilised not for the purpose of raising the standard of living of the masses in a given country, for this would mean a decline in profits for the capitalists, but for the purpose of increasing profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries.”

WWS Archives...



36th Convention of the Communist

 

News and Statements from:
The Communist Party of Canada

Communist Party of Canada May Day Statement 2010
Unite to Demand a People's Recovery!

The corporate‑owned mass media greet us daily with upbeat economic reports about how the global economic crisis is over and that ‘recovery is now well underway’. This is all very comforting, but it’s also a gross perversion of the truth.

In reality, there is no recovery for most working people in this country. Unemployment and job insecurity remain high, with over 1.5 million (8.2%) out of work according to official statistics; real unemployment is closer to 12%. Since 2003, more than half million well‑paying manufacturing jobs been wiped out, 290,000 in the past two years alone. Soon EI benefits will be running out for hundreds of thousands of these unemployed workers.

Nor is there any recovery for young people trying to find work or to complete their education. Or for Aboriginal peoples who continue to suffer systemic joblessness and grinding poverty. Or for new immigrants and their families trying to build a better life. Or for pensioners and others on fixed income.

So what kind of recovery is this? It’s a recovery for the profits of the biggest banks and corporations, and for those who own and control them.

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The Communist Party of Canada has issued the Main Political Resolution coming out of the 36th Central Convention February 2010.  Canadians for Peace and Socialism will be commenting on the document in the coming weeks and months.  It is an essential document for all workers to read, discuss and distribute.

 

From the Keynote Address to the 36th Central Convention by Comrade Miguel Figueroa:

 

“The second and final point I wish to make refers to the centrality of our theoretical and ideological work. Of course, we have a clearly delineated theoretical perspective and world-view – Marxism-Leninism – which is reflected in our Party program, our strategy & tactics, and our daily work as Communists. We all remember Lenin’s famous dictum: “without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement”. But the theoretical basis of our Party – and that of the Communist movement internationally – can never be neglected or taken for granted, for without its constant development and application to ever-changing conditions, our theoretical basis, and with it our movement itself, would wither and perish.

 

"As important as this question always is, it could rightly be argued that it is even more critical today, for it is undeniable that as the class struggle intensifies, so too does the ideological struggle – the ‘battle of ideas’ – sharpen. It is hardly coincidental that it is precisely now, when the crisis of capitalism is deepening, that we witness an increased ideological offensive from our class adversary in the form of a revival of anti-communism, ‘philosophical’ attacks on the concept of socialism, and crude attempts to falsify or re-write the history of our movement in Canada and around the world.

CPC 36th Central Convention Main Political Resolution

 

Build Solidarity with the Striking Sudbury Miners at Vale Inco
March 5, 2010

Read...

 

Militant May Day Greetings 2010
April 30, 2010
Read...

Rebel Youth Magazine Blog:
75,000 Quebec Workers March!

March 20, 2010

A few days after the expiry of collective agreements for employees of public and parastatal sectors, thousands of people, members and friends of the Common Front SISP-CSN-FTQ from all regions of Quebec, marched in the streets of Montreal to remind the government that the solutions to improve public services go through the negotiation.

Read...

 

Speech by Johan Boyden, YCL-LJC General Secretary
To the 36 Central Convention Communist Party of Canada

Three years ago, the YCL stood at this podium giving greetings on the eve of our re-founding convention. New delegates may not know this, but in a deliberate and calculated attempt to attack the Communist Party of Canada thirty years ago, a campaign was initiated to destroy, terminate, liquidate the revolutionary youth around the Party. Some members who fought against that attack are here today.

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25th Central Convention of the YCL-LJC
September 24-26, Toronto ON

DISCUSSION BULLETIN #1
DISCUSSION BULLETIN #2
DISCUSSION BULLETIN #3

 YCL Central Convention Announcement

June 23, 2010

NEW DATES : September 24-25-26

Dear comrades and friends,

As you no doubt have heard, due to unexpected circumstances the Central Committee of the YCL-LJC was forced to postpone our 25th Convention, originally scheduled for May. We are now pleased to announce the new dates of the convention: Friday September 24 to Sunday September 26, to be held in Toronto. We are re-issuing the original convention call, below, which can also be found online, together with registration.

The Central Committee encourages all clubs and members to continue to meet this summer to discuss the main documents, the pre-convention discussion, and nominate delegates. As we enter an extended period of ideological mobilization, clubs and committees should compare their concrete political realities of struggle with the framework of the main convention documents and deepen discussion of the documents.

We also encourage all clubs and committees of the YCL-LJC to re-enforce their activities building the convention financially, organizationally and politically, and to broaden and deepen our engagement with friends and allies regarding the convention.

The Central Committee has struck a special committee to review and discuss the YCL-LJC Constitution as an additional item of business for the Central Convention. The committee will be reporting by early September as a special discussion bulletin.

The deadline for convention discussion bulletin #4 is July 1, 2010.

With the additional time to organize, let's  make this convention an exciting moment for the YCL-LJC and the youth struggle!

In solidarity and comradeship,
Â