1^st session of the 41^st Canadian Parliament will convene June 2^nd 2011

Four Years of Struggle Ahead! It Will Take A Fight to Win!

May 22, 2011

Don Currie, Chair CPS

The election of a right-wing Conservative government with majority parliamentary legislative power presents new and serious difficulties for the working people of Canada.  A right wing Conservative majority in Parliament threatens all of the social gains of wage and salary earners, the self-employed, small business and farmers, the urban middle strata and all Canadians who must work to live.  Majority parliamentary power in the hands of right-wing Conservatism has immeasurably enlarged the threat to peace, people’s democracy and Canadian independence.

The main preoccupation of the right wing Harper Conservative majority for the next four years will be to commit all of the resources of the state to the entrenchment of militarism, austerity for the people and deeper US-Canada economic integration as Canada’s future.  Nothing in such a state monopoly policy is for the working people.  The Conservative vision for Canada must be rejected and defeated.

The euphoric reception and speech by NDP leader Jack Layton at the recently concluded Canadian Labour Congress Convention, where Layton optimistically alluded to a social democratic government in four years glosses over the depth of struggle that will be required to defeat the right-wing Conservatives to make that vision a reality.[1]  Moreover, the people of Canada have not concluded that a left of centre social democratic vision of the country to ameliorate capitalisms worst features is the one they will ultimately choose.  It would be a serious mistake for NDP strategists to make that assumption based on the recent election outcome.

Right Wing Conservatism in the 21^st Century

The majority of the Canadian electorate rejected right wing Conservatism but was not able to prevent it from assuming power.  The right wing Conservative majority in Parliament should not be underestimated.  It is not a business as usual “Tory” government.  The Harper Conservatives are not and have never been “Tories” in the classic sense.  That appellation is wrong, belonging to another era, and trivializes and glosses over the reactionary essence of what Harper and his cohorts represent today.

Harper is no more a Tory than Sarkozi and Berlusconi and Obama are republicans or Cameron, Merkel or Kan are parliamentarians.  G7 leaders of the developed imperialist states are part of the round table of NATO, IMF imperialist enforcers of the interests of international finance capital.  Prime Minister Harper is now securely seated at that table for four years and committed to its world view.

The Harper Government is the government of capitalism at the state monopoly stage of its development when the imperialist ambitions of Canadian finance capital in the 21^st century are openly proclaimed and dominate domestic politics.  That reality requires of the communist and progressive left to consciously break with bourgeois rhetoric and adopt the correct language to expose the reality of 21^st century state monopoly capitalism to the Canadian working class, organized labour and democratic forces of Canada.

21^st Century State Monopoly Capitalism Is Imperialism

Prime Minister Harper’s right-wing Conservative government acts for finance capital; the merged power of the state with the banks, industrial corporations, the energy sector and the militarists, and a small elite investor class immersed in global and domestic market speculation that is permeated with imperialist ambition.  The Conservative government will place the profit interest of this elite group at the top of its parliamentary agenda for the next four years.  That is a far cry from the rock ribbed small c conservatism that many Canadians believed they were voting for.  Small c conservative voters have been duped and cruelly betrayed by the big business Harper government.

The Harper Conservative majority is poised to deal ruthlessly with labour and the hopes of the Canadian people for peace.  From the outset of the opening of Parliament the left democratic forces inside and outside Parliament are called upon to recognize without illusion just what it is that the people now confront with a right wing Conservative government in power.  The parliamentary opposition if it is serious is called upon on behalf of the people to send the same message.  Prime Minister Harper and his right wing big business war agenda is in for a fight.

The left democratic and peace forces are called upon to act independently of the media hype and parliamentary parlor games beloved of pundits and academia and get down to the serious business of organizing a united anti-Conservative front of political forces to ensure the Canadian people see this government for what it really is, right wing reaction all along the line, and send it packing.

The Significance of Mass Electoral Break with the Main Parties of the Profit System

A majority of Canadian electors, in their own way and out of their own experience, saw through the fog of lies and disinformation spread by Conservative compliant media hacks and voted for something better and more progressive as they saw it.  The popular judgment of the democratic electoral majority is a political process, in motion and development that no single party can take credit for and merits the utmost attention and respect and encouragement by the conscious and responsible left.  The NDP would be making a critical error if it took this electoral support for granted.

The election of 105 NDP MP’s is a significant counter-weight to the Conservative majority.  The political importance of that outcome requires careful study and must not be trivialized.  The fact is that 4,508,474 Canadians, inspired by the working people of Quebec voted for the social democrats, many breaking for the first time with the two major parties of the profit system, the Liberals and Conservatives.  The Liberals receiving 2.7 million votes mainly from the urban middle strata suffered the consequences of its arrogant go-it-alone policy.  Those who voted Liberal supporting its opposition to spending billions on fighter jets, its condemnation of Prime Minister Harper’s unilateral suspension of parliamentary democracy and opposition to tax cuts for corporations, must demand that the remaining Liberals honour and adhere to those positions in opposition.

The combined parliamentary opposition bears a heavy responsibility to confront and resist the right-wing Harper Conservative Government’s plan to shred public universal health care, gut the civil service and move ahead with deep Canada-US economic and security integration.[2]

The majority of Canadians who must labour to live, wage earners and farmers, the self employed and small business, the majority who voted for the NDP, the Liberals, the Bloc and the Greens have a right to expect that every non-Conservative MP will act responsibly.  Collaboration by the NDP-Liberal-Bloc-Green opposition with a right-wing big business government pledged to carry forward deficit reduction on the backs of the people is not an option.  Collaboration with right-wing Conservatism on this or that separate issue will be a betrayal of the interests of the 60% of Canadians who voted for peace, jobs and real people’s economic democracy.   

Dividing the opposition and smothering extra-parliamentary labour action is just what the right-wing Conservatives are counting on.  Post-election complacency and inter-opposition rivalry will help Prime Minister Harper consolidate power and move rapidly to implement the main planks of his big business agenda.  He must not be given a moments respite by the people’s majority.

For a New Type of Mass Political Action!

The organized labour movement and the militant democratic left must resist all calls to limit its political role to passive support for the NDP parliamentary caucus.  The NDP caucus needs time to consolidate and get to work, and that must include not repeating past mistakes of taking its support base for granted.  That means to accept the reality that the right wing Conservatives cannot be curbed and defeated by parliamentary politics alone.  The NDP backroom strategists must be told in no certain terms that they are no smarter and more clever than the people of Canada who voted for them.

The clever strategists must be told plainly that only a people’s movement led by labour and its allies can create the necessary dynamic outside and inside parliament to defeat the right wing agenda and advance the cause of the working people. NDP back room strategists demanding a mute and compliant mass base must be told that is not the new politics Canadians need.  Mobilizing mass pubic pressure on parliament is now the key ingredient necessary to defend the interests of the working people.

Together left progressives, worker and farmer unionists, peace activists, environmentalists, advocates for the rights of women, pensioners, immigrant workers, the unemployed, the homeless and the poor, all people engaged in the struggle to earn a living, can be the decisive factor to thwart and defeat the corporate agenda of the Harper Government and in the process make life better for our families and our country.  The NDP cannot do it alone.

That task is daunting but not impossible.  The continuation of separate issue politics is past.  Unity in action around common goals is now the overriding necessity.

For a New 21^st Century People’s Democracy

The federal election has propelled the matter of people’s democracy to the fore. The Conservative win was the result of a long process of crude right wing degrading of parliamentary democracy in collusion with a corrupted mass media.  The importing to Canada of US election style bribery, smear, corruption and dirty tricks, has aroused the indignation of thoughtful Canadians and was a factor in many voting against both the conservatives and the liberals and their crude strategists.

The issue of restoring democracy to Canadian politics has become a politically motivating factor for many Canadians and part of a movement for progressive electoral reform and change that deserves support.

Power without a People’s Mandate Is Not Democracy!

The right wing Harper Conservative government takes power with 167 Parliamentary seats out of a possible 308 having received 23% of the 23,971,740 registered electors and 40% of the 14,720,580 Canadians who actually turned out to vote.  The NDP becomes the official opposition with 105 seats and 18% and 30.6% respectively.  The Liberals were reduced to 34 seats with 11.6% and 18.9% respectively.  The Greens took one seat and the Bloc Quebecois was reduced to 4 seats taking .037% and 6% respectively.  Over 9 million eligible voters didn’t vote in the 41^st federal election.[3] 

Sixty percent of the electorate, the majority voted for opposition parties garnering a total of 141 seats and 40% of the electorate voted for the Conservatives and garnered 167 seats.  That is the reality of capitalist-style democracy in Canada today.  That must change.  The movement for proportional representation is the logical, predictable reaction to an undemocratic electoral system corrupted by money and bribery and deception.  It deserves support.

Federal election outcomes are increasingly the handiwork of amoral professionals that package and sell parties and candidates like commodities.  The affects of that corruption will stamp right wing politics for the next four years as the Conservative mandate unfolds and as has happened so many times in the past will rise to the surface and explode in scandal.  It will be up to the people to intervene in the sordid process and demand transparency and strengthen the resolve of the opposition not to sink to the level of conservative mendacity.

The People are the Only Guarantor of Democracy

In spite of the corrupting influence of money politics in the federal election, the majority of the Canadian electorate acted independently and did not move right as the big business election strategists planned.  However the top echelons of finance capital most certainly did.  Corporate power in choosing the right wing Conservatives opted for a more autocratic and ruthless anti-people administration at Ottawa.  That reality is a cause for alarm for every Canadian concerned about the state of real economic democracy in our country.

The Harper Conservatives won a majority of Parliamentary seats in spite of the fact that 60% of the electorate rejected Harper’s big business pro-US-NATO war agenda.  Finance capital, abandoned the Liberals, the traditional capitalist party of wealth and privilege and gave support to extreme right-wing Conservatism.  The Harper Conservatives could not have won without the shift in corporate backing.

Liberal Mandarins Back the Conservative Win

Big business is applauding the right-wing Harper Conservative Parliamentary majority.  When it comes to promoting the profit system, a party brand is inconsequential to the big investor classes. Party allegiance to their profit interests is what counts.

Former Liberal mandarin and cabinet minister, John Manley now head of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives in a post-election congratulatory letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper[4] hailed his former Conservative adversary for his record of trade liberalization (market driven free trade), regulatory reform (relaxing all government restraints on capitalist business practice) and corporate tax reductions urging him to stay the course.

Manley then laid out corporate Canada’s expectations of the new majority Conservative government.  In typical Bay Street lingo, Manley hailed Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s 2011-2012 budget supporting balancing the books by mid-decade via a demand for a streamlined public service, double speak for job cuts to the civil service and lower standards of service to the people.  Right on cue Treasury Board Chair Tony Clement is promising an immediate $4 billion cut to government programs, threatening not just reductions but the elimination of entire programs.[5]

Manley alludes to tightening up on federal government transfers to the provinces code for reductions to Health Care funding when the Canada Health Act comes up for renewal in 2014.  Prime Minister Harper has set the stage for federal health care cuts to the provinces by predicting federal provincial conflict.  Andre Picard in the Globe and Mail of March 31^st outlined the truth of the matter and what is at stake.[6]

From the outset the parliamentary opposition must expose and condemn any attempts by the Harper majority to play the federal government against the provinces to evade his responsibility to uphold the Canada Health Care Act and fund it as is required.

The people of Canada from coast to coast to coast aspire to live in peace and unity with one another and deplore and reject attempts as is done in the USA to play provincial rights politics. Artificially fomenting federal-provincial disputes is a finance capitalist contrivance to ensure the state treasuries at both the federal and provincial level are at their exclusive disposal and use.

That is why, from the standpoint of defending the Health Care Act in 2014, the election of an NDP government in the upcoming BC provincial elections would strengthen that struggle.  That outcome must be supported.  It is on the matter of health care that the NDP has its greatest support among the people and the election of an NDP government in BC would send a powerful message to Harper that scuttling public health care is not on.

Back to John Manley and the CCCE

On international trade, Manley calls for closer ties with the USA promoting deeper integration and security, code for a North American finance capitalist cooperation in pursuing US-Canadian imperialist strategic rivalry among the leading imperialist states.

The CCCE promotes expanded markets abroad for Canadian resource exports, specifically energy exports without regard for Canada’s future energy needs.  Manley calls upon Harper to speed up negotiations for a Canada-EU and India trade agreements to counter the rise of China.  Manley supports a weakening of the Wheat Board and lifting of supply management agreements for eastern Canadian egg, poultry and milk producers and calls for support to the most reactionary provisions of the Doha Round.   

Most ominously, and a warning to organized labour, Manley calls for collaboration between the federal government and the provinces to promote higher productivity and “defining and implementing a national labour market strategy” bafflegab for enforced labour mobility both inter-provincially and among the USA, Canada and Mexico.  A finance capitalist labour market strategy is based on a race to the bottom and weakened labour standards, speed up and wage freeze for Canadian and all North American workers.

What Majority Does Prime Minister Harper Represent?

Prime Minister Harper’s right wing Conservatives were never interested in receiving majority approval of the Canadian people. They coveted majority approval of finance capital and to wield majority legislative power in Parliament on its behalf.  The rewards to politicians that do the bidding of corporate power are generous.

Prime Minister Harper assigned the task of wooing finance capital to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty Bay Street insider and confidant of Governor of the Bank of Canada and propagandist in Canada for the IMF.

Flaherty convinced Bay Street and international investors that the Liberal Party lacked the necessary ruthlessness to impose an IMF style program of economic austerity on organized labour and the working people, and the Conservatives were the party best able to do that dirty work for international and domestic investors.  That is what Flaherty is tasked to do in the next four years and that is why he has been reappointed as Finance Minister to impose the upcoming austerity budget on all Canadians.  

The right-wing Harper Conservatives with a bogus populist image, were chosen by finance capital to finish the job started by the Paul Martin Liberals to erase the universality principle from federal government social programming and by the method of gradual starvation of federal funding to the provinces, erode universal health care, old age pension, plunder the CPP, gut seniors and child care programs and open the door to across the board privatization and for profit investment.

Big business recognized that Prime Minister Harper is ideologically committed to transform Canada into  a 21^st century corporate state, where foreign and domestic investor capital has absolute power and determines unimpeded, all political and economic development of the entire country.

As such, the right wing Harper Conservatives pose the most serious threat to democracy to arise in Canadian capitalist politics since the time of the discredited extreme rightist corporate-clerical regimes of Colonel George Drew and Maurice Duplessis.  Stephen Harper promotes that dark legacy into the modern era.

The Election Outcome and Credibility

The federal election has not erased the doubts of millions of Canadians about the credibility of the Harper Conservatives.  The right wing Harper Conservatives remain the government of extreme demagogy.  The record of the right wing Harper Conservatives is by stealth and gradualism, by deceit and deception, by demagogic formulaic rhetoric, to inch by inch and day by day, erode the social and economic gains of the people of Canada and promote the profit interests of a minority of wealth and privilege that live parasitically on the backs of the working people.  Harper is notorious for contemptuously dismissing the social gains of the Canadian people as a “northern European welfare state.”[7]

The right wing Harper Conservatives with active and enthusiastic support of the corporate mass media deluded some voters into believing that the Conservatives were actually concerned about hard working Canadians.  That fog of deception was necessary to cover the fiscal and monetary and economic policies that in essence serve domestic and foreign investor capital not workers and farmers.

The Harper Government Is a War Government

Assuming the mantle of moral righteousness the Harper Conservatives subordinated Canadian foreign and military policy to the strategic aims of US-NATO-EU-Israeli expansionism.  It did that deliberately with the aim of acquiring a more prominent role for Canadian finance capital at the imperialist round tables at NATO headquarters at Brussels, Washington the IMF and Doha.  In so doing Prime Minister Harper has been judged by majority public opinion in Canada and abroad as having demeaned Canada’s reputation as an enlightened and progressive society.  Canada’s defeat by UN member states for a seat on the Security Council was indicative of how the developing states view Canada’s international performance under the Harper administration.[8]

War and militarism and massive arms spending are now the centre piece of the strategic plans of the right wing Harper Conservatives to achieve more clout at the imperialist round table.   Prime Minister Harper has abandoned the Liberal pretense to a peace policy and without consulting Parliament chooses war as the first option in international affairs.  To pay for militarization Canadians will be deprived of necessary funds for social needs.

Evading the issue of foreign policy in the federal election the NDP actually helped the Conservatives get their majority.  The NDP strategists were wrong to mute the issue of foreign policy and the NDP is disastrously wrong to continue pander to the discredited “duty to protect” fig leaf for US-NATO intervention in the internal affairs of other nations such as the current US-NATO war on Libya.[9]  A strong anti-NATO peace policy is the only way the NDP can become an effective opposition.  The Canadian Peace Congress in its federal election statement outlined what that policy must be.[10]

The right-wing Harper Conservatives, with majority legislative power, using a balanced budget as the excuse, are now poised to spend massively on arms as they impose an IMF austerity budget on the working people of Canada.  The Harper Conservatives are devising ways to carry forward the for profit privatization of health care, pensions, child care, and seniors programs to divert social funding to war expenditures.

A Renewed Struggle for the Principle of Universality

The Harper Conservatives lead a government that is opposed to the principle of universality and federal government responsibility for the needs of the people.

The Prime Minister has already signaled that he will artificially foment differences between the federal government and the provinces to withhold urgently needed transfers of state funds to assist provinces and regions both urban and rural to maintain infrastructure, health, education and public transportation and maintain high standards of government service to the people.  His record of deceit on this issue has been exposed by the Canadian Union of Public Employees.[11]

Profit Stability for Finance Capital the Banks and Investors, Economic Insecurity for the People

Prime Minister Harper and Finance Minister Flaherty appealed for votes claiming a majority in parliament was necessary to ensure the continued recovery from the global capitalist depression.  Stability was necessary to ensure investor confidence in Canada’s much vaunted economic recovery from the 2008 global capitalist depression.

Any recovery now underway has nothing to do with Prime Minister Harper’s degree in economics or Finance Minister Flaherty’s luncheons with his Bay Street pals.  Any recovery now underway in Canada is because of the rising demand for Canada’s natural resources in particular its energy resources.  Harper and Flaherty didn’t put oil and coal in the ground or plant the wheat on the Prairies and it is utterly preposterous for them to take credit for what is a predictable cyclical partial upturn.  While the IMF praises Canadian banking stability it neglects to mention that it is largely due to the demand of developing states such as China and India for Canadian resources that is primarily responsible for that stability.  The combined banking and corporate investment sector manage the traffic in foreign investment inflow and outflow making sure large amounts wind up in their coffers, but to suggest that the banks are responsible for any recovery is part of the gold plated bamboozle the media concocts for the gullible.  Banks invest for profit – not for the people.

Finance Minister Flaherty takes pride and boasts that he has been instrumental in Canada joining the coveted list of the ruling parties of the G7 capitalist states with “stable” majority governments.  A quick glance at the real situation in other G7 states reveals a similar charade to that existing in Canada.  All G7 finance ministers boast of their cleverness and all of the governments they serve have plummeting public approval ratings.

International finance capital considers popularly elected legislatures to be nothing more than a necessary adjunct to state monopoly capitalism that exists to give a periodic stamp of approval to the actual decisions that are taken by the ruling elites of the G7 states outside of the elected Parliaments at the IMF and NATO and the Doha Round where the approval of the people is not required.

The ruling parties of the governments of the other G7 states, the USA, Japan, Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy are all in various stages of economic and political crisis with approval ratings of the governing right-wing parties in free fall.  None are stable.[12]  This is the gang of seven Flaherty has tied Canada’s fortunes to.

The role of elected legislatures in the developed capitalist states, whether republican or parliamentary democracies, whether in North America or the EU or Japan have all been degraded and marginalized by the transfer and concentration of major decision making regarding the economy and wars of aggression to the IMF and NATO.  The result is a profound crisis of legislative democracy in all developed capitalist states that will continue and worsen.  It is a state monopoly capitalist device to distance the people from influencing real economic decisions making.

That reality is a source of political crisis and carries with it the potential for revolutionary conditions arising very quickly.  The manipulation of weakened parliamentary democracy by the moneyed classes has widened the gap between the elites of wealth and privilege and the needs of the working people, the real majority in any capitalist country.

What was at stake for the banks, the militarists and the investors in Canada’s vast energy and mineral resources sectors in the federal election was to have a government in power that will promote their strategic investor interests at the imperial forums at the IMF and NATO at the expense of the people.  These are the interests that are competing ferociously to maintain a dominant place at the table of imperialist power.

The developed capitalist states led by the USA presume to set the international standard for all of the peoples of the world.  They fancy themselves to be the board of directors of global corporatism where decisions are made and then imposed on elected legislatures.  That is what is meant when both the Liberals and Conservatives assert that Canadians must surrender some of their sovereignty to the “international community” code for the dominance of the G7 states.[13]

According to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, the stamp of approval has been given to Canadian high finance by the IMF and NATO and Canada has now become a destination state for investment and deal making.  Those accolades also poured in from Bloomberg and Wall Street and ended the pre-election nervousness of foreign investors.[14]

That is the reality that the NDP-Liberal-Bloc-Green opposition must have the courage to expose and confront.

The Betrayal of Small c Conservatism

The right-wing Reform-Alliance-Conservatives posing a decade ago as a grass roots populist movement has served its purpose as far as big business is concerned and has been tossed aside as yesterday’s news.  The political movement created by small business and farmers and urban and rural middle classes has been cast aside and is now dominated by a small minority of corporate wealth and privilege that live parasitically from the labour of productive Canadians.   Canadians who supported Reform and the Alliance in expectation of reducing the power of wealth privilege over government and restoring a semblance of grass roots democracy to Canadian politics have been betrayed by Prime Minister Harper.

Parliamentary power has passed from small c conservatism exclusively into the hands of big finance capital and a small minority that prosper from its narrow profit interests.  Those well meaning and misguided Canadians must be urged to come back to the left democratic mainstream and abandon the Manning, Flanagan, extremism and the narrow single issue politics.

The Communists Must Re-Evaluate

The Communist Party of Canada’s post election statement[15] that the majority of voters did not move right in support of the reactionary program of the right wing Conservatives is correct as far as it goes.  What they needed to emphasize was that finance capital did move right and draw the full conclusions for the working class of what that means going forward.

The Communist have analyzed one election when they are called upon to analyze the election in the context of the era in which we are living and struggling, the era of state monopoly capitalism, imperialism.  That reality has not been fully grasped by the Communist party leadership nor has it as yet caused them to update and creatively develop their program to reflect that reality.  

Instead the Communists conclude in their post election analysis; “that given the new balance of forces within Parliament, the capacity of the NDP and other opposition parties to counter this agenda will be significantly weakened; they will offer up their critiques and may succeed in delaying various pieces of legislation, but with the Tories in control of both the Commons and the Senate, the possibilities of actually blocking or defeat government bills by parliamentary means alone have all but disappeared.  In such circumstances, the focus of resistance and struggle against this reactionary agenda must shift decisively to the extra-parliamentary arena.”

It is the view of CPS that the above assessment is too bleak and doctrinaire and formulaic.  It fails to take into account the full significance of a change that occurred in capitalist politics in the 41^st election and how the organized labour movement, the peace movement and the democratic voters can take advantage of that change and position all of the anti-conservative forces to overturn their win and lay the basis for an entirely new type of people’s democratic governance for Canada.

The Communist Party of Canada is called upon to overcome its isolation from the movements of the people, to study more deeply their moods, mass psychology, limitations and strengths.  That task is not simple but unavoidable if the Communists are to begin to engage in mainstream working class politics.

The tendency to preaching and doctrinarism, periodic flights into left infantilism must be confronted and overcome.  If it can do that, the courage and resolve that it took to field 20 candidates under extremely difficult circumstances will begin to bring the results that the working class so richly deserves.

Next: The Energy Issue, Environmentalism and the Working Class