Underneath the failure of the United Alternative project is the nightmare facing Canada's ruling billionaire families — the refusal of millions of Quebecois to give up their fight against national oppression. A coalition including Reform, an openly chauvinist anti-Quebecois formation, had no perspective of becoming a national party with roots in Quebec and therefore a chance of forming a government in Ottawa.

Growing regional and national fragmentation of bourgeois politics on the federal level is compounded by instability on the provincial level, as capitalist governments of all stripes have come up against the continued resistance of workers and farmers to government slashing of their social wage and more legislation and court action to further restrict their ability to use union power to defend themselves.  
 

No truly national bourgeois party

In response to the Conservative Party convention, the editorial writers for the Globe and Mail, which historically has supported the Conservatives, bemoaned the fact that "the most audacious political gamble in Canadian history has failed with the Conservative Party's rejection of any trade or truck with the Reform Party…There will be no United Alternative before the next federal election."

The Liberal editors of the Toronto Star opined that the Conservatives "even talked about winning the next election…That seems unlikely. But they could regain their lost role as the main alternative to the governing Liberals."

The concern by these bourgeois commentators over the fate of the Conservative party reflects the continued failure by Canada's capitalist rulers to re-stabilize their electoral system based on two major bourgeois parties — the Liberals and Conservatives —which was blown apart six years ago in the October 1993 federal election.

The results of the 1993 federal election represented the biggest shakeup in capitalist politics in Canada since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Liberals came to power in 1993 ousting the Conservative government of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, which had earned the hatred of working people through a deepening austerity drive from one end of the country to the other.

The Conservatives were reduced from a majority of 155 seats to an insignificant minority of two. However, the Liberals only won 177 seats in the 295-seat parliament. The Reform Party, known for its antiabortion stand, anti-immigrant and anti-Quebec chauvinism, and based mainly in the provinces to the west of Ontario, moved from one to 52 seats. Most significantly, the newly-formed Bloc Quebecois, running only in Quebec with close ties to the sovereigntist and bourgeois nationalist Parti Quebecois (PQ) that forms the Quebec government, became the official opposition with 54 seats. The social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP), which is linked to the unions outside of Quebec, was reduced from 44 to nine seats.

The election results left the ruling class without a national party — that is, without a party on the federal level with a strong organization in Quebec. The Quebec Liberal party, which is pro-federalist and the official opposition to the PQ government, is often at loggerheads with the federal Liberals over "constitutional issues" because of the pressure of the deep Quebecois nationalist sentiment.

These events were part of an international trend in a number of imperialist countries that took place in the wake of the failure of the right-wing policies associated with the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan governments in the United Kingdom and the United States. Their policies aimed to decisively weaken the trade unions and raise the profit rates of the ruling capitalist families in the context of sharpening interimperialist economic competition, growing depression-like and deflationary conditions worldwide, and unbroken resistance by toilers throughout the world.

In a number of countries bourgeois politics shifted to the left in the mid-1990s. The election of the Liberals in Ottawa took place in this context. The Liberal government then "largely borrowed the Conservative agenda from 1984 to 1993, rounded off a few rough edges, packaged it better and pushed it forward," wrote Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson.

The government of Jean Chrétien carried out massive cuts in subsidies for health and education to the provinces, along with a full-scale assault against unemployment insurance. Today only 36 percent of unemployed workers receive benefits as compared to 74 percent in 1989. The trade union officialdom which viewed the Liberals as a lesser evil to the Conservatives, stood by and watched. But this failure of leadership has not prevented working people from resisting.

Ottawa is one of the weaker imperialist powers. Despite their efforts, Canada's ruling capitalist families have not matched the "productivity" gains of their main competitor in Washington and elsewhere. For more than three years Canada has remained in 10th position on an international scale of productivity in which the United States, Canada's main trading partner, is first. Ninety-five working hours per person are lost to strikes and lockouts in Canada annually compared to a global average of 31 hours. Between 1990 and 1996, Canada averaged 407 strikes a year compared to 306 in Britain, 191 in Japan and 38 in the United States.

In this context, the ruling class failed to regain in the 1997 federal election what it had lost in 1993. The situation became even more fragmented. After four years of austerity, the Liberal government barely kept its majority, winning only 155 seats. The Reform Party became the official opposition with 60 seats. The Bloc Quebecois dropped to 44, the NDP climbed to 21, and the Conservatives won 19.  
 

Quebec at center of bourgeois politics

The 1993 election was followed by the October 1995 Parti Quebecois sovereignty referendum, which revealed the irrepressible march of the Quebecois toward taking control of their own destiny. This was best expressed in the chant, "We want a country" by thousands of Quebecois youth who took to the streets in the lead-up to the vote. The "Yes" side lost by barely one percentage point, although over 60 percent of the nationally oppressed Quebecois voted "yes."

The PQ government led by Premier Lucien Bouchard, which is seeking a new arrangement of powers with Ottawa in the interest of a layer of Quebecois capitalists, has promised to hold another sovereignty referendum under "winning conditions." Last year the federal Supreme Court ruled on an initiative taken by Ottawa, declaring that unilateral secession by Quebec would be illegal.

The tension between the governments in Ottawa and Quebec — Canada's second most populated and industrialized province next to Ontario — broke into the open again at an October international conference organized by the federal government in Quebec to showcase the merits of federalism. Quebec's Premier Lucien Bouchard embarrassed Ottawa before the 600 delegates from 25 countries by attacking the federal system and laying out the injustices faced by Quebec within it. U.S. president William Clinton, attending the conference, felt compelled to give an extensive speech in defense of the Canadian federal system.

Deepening national oppression under the impact of the capitalist economic crisis and the resistance of Quebecois to it is what keeps the Quebecois struggle at the center of bourgeois politics. Quality of life comparisons among Canada's ten provinces put Quebec at the rank of eight. Its inferior health-care system is a major factor in this. Suicides, particularly among the youth are the highest in Canada, except among Native people. There is less job creation. The poverty rate in Montreal, Quebec's largest city, has risen in five years from 22 to 27 percent. Illiteracy is higher for French-speakers than English-speakers. And more English-speakers graduate from colleges and universities with degrees.  
 

Growing instability on provincial level

Canada's rulers consciously decided not to take on the working class directly and nationally in its austerity and productivity drive to raise profit rates, by having the provincial governments of whichever party carry out the cuts in welfare, education, and health care and the legislative attacks on union rights.

The Ontario Conservative government headed by Premier Michael Harris, elected in 1995, became the spearhead of the austerity drive for the ruling class as a whole. Despite significant protests by union and community organizations, the Harris administration took draconian measures to slash welfare benefits, and cut education and health-care budgets. Its antilabor legislation weakened the right to organize unions, picket and strike in Canada's industrial heartland.

In the six provincial elections that have taken place across Canada this year, incumbent governments fared poorly. Only the Liberal government in Newfoundland and Conservatives in Ontario were returned with majorities. In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the Conservatives replaced the Liberals.

In the September 21 Manitoba provincial election, the NDP ended 11 years of Conservative Party rule in that province, winning 31 of 57 seats in the provincial election and 44.8 percent of the popular vote. The new government has promised to increase spending on health care, defend the family farm, and carry out modest tax cuts.

In Saskatchewan a week earlier, the NDP won a muted third term, forming a minority government with 29 of 58 seats and 38.7 of the vote. The right-wing Saskatchewan Party, a remake of the Conservative Party and Reform, made its electoral debut with 26 seats and 39.4 percent of the vote, mostly in rural areas. Many farmers faced with depression-like conditions voted against the NDP, which has traditionally gained their support.

During the summer thousands of Saskatchewan farmers blocked highways throughout the province demanding provincial and federal government aid in face of falling wheat prices, spring floods, and massive cuts by Ottawa in subsidies to small farmers. On September 29, Saskatchewan NDP Premier Roy Romanov announced the formation of an NDP-Liberal coalition government, the first coalition government in Saskatchewan in 70 years.

In British Columbia, the NDP government is in crisis. Former union official Glen Clarke resigned as provincial premier August 21 during his second term over a casino-licensing scandal whipped up by the media and the police.

Despite its claim to be the defender of the national rights of the Quebecois, the popularity of the PQ government in Quebec is also dropping. Last summer nearly 48,000 nurses carried out a 23-day illegal strike against the government. Most recently, the PQ has been trying to head off the possibility of a November strike by more than 400,000 provincial government workers who want to break the 5 percent wage increase ceiling imposed on the nurses. Towards the end of October the Quebec government used the courts against thousands of independent truckers who had blocked highways in their fight to unionize.  
 

Credibility of union officials weakened

Within Quebec the ferocious assault by the PQ government against the social wage and union rights of working people is undermining the credibility of the union officialdom's support for the PQ as a party "friendly to labor."

Outside of Quebec the impasse facing the New Democratic Party on the provincial and federal levels is being reflected by tensions within the NDP itself. Since the NDP's founding in 1961 by the Canadian Labor Congress and its affiliates, the main sectors of the union officialdom have tried to use it as a lever to get a hearing for their demands from the ruling class by putting pressure on the Liberals.

Except in Manitoba, the NDP did poorly in all the provincial elections of 1999. In the Ontario election last June, the NDP was devastated, losing official party status in the provincial legislature with nine seats out of the 12 required. The Ontario NDP government paved the way for the Conservative victory in 1995 by slashing the social wage of workers and attacking union rights under the guise of a "social contract" with public sector unions.

At the federal convention of the NDP that took place in Ottawa last August a sharp exchange took place on the floor of the convention between a number of trade union officials and the NDP federal leadership headed by Alexa McDonough on whether or not the convention should model NDP policy after the rightward shift of "New Labor" in the United Kingdom under the leadership of Prime Minister Anthony Blair.

McDonough argued that the NDP needs to present itself as the party of "fiscal responsibility" along the lines of the Saskatchewan NDP government, which was the first provincial government to balance its budget in the context of the two decades-long austerity drive of the ruling class.

Canadian Auto Workers union president Basil Hargrove, presenting himself as the defender of the NDP's claim to be the party which supports an expanding social wage for working people, threatened to end his union's support for the NDP if it adopted McDonough's policies. In the end the delegates, including the NDP leadership, officially rejected "Blairism" in favor of a policy of "balanced" tax cuts and social spending.

Several weeks later one of the two NDP members of Parliament from New Brunswick announced her decision to join the Conservative Party, which has made "fiscal responsibility" and tax cuts one of its trade marks.

The strains in the NDP surfaced again at the September meeting of the Ontario NDP provincial council. A motion was placed on the floor proposing the expulsion of Hargrove from the NDP for advocating, along with a number of other union officials, a policy of so-called "strategic voting" in the June Ontario provincial election.

The CAW along with officials from a number of public sector unions urged workers to vote for either Liberal or NDP candidates — whoever had the best chance of winning — in order to defeat the Conservative government. (At the time, Communist League candidate Rosemary Ray explained that this further weakened the independence of the unions from the ruling class and urged workers who could not vote for the program of the Communist League to vote for the NDP, a union-based party, as a way of registering their opposition to both the Liberals and Conservatives, parties controlled directly by the capitalist class.) The 300 delegates to the council meeting followed the provincial leadership's advice not to expel Hargrove. Opponents of the motion to expel him argued that many others held similar positions.

Today, popular support for the NDP on the federal level is stagnant at 11 percent. It has no base in Quebec and therefore no realistic perspective of ever forming an NDP federal government. This has as much to do with the Quebec union officialdom's class-collaborationist perspective of supporting the Parti Quebecois, as with the NDP leadership's strident Canadian nationalism and historic hostility to the Quebecois national struggle.

John Steele is a member of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 175.  
 
 
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