The following statement was released October 8 by Beverly Bernardo, Communist League candidate for mayor in Vancouver, British Columbia. Bernardo, 57, is a meat packer at Britco Pork in Langley.

Workers, farmer, and youth across Canada have a vital stake in opposing Canadian imperialism’s stepped-up march to war in the Mideast.

The escalating aggression against Iraq is not about Saddam Hussein. It is an imperialist grab for oil and a drive to redivide the world among those who pillage it--a direct product of the accelerating crisis of world capitalism as it drags humanity into an economic depression of catastrophic proportions.

The Canadian government has postured as a force committed to "peace" and negotiations in the Mideast, supposedly in contrast to Washington and the "U.S." war against Iraq. But this is nationalist demagogy. As a smaller imperialist power, this is how Canada’s ruling class has acted since World War II to try to convince working people to support every single one of its wars--from the imperialist assault on Korea 50 years ago to the war on the Yugoslav workers state less than a decade ago.

Canada’s imperialist rulers are driven to war by the same lawful motions of capitalism as Washington and the rest of their imperialist allies and rivals. Two years ago, at Can$124 a share, Nortel’s stocks reined supreme on the Toronto stock market, comprising some 30 percent of its overall prices. Today these pieces of paper are worth less than a dollar. Bleak reports are published almost daily about other major big Canadian corporations. These facts are representative of the depression that Canada and the capitalist world as a whole have entered--long-term conditions that Canada’s rulers can only be reverse by expanding their control of markets and territories abroad, and assaulting the jobs, wages, and social conditions of workers and farmers at home.

In this sense, the wars that Canada’s employer class are carrying out against working people abroad are an extension of the escalating war they are waging against our class at home. Among the recent examples of these attacks, and of the working-class resistance they generate, are: the government’s slashing of basic social services such as health and education, Bombardier’s layoff of 2,000 workers, the lockout of 600 grain handlers in Vancouver, the five-month strike by 2,200 workers at Videotron in Quebec to defend their jobs and union, and the fight by hundreds of Algerian refugees against the threat of deportation.

The Communist League campaign urges you to join with us in linking up with other working people who are part of this resistance to the employer offensive, as well as meeting youth who are repelled by the brutality of capitalism. Ours is a working-class campaign against imperialism and its inherent march to war and economic catastrophe. We urge you to read and help circulate the socialist press--the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial--as well as books that explain how working people can chart a course to put an end to the very system of oppression and exploitation that produces these wars and social devastation.

This course of action is part of the historic fight to build a revolutionary leadership that can lead working people in this country to take power out of the hands of the capitalist warmakers, establish a government of workers and farmers, and join the international struggle for a socialist future.
 
 
Related articles:
Canadian rulers join in imperialism’s war drive in Mideast  
 
 
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