BY JOE YOUNG AND MICHEL PRAIRIE
MONTREAL, Canada - Taking advantage of an economic upturn and the lack of any national alternative to his party's rule, Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien called parliamentary elections on April 27 to take place on June 2. The government still had a year and a half to go in its five- year term of office.

Central to the elections will be the question of the right of the Quebecois to determine their own future, including the right to their own country. The Canadian ruling class suffered a major political defeat when they avoided a majority yes vote for sovereignty by the thinnest of margins in a referendum held in Quebec on Oct. 30, 1995. When the votes were tallied, 49.4 percent voted yes. Since then the movement toward for Quebec independence has remained the biggest challenge to capitalist rule in Canada.

The Quebecois are a French-speaking oppressed nationality representing 80 percent of the 7 million people living in Quebec. The discrimination they suffer on the basis of the language they speak and the denial of their right to self- determination has been a pillar of capitalist domination in Canada for over 150 years.

In an April 15 speech to the Canadian Club in Toronto, former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney put the issue clearly: "We have to remind Canadians that only one of the various problems which afflict us - the problem of Quebec - can destroy our country."

There are several points of conflict between the Parti Quebecois government in Quebec and the federal government in Ottawa at this time. The Parti Quebecois (PQ) is a bourgeois nationalist party that promotes Quebec sovereignty. The federal government has asked the Supreme Court to rule on whether Quebec has the right to declare independence unilaterally. On March 1, a headline in the Montreal daily La Presse summarized the federal government's position: "Only a war can lead to secession, claims Ottawa."

The Quebec government is also seeking a constitutional amendment to replace a school system divided on religious and linguistic lines with one divided on language lines only. At the present time public schools are divided both between Catholic and Protestant schools and English and French schools. The division of schools in Montreal and Quebec City on religious lines is enshrined in the Canadian constitution. The existence of separate schools systems divided along religious and language lines leads to inferior services for students who speak French and is a big factor of division among working people.

While a step forward in ending the religious division of schools, the Quebec government's proposal would not alter the existing divisions between French and English schools. The federal government is using the request as an occasion to assert its ultimate authority to decide.

Liberals attack the social wage
While there is an economic upswing in Canada - the Gross Domestic Product grew by 0.6 percent in January, the biggest monthly gain since June 1994 - unemployment remains very high, with the official rate at 9.3 percent. In Quebec the unemployment rate stands at 11.2 percent. The fragility of the upturn has been highlighted by the dramatic fall in the value of the stocks of Bre-X, a gold mining company with interests in Indonesia. Reports that the value of finds in Borneo had been greatly exaggerated led to a drop of $3 billion in the value of its shares within minutes on March 27. This in turn had a devastating effect on the value of stocks of a whole series of other mining companies. Mining is a key sector of the Canadian economy.

In its three and a half years in office, the Liberal government has carried out the most far-reaching attacks on social services since World War II. In fact, the government has applied a large part of the program of the right-wing populist Reform Party, which won more than 50 seats in Parliament in the last elections.

These attacks have largely taken the form of cuts in funds transferred to the provincial governments for health care and welfare. This means that the cuts have been carried out province-by-province. While there has been resistance, in particular in Ontario last year, there has been no unified national actions except on the part of students. Recently union officials have retreated from organizing actions against the attacks.

Cuts in transfer payments have had a devastating impact leading to widespread hospital closings and massive cuts in welfare payments and in welfare rolls. From 1994-95 to 1997- 98, the amount transferred to the provinces will go from $18.8 billion to $12.5 billion. According to the National Council on Social Welfare, poverty has never been so widespread in Canada, with one-sixth of all Canadians living in poverty. This affects Quebec the most. While 17.4 percent live in poverty nationally, the proportion is 20.6 percent in Quebec, despite the fact that it is the second most industrialized province.

There have been major reductions in unemployment benefits. In 1993, more than 80 percent of those unemployed received benefits. With new rules applied in January 1997, only about half receive benefits now.

Since the election of the Liberal government in 1993 there have been no major disagreements in Parliament over foreign policy. While not a major actor on the world stage, the Canadian ruling class has used its military forces and "aid" to shore up imperialist domination in oppressed countries and to contribute to efforts to take back for capitalism countries such as Yugoslavia, where bourgeois rule has been overthrown.

Ottawa gives support to many dictatorial regimes internationally from Indonesia to Peru in hopes of seeking profits through investment and trade. Ottawa presently has military forces in Bosnia, Haiti, Cyprus, and elsewhere. On March 26, Canadian troops leading the occupation in Haiti were met with shouts of "Go home" by demonstrators.

The Liberal government has also pressed forward the attack on democratic rights. One move has been the adoption of an "anti-gang" law. Using the pretext of violence by motorcycle gangs and drug dealers, the law attacks the right to freedom of association by putting into law that participating in the activities of a "gang" is a criminal act. The law allows a judge who believes that someone is about to commit an act of gangsterism to demand that the individual sign an "engagement to keep to peace" for up to 12 months. It also increases prison terms and facilitates electronic surveillance.

Shake-up of Canada's electoral system
The last federal elections, which took place Oct. 25, 1993, registered the biggest shake-up in Canada's electoral system since the depression of the 1930s. There was a virtual collapse of the Progressive Conservative (PC) party, one of the two traditional parties of capitalist rule since the foundation of Canada in 1867.

The PC went from forming the government and holding 155 seats in the previous Parliament to 2 seats. The New Democratic Party (NDP), which is based on the unions outside of Quebec, fell from 44 seats to 9, losing its status as an official party. For official status, a political party must hold 12 seats in Parliament.

On the other hand two parties that had never won seats before made major breakthroughs. The Bloc Quebecois, which promotes Quebec sovereignty and is allied with the PQ, won 54 seats in Quebec and, much to the chagrin of Canada's capitalists, became the official opposition. The right-wing Reform Party, based largely on support in the west, won 52 seats. The big majority of the votes of these parties came from the Conservatives, reflecting polarization along national lines in Canadian politics.

It is not clear at this point how the PC will fare in the upcoming vote.

In Quebec, neither the BQ or the PQ put forward a perspective of mass struggle for independence. The PQ, which forms the provincial government in Quebec, has carried out major attacks on social services. Nevertheless many workers and youth will vote BQ as a way of voting against Ottawa's domination of Quebec.

At its convention in Regina in April the NDP adopted a program pledging to cut unemployment in half over the next four years, to increase social services, and to balance the budget by the year 2000. Its stand on social services is not very credible, however, since NDP governments in Ontario, Saskatchewan and British Columbia have carried out major attacks on social services.

While at the NDP convention, Roy Romanow who is premier of Saskatchewan, spoke in favor of recognizing the distinct character of Quebec, at the same time the Saskatchewan NDP government joined the federal government's lawsuit before the Supreme Court challenging Quebec's right to declare independence.

The Reform Party has been unable to define itself clearly on the right and will likely lose ground. A large part of its program on social services has been applied by the Liberal government and because of its virulently anti- Quebecois positions it has no perspective of winning support in Quebec and thus becoming a credible tool for Canada's ruling class.

On April 24, the Communist League decided to field four candidates across Canada: Michel Dugré and Victoria Mercier in Montreal, John Monuru in Toronto, and Roger Annis in Vancouver. All four are members of industrial unions and Mercier is a leader of the Young Socialists. The Young Socialists have voted to support the national election campaign of the Communist League.

The theme of the Communist League campaign is "No to the capitalists' war against workers at home and abroad." At the heart of the CL's campaign is support for Quebec independence, defense of social services, and the demand for the withdrawal of Canadian troops from Haiti and Yugoslavia. The CL candidates call for a single secular school system in Quebec, with French as the common language. They point to the example of revolutionary Cuba, which shows what a difference a government of workers and farmers makes. They and their supporters are actively involved in building a delegation from Canada to the World Festival of Youth and Students, which will take place in Cuba this summer.

The communist campaign champions the fight of small farmers to defend the monopoly of the Canadian Wheat Board over the marketing of wheat and barley. This system allows farmers to get better prices for their products than if they were left at the mercy of the market. The CL puts forward the demand of a reduction of the workweek to 30 hours with no loss in pay as a way of fighting unemployment.

CL candidates with their supporters will join the mobilizations to keep Montfort Hospital in Ottawa, the only French-language hospital in Ontario, open and they are walking the picket lines with 10,000 union members on strike against the Safeway grocery chain in Alberta. They have taken a stand against the racist murders by the police in Toronto, who have recently killed Hugh Dawson and Edmond Yu. They will expose the antidemocratic real aim of the "anti- gang" law. And they will join those who are fighting the closure of nine hospitals in Toronto. In all of these fights, Communist League campaigners will offer fighters a class-struggle perspective by circulating the Militant and selling Pathfinder books.

Joe Young is a member of Communication, Energy and Paperworkers Union Local 1103 in Montreal.  
 
 
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