The Communist League campaign is the only voice presenting a clear working-class perspective in the elections. The unfolding of the election campaign in Canada confirms that Quebec independence is the central challenge to capitalist rule in Canada. Workers and farmers across Canada need to unambiguously support Quebec independence and the right of the Quebecois to decide their own future, free of threats. This is key for workers' unity, which is impossible as long as the Quebecois remain oppressed within Canada.

The Communist League proposes an action program for the labor movement to unite working people in the fight against unemployment and to defend and extend social services. We call for a 30-hour workweek with no cut in pay to create jobs, and for affirmative action programs to overcome discrimination against women, Blacks, francophones, and immigrants.

In the so-called salmon war between the rulers of Canada and the United States, we demand that the U.S. fishing boats, which have been seized be released, and that it be left to the producers on both sides of the border to work out a solution that preserves the stocks. The two governments concerned must guarantee a decent revenue to fishermen.

We call for the withdrawal of Canadian troops from Yugoslavia, where they are part the effort to try to overturn the workers state and restore capitalism. We call for the withdrawal of Canadian troops from Haiti, where their role is to maintain imperialist domination. We call for the cancellation of the third world debt.

The CL candidates hold up the example of the Cuban revolution, where workers and farmers kicked out the U.S.- backed dictatorship and formed their own government in 1959.

At this point it seems that the Liberals will once again form the government. But whoever wins, workers and farmers will be the central target of the capitalist rulers' attacks against our working and living conditions, social services and democratic rights. The capitalist system is in a deepening crisis worldwide and needs to be replaced with socialism, a society based on human needs and solidarity, not profits.

This is the way forward offered by the Communist League candidates. It's one that must be fought out above all in the streets and on the picket lines, not just at a ballot box. We point to the strike by Safeway workers in Alberta against concessions, to the April 16 protest by farmers in Quebec City, the fight of Acadians to keep open their schools in New Brunswick, and the fight of Franco-Ontarians to keep open the Monfort Hospital in Ottawa.

Where the CL is not running, we call for a vote for the NDP. Because the NDP is based on the unions outside of Quebec, a vote for the NDP is a vote against the parties directly controlled by the capitalists.

In Quebec, an NDP vote allows workers and farmers to express the importance of uniting with working people across Canada in the fight for a workers and farmers government and of winning workers in English-speaking Canada to the fight for Quebec independence. Because the Bloc Quebecois is based on a section of the capitalists in Quebec, a vote for the Bloc goes in the opposite direction and is in fact against the interests of working people.

The program advocated by the CL campaign is the program that the NDP as a labor party should put forward, a program that is along the line of march of the working class and its allies toward the formation of a workers and farmers government. Advancing this perspective today is a central element of fighting to transform our unions into weapons of class struggle.

The Communist League candidates know the struggle doesn't stop on election day. On June 3, we'll be back in the streets and in our plants with the Young Socialists joining the fights and looking for those who can be won to the communist movement. We will continue to get out the truth by circulating Pathfinder books, the Militant, and Perspectiva Mundial.  
 
 
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