Workers, small farmers, youth, and other fighters for social justice in Canada and elsewhere have to unambiguously reject and oppose Ottawa's march toward war under the guise of the recent land mine treaty it initiated and hosted December 2 - 4. This treaty has nothing to do with stopping military slaughter or the maiming of children. It will be used instead as a club against those in the world who resist or are not compliant enough with imperialist dictates. Ottawa uses its campaign around land mines to advance the interests of Canadian imperialism in the world - against its rivals and against oppressed nations and peoples - and to suck working people in Canada into supporting its foreign policy and the use of Canadian troops abroad and at home.

The Canadian government's so-called "pacifism" is that of a smaller imperialist country with limited military weight compared to its bigger imperialist competitors -above all its neighbor to the south, the United States.

But in fact Ottawa has been a participant in most of the imperialist wars in this century, from WWI to the slaughter of 150,000 Iraqi working people in 1990 - 91. It took part in imperialist interventions in the Congo in the early 1960s and in Somalia in the 1990s. It supported the invasions of the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Panama or has been complicit, as in the Algerian and Vietnam wars of national liberation against Paris and Washington. Its forces are still part of the occupation of Haiti.

The Canadian rulers' crusade is aimed at banning "small" arms, the only ones that oppressed people can get in most cases, not the massive machines of death and destruction used by Washington, Paris, London, and Ottawa to terrorize workers and farmers around the world. Working people should defend unconditionally the right of the oppressed and exploited to use whatever weapons they can get to fight for their freedom.

The Communist League supports the Cuban government's refusal to sign the mine treaty. "Land mines are a weapon of the poor," a Cuban general said recently, explaining the commitment by the Cuban government to provide a rifle, a land mine, and a grenade to each Cuban citizen so they can defend their country and their socialist revolution against Washington's decades-long aggression.

The very same day the conference on land mines opened, Ottawa suspended the right to strike of 45,000 postal workers. Over the last half-decade it has forced through draconian cuts to vital social services. Inside its own borders it denies the right to self-determination of nationally oppressed Quebecois and Natives people, and has used its army against the Quebecois in 1970 and against the Mohawks in 1990.

Working people in Canada can strengthen their fighting capacity by opposing the support given to Ottawa's imperialist initiatives by the entire labor bureaucracy and by its political arm outside Quebec, the social-democratic New Democratic Party. The pledge of CAN $1.25 million to a de- mining project by the Canadian Auto Workers officialdom only draws working people to support Ottawa's capitalist government - their biggest enemy - and its imperialist war aims.

The main thing that workers, farmers, and youth in Canada can do to make the world safer from land mines or weapons of mass destruction is to organize to take political power out the hands of Canada's imperialist exploiters, establish a workers and farmers government, and use this revolutionary weapon to help working people in the rest of the world to do the same - as their brothers and sisters in Cuba have done uncompromisingly since the victory of their revolution in 1959.  
 
 
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