We have decided to run in the November 30 Quebec elections as candidates of the Communist League.

We will present a working-class voice against the parties of the bosses - both the Parti Quebecois (PQ) and the Liberal Party of Quebec (PLQ). And we will use our campaign to fight for Quebec independence and build solidarity with all the oppressed and exploited fighting for their rights - from the 4,500 striking paperworkers against Abitibi-Consol, to the workers and youth protesting the murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian in the United States because he defended a women's right to abortion, to the students demanding better schools in France, to the 300,000 public workers in Quebec who demand that the government sit down to negotiate a decent contract with them.

As the party of Canada's ruling class in Quebec, the PLQ is one of the main defenders in this province of the Canadian federalist state - the very pillar of the national oppression of the Quebecois. Its leader, Jean Charest, is today at the center of an effort aimed at preventing a new referendum on Quebec sovereignty that Canada's rulers know they can lose. Many workers justly resent this move as an attack against Quebec's right to self-determination. As for the PLQ's new economic program, it will deepen the attacks already led by all provincial governments in this country, including the PQ, against our social services and labor rights.

The PQ is also a party of the bosses, but of smaller bosses who are Quebecois. They want to get greater powers for the Quebec government in order to advance their own class interests against those of their competitors -and against us, working people. The PQ claims to defends Quebec's rights. In fact, it has led the deepest assault by any Quebec government on social services, especially health care. This has deepened the national oppression of the Quebecois.

Quebec labor officialdom has already made clear that, as they have done over the last quarter century, they will use Charest's federalism and conservative program to try convince working people to vote for the PQ as a "lesser evil." This is a dead-end. Working people in Quebec have already paid a huge price with this course of class-collaboration. Today's crisis of world capitalism leads humanity into a disaster. The only way of getting out of it will be for working people to follow the Cuban road, i.e. to fight to establish governments of the exploited producers, workers and farmers governments, and to use them to begin building a society based on human solidarity and needs, not profits.

As a first step into that direction, we will use our election campaign to explain why the trade union movement in Quebec should break with the PQ and launch its own party, a labor party based on the unions. Such a party would be an incomparable weapon in the hands of working people for building solidarity with those of us engaged in struggles, here and abroad; for fighting for a shorter workweek with no loss in pay as a mean to create badly needed jobs; and for struggling for Quebec independence as a vital part of the fight to establish with our brothers and sisters in the rest of the country a workers' and farmers' government in Ottawa.  
 
 
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