Pritchard is a garment worker and member of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. Dugré is a packinghouse worker. O'Keefe is a meat packer and member of the United Food and Commercial Workers and of the Young Socialists. The federal elections in Canada are November 27.

Through the Communist League campaign, we have presented a fighting, working-class voice in this election in opposition to the parties of big business to thousands of working people across Canada who are resisting the deepening assaults against our working and living conditions, our democratic rights and union organizations, and the ever growing devastation caused by the capitalist system of exploitation.

Union members and other working people are setting an example of standing up to the employer and government attacks and of labor solidarity. This includes striking truckers at the port of Montreal who face government strike-breaking orders; miners on strike against Falconbridge in Sudbury, Ontario, who have won solidarity from fellow workers in Norway; striking meat packers fighting for a union contract at Superior Poultry and locked-out workers walking the picket line against deep concessions demanded by Fletcher's in Vancouver; and farmers defending their livelihood in Ontario.

Amidst these struggles the Communist League campaign has built solidarity with the Palestinian people fighting for their freedom; workers and farmers defending their revolution in Cuba; working people bringing down the brutal Milosevic dictatorship in Yugoslavia and opening new space to organize and defend their workers state; and meat packers, coal miners, and other workers in the United States who are part of the growing working-class resistance in that country.

We brought our communist campaign on picket lines, at plant gates and labor protests, door-to-door and on street corners in working-class neighborhoods, to rallies and all-candidates meetings, and in actions defending the rights of working people around the world.

Our campaign has received a serious response to the fact that in order to put an end to the growing injustice, brutality, and horrors of capitalism, those who produce the wealth of this country need to unite in a revolutionary struggle to establish their own government, a workers and farmers government. With such a weapon, we can begin to build a society based on human needs and not profits, and join the international struggle for socialism.

In Canada, such a revolutionary course goes hand-in-hand with a common fight by working people across the country against the national oppression of Quebecois, Acadians, and Natives, and for Quebec independence.

The struggles of working people today show the possibilities that exist for solidarity, common action, and relying on our organized power. They help explain why working people and their mass organizations, the trade unions, should not give support to the bosses' parties, but rather should embark on the road of independent working-class political action.

More than anything else, the current election campaign registers the rightward shift in bourgeois politics in Canada. Despite sharp conflict, all contending parties have been part of the assault--from the actual privatization of growing parts of the public health care system across the country, to anti–working-class "law and order" measures, to new imperialist intervention abroad. Regardless of who wins, the new government will implement big parts of the Alliance's anti–working-class program. This is what Canada's capitalists badly need in order to defend their crisis-ridden profit system.

Voting for Jean Chrétien's Liberals in order to stop Stockwell Day's Canadian Alliance party is not a step toward a united fight against the bosses, their parties, and their government, any more than voting for the capitalist Bloc Quebecois can advance the fight for Quebec independence.

We urge a vote for Communist League candidates where possible, and elsewhere encourage workers, small farmers, and youth to express an elementary class vote against the bosses' parties by casting a vote for the New Democratic Party. Despite its pro-capitalist, pro-Canadian imperialist program, the NDP is a party linked to the unions.

We and our campaign supporters will continue collaboration with other fighting workers after the election. We will bring the revolutionary truth as widely as possible by circulating the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and Pathfinder books among those fighters, who need a clear, scientific understanding of the world in order to change it.

Join us in this effort. Join the Communist League and the Young Socialists.
 
 
Related article:
Polarization marks elections in Canada
 
 
 
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