In face of this crisis, Prime Minister Paul Martin has tried to frame his campaign around the question, “What kind of Canada do you want?” claiming the choice is between today’s Canada under the Liberal Party or “a country like the United States” under the Conservative Party. He and other bourgeois politicians want workers and farmers to identify themselves as “Canadians” embracing bosses and working people alike.

However, what isn’t being discussed by the capitalist politicians is the reality facing millions of workers and working farmers who have been confronting the brunt of the Canadian rulers’ intensifying austerity drive—a drive aimed at raising the sagging profit rates of the ruling rich in the context of the growing march of the world capitalism system toward economic depression and imperialist war.

Speaking at a May 29 public meeting here on this topic sponsored by the Militant Labor Forum, Michel Prairie, a leader of the Communist League in Canada, said, “There is no working-class voice in these elections. The truth is that in this class-divided society there is “we”—workers and farmers—and “them,” the handful of billionaire ruling capitalist families who own the mines, mills, factories, land, and the banks. We as working people have no common interests with them.”

Prairie said, “The Liberals, Conservative, the New Democratic Party [NDP], and the Bloc Quebecois are all acting in the interests of the rulers and have been part and parcel of the attacks against the social wage of working people and our unions.”  
 
Living standards, unions under attack
An article in last week’s Militant explained that Washington’s blows against Canadian imperialism for its refusal to take part in the “coalition of the willing” in the war on Iraq is behind the crisis of the current government in Canada.

At home, as the bosses and their governments seek to make workers pay for their economic crisis, they have met resistance by workers and farmers. But as this drive steadily erodes the standard of living of working people, their first line of defense, the organized labor movement, has been weakened.

In May union officials in British Columbia agreed to a settlement that imposed a 15 percent wage cut on 43,000 health-care workers in the province and gave the provincial government power to fire 600 health-care workers over the next two years and to contract out their jobs. The workers had initially defied a strikebreaking law, winning the support of thousands of other workers. Since January 2002, some 6,000 hospital workers in British Columbia have lost their jobs as a result of contracting out by the government.

Over the past year, bosses have used the club of “bankruptcy” to go after workers and their unions. On January 29, Stelco, the biggest steel producer in Canada, gained court protection from creditors by declaring bankruptcy and has been demanding massive concessions from the United Steelworkers union that threaten the livelihood of thousands of Stelco pensioners and the jobs of those currently on the payroll. A May 1 rally of some 3,000 workers in Hamilton, Ontario, protested the company attack.

Thousands of unionized Air Canada workers are now being asked by union officials to accept more than $1 billion ($1 Can = $0.73 U.S.) in wage and benefits concessions in order to “save” the airline, which is also under bankruptcy protection.

In mid-May, a provincial mediator imposed a contract on 10,000 wood workers in British Columbia, members of the Industrial, Wood and Allied Workers of Canada. The contract allows the 61 employers on the West Coast to run their sawmills continuously with reduced overtime and travel pay. The contract also lets the bosses cut production costs by 10 percent over the next 18 months, which will result in thousands more layoffs.

The lives of working farmers across Canada are also being devastated by the capitalist economic crisis. Farmers’ cash income is at its lowest level in 25 years. Overall farm revenue fell to $34 billion, a 5.8 percent slide from the $36 billion reported in 2002. As a result, thousands of working farmers have been forced off the land. Since 1996, the number of farms in Canada has dropped by 11 percent to nearly 247,000. The number of people working on farms today is 313,000—down from half a million in 1976. This year the crisis was sharpened by the Canadian rulers’ trade war with Washington, which banned beef from Canada under the pretext of the threat of “mad cow” disease.

The overall impact of the bosses’ profit drive has pushed down wages dramatically for tens of thousands of workers. Today, one in four workers makes less than $10 an hour. Long-term unemployment has increased with the closure of plants like Camco in Hamilton, and Levis in Stoney Creek, as well as layoffs at corporations like Bombardier in Montreal.

The organized labor movement, the main obstacle to the course of the rulers, has taken a battering under the onslaught of the bosses. While union membership has increased in absolute numbers by 350,000 to 4.2 million between 1997 and 2002, the proportion of workers organized in unions has dropped from a high of nearly 42 percent in 1984 to 32 percent in 2002.

The productivity drive of Canadian bosses against working people and their unions is fueled by the intensifying economic competition between Washington and Ottawa. For the bosses, productivity means forcing fewer workers to produce more in a shorter period of time, for less pay and benefits.

In this competition, in which workers in both Canada and the United States go to the wall, the bosses in the United States have done better than Canada’s rulers. For the 1997-2000 period, the average growth in the rate of productivity in the United States was 3.3 percent. In Canada it was 1.5 percent. Growth in labor productivity in Canada slumped in 2003 to 1.2 percent, less than half of what it was in 2002. Ten of the 20 industries in the manufacturing sector recorded a decline in productivity.  
 
Fight for working-class unity in struggle
“The growing capitalist economic crisis has had a differentiated impact on different layers of workers,” said Prairie. For example, the weight of the economic crisis has fallen disproportionately on workers who are Quebecois. The French-speaking Quebecois are an oppressed nationality within Canada.

Official unemployment in Quebec has grown steadily since 2000, reaching 9.1 percent, well above the national average of 7.6 percent. More than one-third of all working people receiving welfare in Canada lived in Quebec in 2003, while Quebecois only make up about one-quarter of the population.

Current polls show the Bloc Quebecois, a bourgeois nationalist party that supports Quebec sovereignty, would get a large majority of Quebec’s 75 seats. As a result, the Quebec national question has become an issue in the election campaign.

Conservative Party leaders are discussing the possibility that a minority Conservative government would make alliances on certain issues with the Bloc Quebecois.

Speaking at a rally in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Paul Martin attacked National Democratic Party federal leader Jack Layton for committing the NDP to repealing the Clarity Act if Quebec won its independence. The Clarity Act of 2000 asserts that Quebec would be able to achieve sovereignty only after negotiations with Ottawa, following a referendum in which the House of Commons had concluded that the question and the answer were acceptable to Canada’s rulers.

Layton describes himself as a “flexible federalist” and is an opponent of Quebec independence. Campaigning in Quebec, he stated that the Clarity Act was no longer needed because “Canadians are ready to move beyond those divisive times of the past.”

“Our unions should support the struggle of the Quebecois against national oppression and for Quebec’s independence,” said Communist League leader Michel Prairie. “This is the road toward unity of working people in Quebec and in the rest of Canada against the government of our common class enemy in Ottawa.

“Other demands can also point our unions in the direction of promoting unity in struggle among working people,” said Prairie. He highlighted several:

“An immediate increase in the minimum wage, employment insurance, and social assistance to the average industrial wage of $14 - $15 an hour.

“Jobs for all by instituting a 30-hour workweek for all with no cut in pay, together with a massive program of public works to build and repair badly needed hospitals, schools, community centers, sports facilities, and basic infrastructure like roads and water purification systems.

“Government-enforced affirmative action programs to ensure that women, Blacks, Native people, and other oppressed layers of the working class have access to better-paying jobs, proper housing, and higher education.

“In face of rising gasoline and other prices, full and automatic cost-of-living protection for workers’ wages and social benefits.

“Opening the books of the energy monopolies, to be inspected by committees of workers and farmers, and nationalization of the energy industry under workers’ control, taking it out of the hands of capitalists.

“Canceling the foreign debt of semicolonial countries.”

By fighting for these kinds of demands, Prairie said, “working people can strengthen our unions. Through this struggle we can build a political party that can help lead a revolutionary fight by millions to replace capitalist political power with a workers and farmers government, as the first step in the fight for a socialist future here and abroad.”  
 
 
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