Vol. 79/No. 41      November 16, 2015

The only working-class voice in the elections was the Communist League campaign of Joseph Young and Beverly Bernardo, who ran in Calgary, Alberta, and Montreal.

Battered by the world contraction of capitalist production and trade — especially the plunge in oil prices — the Canadian economy entered a recession in 2015. Official unemployment rose to 7.1 percent in September. In oil-rich, formerly booming Alberta, jobless claims jumped 82 percent over the last year as oil companies laid off thousands. Husky, a major oil company based in Calgary, announced 1,400 layoffs Sept. 30. Many workers and some middle-class layers blamed the Conservatives’ moves to place the burden of the capitalist downturn on their backs for worsening conditions. The slogan “Anyone but Harper” became popular at labor rallies and social protests.

Harper’s “government has, with a parliamentary majority, become sclerotically rigid, media inaccessible, authoritarian and peevish,” wrote longtime Harper supporter Conrad Black in an Oct. 18 New York Sun article titled, “Canada Is Set to Vote on Whether to Re-elect a Sadistic Schoolmaster.” Black concluded that it was time for Harper to go, saying Trudeau “has earned his chance.”

Harper attacked political rights. He pushed Bill C-51, aimed at strengthening police powers in the name of fighting terrorism, and Bill C-24, which gives the government power to revoke Canadian citizenship for those with dual citizenship if convicted on terrorism-related charges.

He marshaled C-10, an omnibus crime bill, through Parliament, introducing a raft of mandatory sentences, sentencing juveniles as adults, and barring alternatives to prison such as house arrest or community service.

Harper insisted that Muslim women receiving citizenship be denied the right to wear a face-covering niqab at the event. Both Trudeau and NDP candidate Thomas Mulcair opposed the policy.

Communist League campaign

Rojhat Dereli, a student of Kurdish origin, joined Bernardo and campaign supporters at a protest of 1,000 in Lac-Mégantic Oct. 11. “I was very impressed to see a crowd of people mobilizing because an issue touched them directly,” he told the Militant.

The Communist League candidates called for a massive government-financed public works program to put people to work at union rates to build infrastructure, schools, child care centers and other things workers need. They championed the fight for a $15 minimum wage and a union. They spoke out against Canada’s participation in Washington’s intervention in Syria and joined protests against the Turkish government’s attacks on the Kurds and the murder and disappearance of Aboriginal women. They pointed to the Cuban Revolution as an example for working people in Canada, calling for an end to the U.S. embargo on Cuba and return of the Guantánamo naval base.

Workers face growing attacks from the bosses and their governments no matter what bourgeois party is in office, the Communist League candidates explained. Working people need to organize independently of all the capitalist parties and build a labor party based on the unions that can unite workers in struggle on a course toward taking power out of the hands of Canada’s propertied rulers.

Working people looking for a change put NDP leader Thomas Mulcair in first place in the polls at the beginning of the campaign. But the NDP echoed Harper in promising a balanced budget. Trudeau, on the other hand, pledged to run $10 billion deficits over the next three years to invest in public transportation, health care and housing.

“Many of my co-workers see the NDP as a bad option for the economy,” Atakan Beyi, an air-conditioning mechanic in Calgary, told the Militant.

The NDP, founded as a social democratic party in 1961 with a pro-capitalist program, acted as the political arm of the unions outside Quebec at the outset. Never a revolutionary party with a working-class program, it has become a party based on ideology, not on working-class organizations, another liberal bourgeois party. It no longer provides a way for workers to vote for their class — even in a distorted way.

The union officialdom has turned towards “strategic voting” to defeat the Conservatives, another way of saying anyone but Harper. In essence, this was a call for workers to vote Liberal. The Canadian Labour Congress sent Trudeau a congratulatory message Oct. 19, saying it looked for “real change” under a Liberal government.

Trudeau has announced he will withdraw Canadian participation in the bombing campaign against the Islamic State while maintaining a training role for Canadian troops in Iraq. He said he will let 25,000 Syrian refugees enter Canada by the end of 2015.

This election also marked the continuing decline of the bourgeois-nationalist Bloc Québécois, which runs candidates only in Quebec. The BQ won only 10 of the 75 Quebec seats in Parliament, even less than the 12 won by the Conservatives, while the Liberals won the majority there for the first time in decades.
 
 
Related articles:
‘Our victory is that workers get a voice’ in 2015 election
 
 
 
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