MONTREAL — The Communist League here is running an energetic working-class campaign for Joe Young, its candidate for the October elections to the Quebec National Assembly for the electoral district of St. Laurent. Party members joined Young in campaigning at a Walmart parking lot Aug. 9, discussing today’s crisis of the capitalist system and its deepening drive toward war. They’re petitioning to get him on the ballot.
Young and CL member Francois Bradette met Miriam l’Heureux Greenberg, whose father is Jewish. She was interested in Young’s campaign statement, “The fight against rising Jew-hatred is crucial for working people.” Her father’s parents emigrated from Poland “when they learned what was happening in Germany,” she said.
“When I learned about the boat that arrived with Jewish refugees that was refused entry into both Canada and the United States, it made me sick,” she said. That boat was the MS St. Louis, which set sail from Nazi Germany May 13, 1939, holding 937 Jewish refugees. After being barred from landing in Cuba, Canada and the U.S., the ship had to return to Europe, where hundreds of passengers later perished in the Holocaust.
Recent attacks on Jews
Young described recent attacks on Hasidic Jews here and how claims by the Montreal police and the media that they are an “isolated incident” are false. “This is part of the capitalist rulers’ attempt to downplay the significance of the major rise of attacks on Jews in Canada and around the world since the Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom in Israel,” Young said. “The Communist League supports Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews and its fight with Tehran, Hamas and Hezbollah to prevent another Holocaust.”
She signed the petition to put Young on the ballot. “I’m against everything that harms Jews,” she said.
The CL has now reached its goal of collecting 200 signatures to put Young on the ballot, double the legal requirement of 100. In the course of the ballot drive, campaigners have sold 17 books by Socialist Workers Party leaders and other revolutionaries, five Militant subscriptions and dozens of single copies of the socialist newsweekly.