Conservatives target the unemployed with EI changes

This article was originally published at Fightback.



Strict new changes to Canada’s Employment Insurance (EI) program took effect across the country on Jan. 6. The Conservatives’ plans to “reform” EI have been public knowledge since the Harper government tabled its last federal budget in March. Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development Diane Finley claimed the new changes merely clarify what is expected from EI claimants and help better connect job applicants to available work. In reality, they represent the latest attempt by the Canadian bourgeoisie to make workers pay for the ongoing capitalist crisis through austerity and a reduction of the social wage.

Henceforth, EI claimants will be divided into three categories. “Long-tenured workers” have paid 30 per cent of their maximum annual EI premiums for seven of the last ten years, and collected benefits for less than 35 weeks during the past five years. “Frequent claimants” have filed more than three claims and collected more than 60 weeks’ benefits over the previous five years. Anyone else is classified as an “occasional claimant.” The net effect is to divide EI claimants between those who pay into the program but never or rarely collect benefits and those who make more frequent claims.

The revamped EI program will also introduce more stringent definitions of “suitable employment” and what constitutes a “reasonable job search” (in other words, preparing resumes, attending job fairs, and applying for jobs and job banks). Under the new regulations, the government will consider several factors when considering whether an EI claimant is suited for a particular job, including wages, type of work, commuting time, working conditions, hours of work and personal circumstances such as family obligations. As an example of what is considered “suitable,” the regulations define an acceptable commuting time as one hour each way — although, it could also be a figure that “could be higher taking into account previous commuting history and community’s average commuting time.”

Particularly hard-hit by the changes will be the Atlantic provinces, the economies of which are more dependent than the rest of Canada on seasonal employment such as fishing. During the winter months, when there is little work to be found in rural areas, many residents rely on EI payments before returning to their jobs when the season starts. In the wake of Harper’s restructuring of the program, frequent claimants may be required to take available work off-season rather than waiting for their old jobs to start up again — even if the new job pays 30 per cent less and is located an hour’s drive away.

While the government portrays the EI changes as common sense reforms designed to reduce waste while making it easier for people to find work, the reality is more complicated. In truth, EI “reform” represents the latest bourgeois attack on workers as the ruling elite seeks to make the most vulnerable members of society pay for the crisis of their system. Seizing on the pretext of a vast increase in the federal debt caused by corporate tax cuts and bailouts to banks and auto companies, the bosses are clawing back every historical gain of the Canadian working class.

As it aims to restore conditions of profitability, one of the biggest targets of the capitalist class is the social wage, which consists of benefits paid through the bourgeois state that workers managed to wrench from the bosses over years of struggle. This includes pensions, health care, and unemployment benefits. In order to pay off the debt and restore the rate of profit, capitalists are targeting every social program they can find as a source of savings. As always, the human cost of restoring economic equilibrium to the capitalist system is borne not by those who order the cuts, but by ordinary working people.

Youth and female workers, in particular, stand to lose out, as they are the most vulnerable to long-term changes in the job market that have reduced eligibility for EI. In recent decades, demand for ever-greater “flexibility” in the labour market has created a shift towards more temporary and part-time employment. This is reflected in numbers from Statistics Canada, which reported that 78.4 per cent of Canadians who lost their jobs in 2012 were eligible for EI benefits, compared to 83.9 per cent in 2010. In an economy that emphasizes the disposability of the worker, fewer and fewer people are able to reach the threshold of 420 to 700 working hours (generally only attainable at a full-time job) that allows them to qualify for benefits. The same Statistics Canada report noted that among EI contributors, the share working in full-time jobs decreased from 51 per cent in 2011 to 40 per cent. Eligibility rates for women and youth both dropped.

By making it harder to qualify for EI benefits and instituting a sliding scale of benefits that decreases benefits for each week the recipient is out of work — all while making no effort to reduce premiums — the Harper government is tightening the screws on the unemployed and forcing them to accept work in the more precarious short-term, temporary or part-time positions that increasingly dominate the economic landscape in advanced capitalist nations. At the same time, cutting benefits while maintaining premiums will provide the government with an additional source of funds to pay off the federal debt should EI once more generate a surplus.

Such a manoeuvre would come as no surprise from the Conservative government, which funnelled $55-billion from the EI surplus to help pay off the debt in 2008 — a move that then-NDP leader Jack Layton described as “the biggest theft in Canadian history.” But Harper’s theft was only the most recent in a series of attacks that have plagued EI for decades.

Unemployment Insurance was first established as part of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett’s Employment and Social Insurance Act of 1935, and was later expanded by the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau, which made benefits more generous and easily available. Since 1971, those benefits have been cut and cut again. The federal government, originally obliged to make financial contributions to the program along with employers and employees, gradually reduced its contributions until they were eliminated completely by 1990.

The Progressive Conservatives cut EI in 1990 and 1993, before the Liberals took over the hatchet and cut it further in 1994 and 1996. Amendments made eligibility more difficult by increasing the hours of work needed to qualify. The Liberals’ role in cutting EI cost them dearly in lost votes from the Atlantic provinces during the 1997 election. After Harper was elected in 2006, the Conservatives refused to recognize the existing EI surplus, and in 2008 adopted legislation freezing the surplus indefinitely and putting EI premiums on a pay-as-you-go basis. That same year, the Supreme Court of Canada rejected a court challenge from two Quebec trade unions, the Confederation des syndicats nationaux (the province’s second largest union, representing 300,000 workers) and the Syndicat National des Employes de l’Aluminium, arguing that the government had misappropriated EI funds.

Now the Conservatives have further escalated their attacks on EI. The new changes are only the latest manifestation of the austerity the party has been mandated by the capitalist class with spearheading, and which is being felt in every area of economic life through cuts, layoffs, and downsizing. In simple terms, EI “reform” will force the unemployed to more quickly accept one of the precarious, low-wage jobs that are the new norm in Canada by making it more difficult for them to survive.

A larger point must also be considered. In the last analysis, the welfare state, which includes programs such as Employment Insurance, is only an attempt by the capitalist state to compensate for the failings of capitalism itself. Ever-subject to the irrational whims of the market, the capitalist system relies on what Marx called a “reserve army of labour” (the unemployed) to help keep wages down. The resulting waste of human potential is staggering. However, in most capitalist economies, unemployment has gone way over and above what Marx would consider a “reserve army”. Persistent, chronic, and endemic unemployment undermines the system from within. Where the anarchic free market permits human beings to suffer when their labour is not required, a rationally-planned economy would allow society to fully utilize all of the “human resources” at its disposal.

As part of an omnibus budget bill passed by Harper’s Conservative majority, the EI overhaul will go through as planned unless stopped in its tracks by a popular mass movement. Canadians have seen two such movements recently in the forms of the Quebec student strike — which targeted the tuition hikes of the Charest government — and Idle No More, which is currently engaged in an all-out battle to stop the implementation of Bill C-45. At first glance, the unemployed appear only as a small minority of the general population. But the same could be said for the Quebec students and First Nations activists who nonetheless pushed their concerns onto the national agenda, and through their efforts earned a great deal of support from the wider working class.

The NDP and many union leaders have come out strongly against the changes to EI. But ultimately, cuts to assistance for the unemployed are only a symptom of the larger problem: an economic system of which unemployment is the inevitable by-product. Bourgeois economists that refer to a so-called “normal” level of unemployment reflect the degree to which our present society has acclimatized itself to a certain, seemingly inevitable degree of human suffering. And indeed, so long as the means of production are privately-owned and geared towards profit, a certain subset of the population will be condemned to idleness and deprivation.

Only a planned economy under democratic workers’ control, where the means of production are publicly-owned and oriented towards the fulfilment of social needs, will allow society to eliminate the scourge of unemployment once and for all.

Idle No More re-ignites social struggle across Canada

Note: This article was originally written for the publication Fightback and is expected to appear on their website www.marxist.ca after the Christmas break.

Thousands of protesters took part in demonstrations across the country on Dec. 21 under the banner of Idle No More, a grassroots movement dedicated to protecting the environment and Aboriginal treaty rights against new federal legislation. First Nations activists and their supporters mobilized nationwide, with the largest protest on Parliament Hill drawing more than 2,000 people. Solidarity rallies took place around the world from New Zealand to Los Angeles to the United Kingdom. Some activists also started blocking key roads and railways. In the span of a few weeks, Idle No More has become the most significant social movement in Canada since Occupy and the Quebec student strike.

The movement’s recent focus has been on stopping the federal omnibus budget bill C-45, now the law of the land after having received royal assent. Idle No More supporters argue that, contrary to Aboriginal treaties, the Harper government has pushed through Bill C-45 without consulting native leaders or gaining their free, prior and informed consent. The bill includes changes to the Indian Act that would give the Aboriginal affairs minister the authority to call a band meeting or referendum for the purpose of releasing reserve land, potentially a gateway to privatization.

Environmental concerns also play a key role in Idle No More. Changes made in Bill C-45 to the Navigable Waters Protection Act reduce the number of protected lakes and rivers in Canada from 2.5 million to 82 (coincidentally, the majority of bodies of water that remain under federal protection are located in Conservative ridings). The weakening of environmental regulations to boost corporate profits will increase pollution and contamination in native communities such as Fort Chipewyan, which has seen cancer rates skyrocket in recent years due to the nearby oil sands.

Idle No More supporters are demanding that the Harper government shelve Bill C-45 until it has met and consulted with native leaders. Their struggle has become embodied in the hunger strike of Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence, who at the time of writing had gone more than 22 days without eating. Leader of a First Nations community that attracted international attention in 2011 for its appalling living conditions, the increasingly emaciated Spence has pledged to continue her fast until the prime minister and governor-general meet with native leaders. Harper’s continued refusal to grant such a meeting raises the real possibility that the prime minister of Canada will let this woman die before he listens to her concerns.

Fightback unequivocally supports the efforts of First Nations to defend their land and resource rights as stipulated in the treaties. But Idle No More addresses issues of concern to all Canadian workers, including poverty, education, housing, public health, the environment and the Harper government’s ongoing attacks on democracy. First Nations face the same enemy as the broader Canadian working class. By forcing these topics into the national conversation, native activists are taking the lead in the ongoing struggle against the decaying capitalist system.

The current activity follows years of steadily mounting grievances. First Nations have faced state oppression and discrimination throughout Canadian history. Successive governments in Ottawa cynically signed and broke treaties depending on their needs of the moment, while Aboriginal inhabitants were pushed onto reserves with poor land or relegated to the fringes of urban society to live as a despised minority. State authorities attempted to erase every aspect of their culture and separated native children from their families, forcing them to attend abusive residential schools.

Today, First Nations people statistically suffer social maladies at rates far worse than the general population: more unemployment, shorter life expectancy, higher rates of incarceration, poverty and suicide, lower levels of education and greater substance abuse. More than 75 First Nations communities live under constant boil-water-advisory conditions, and residents of towns such as Attawipiskat live in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions with no running water or proper sewage. Such is the legacy of centuries of oppression in which Aboriginal Canadians were treated at best as second-class citizens.

Abuse inevitably leads to resistance. Over the last few decades, indigenous peoples in Canada have fought back in whatever way they could, illustrated during successive crises in Oka (1990), Ipperwash (1995), Gustafsen Lake (1995) and Burnt Church (1999). National days of action in 2007 and 2008 led to native activists blockading stretches of Highway 401 and the CN railroad between Toronto and Montreal. Leaders of these actions were often rounded up and arrested.

Many First Nations people hoped for change in 2008 after Stephen Harper issued an official apology on behalf of the Canadian government for the residential school system. The prime minister pledged a new relationship with First Nations based on partnership and mutual respect. But the government’s successive actions exposed Harper’s promise as meaningless verbiage, as The Toronto Star noted on Dec. 20:

Since 2008, the Harper government has cut aboriginal health funding, gutted environmental review processes, ignored the more than 600 missing and murdered Indigenous women across Canada, withheld residential school documents from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, abandoned land claim negotiations, and tried to defend its underfunding of First Nations schools and child welfare agencies.

When some dared call attention to poverty, “corrupt” chiefs were blamed. Although the minister of Aboriginal Affairs, John Duncan, claims to have visited 50 First Nations communities and conducted 5,000 consultations, he and his staff clearly have not gained the First Nations’ consent on the seven currently tabled bills that Idle No More activists oppose.

After so many broken agreements and cutbacks, Bill C-45 was clearly the straw that broke the camel’s back – the moment when quantity turned into quality, when injustices accumulated over many years became too much to bear.

Idle No More began with four indigenous and non-indigenous Saskatchewan women – Sylvia McAdams, Jessica Gordon, Nina Wilson and Sheelah McLean – who began organizing “teach-ins” in Saskatoon, Regina and Prince Albert during November to build awareness around Bill C-45. Efforts continued when the Louis Bull Cree Nation held learning sessions in Alberta, and organizer Tanya Kappo took to Facebook and Twitter to spread the message further.

Momentum built on social media and led to a National Day of Action on Dec. 10. At the invitation of the New Democratic Party, First Nations leaders attempted to enter the House of Commons as the bill was being voted on, but were refused entry.  Agitation therefore built up further, culminating in an even larger day of protests across the country on Dec. 21.

While solidarity rallies took place from Vancouver to Halifax, the focus was on Ottawa, where legions of supporters were bused in from as far afield as Regina. By mid-morning on Friday, 500 supporters had already gathered on Victoria Island outside the compound where Chief Spence is staying in a teepee during her hunger strike. The demonstrators braved cold weather to rally on Parliament Hill to hear a variety of speakers including Assembly of First Nations National Chief Shawn Atleo, who said Spence’s hunger strike and Idle No More had awakened Aboriginal people across Canada.

Harper appeared unmoved by the day’s rallies, preferring to tweet about his love of bacon. But NDP leader Thomas Mulcair penned a letter to Harper in which he urged the prime minister to heed the message of Idle No More, commit to reconciliation and re-engage with native leaders.

“From coast to coast to coast, an unprecedented wave of grassroots action is sweeping across First Nations communities,” the Leader of the Official Opposition wrote. “When you met with First Nations leaders less than a year ago, you committed your government to working in partnership with First Nations Canadians. The #IdleNoMore protests are proof that Aboriginal Canadians are demanding you fulfill that solemn commitment.”

The NDP leader’s support for the aims of Idle No More is an encouraging sign, as are letters of support from the Canadian Labour Congress, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and others. There is a widespread recognition that in challenging corporate power and standing up for native land and resource rights, First Nations people are fighting on behalf of all Canadian workers who want decent housing, high public health and education standards and a clean environment for their children to grow up in.

Therefore, Fightback wholeheartedly supports the Idle No More movement. The struggle of Aboriginal Canadians for basic rights and dignity reflects the struggle of all working class Canadians seeking a decent life. But advancing those goals in the long run will require greater unity between First Nations and the labour movement.

Defend native treaty rights and the environment!

Unity between native and non-native workers!

For a socialist Canada with equal opportunities for all!

Welcome to the New Security State: Conservatives' Omnibus Crime Bill Criminalizes Youth and Workers

This article originally appeared in Fightback.

The relentless austerity measures currently being visited upon the Canadian working class are typically justified by the mantra, “There is no money.” We are constantly told that all levels of government are broke, spending cuts are needed, and that workers must tighten their belts and permanently accept a lower standard of living.

But for the state security apparatus, things are very different.

Despite an apparently desperate need to cut public spending, including the possibility of sacking up to a third of the federal civil service, the Conservative government plans to massively increase spending on domestic and foreign defence. None of this security spending will aid working-class people (either in Canada or abroad); instead, it is very likely that our own money will be used against us in our attempts to fight austerity.

Amidst a general rise in military spending, the Harper government had already allocated $9-billion of federal funds towards the purchase of F-35 fighter jets when delays and cost overruns at Lockheed-Martin forced it to consider alternatives. On Feb. 15, the National Post reported that the Department of National Defence was preparing to tender a contract for six armed unmanned air vehicles (UAVs, commonly referred to as drones). Remotely-piloted aircraft such as the MQ-9 Reaper cost an estimated $30-million each.

Among countries on the receiving end of US imperialism, drones have become notorious in recent years as the most terrifying incarnation of the U.S. military’s advanced weaponry. The ongoing slaughter of innocents at the hands of unmanned aircraft in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya have provoked the ire of civilian populations and served as a rallying point for armed insurrection.

The Canadian military has leased drones in the past from Israel for reconnaissance missions in Afghanistan, but the Post reported that the primary “attraction for the government, apart from the price, is the increasing flexibility of UAVs to conduct domestic patrols along Canada’s borders and mount offensive missions.”

Spending on state security forces has continued to rise in Canada and the United States, even as severe austerity grinds down the working class. Harsher sentences, increased police powers, more advanced weaponry, and greater surveillance of ordinary citizens are all on the agenda as Canada adopts a more aggressive military posture, as well as a more punitive and merciless criminal justice system.

Harper’s “tough on crime” policies are most clearly exemplified by his omnibus crime bill, the Safe Streets and Communities Act, which passed the House of Commons in December and could come into effect as early as March. Bill C-10 combines nine separate measures that failed to pass under the previous Conservative minority governments, including:

• Adult sentences for juvenile offenders as young as 14.
• Mandatory minimum sentences for sex crimes.
• Eliminating house arrest as a sentencing option for certain offences.
• Longer wait times on pardons, or eliminating them altogether in certain cases.
• Allowing police to arrest citizens on conditional release without warrant if perceived to be in violation of those conditions.
• Mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession “for the purpose of trafficking”.
• Increasing hurdles on re-entry for Canadians convicted abroad.
• Allowing victims of terrorism to sue “perpetrators and supporters”.

The imposition of mandatory minimum sentences will drastically swell Canada’s prison population. Officials in Quebec, Ontario, and Newfoundland have already voiced concerns about prison overcrowding. In Ontario alone, Correctional Services minister Madeline Meilleur estimated that the omnibus crime bill could cost Ontario taxpayers over $1-billion in added police and correctional service costs. This is at the same time as when workers are being told they must endure painful sacrifices to plug government deficits, with the federal 2012 deficit standing at $17.3-billion.

Naturally, the corporate media takes care not to remind readers and viewers that these deficits exploded after the 2008 bailout of the banking and automotive sectors. That year, the federal government transferred $75-billion of debt from the banks’ ledgers to the government through the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, and established an additional $200-billion fund to lend to the bankers. Billions were borrowed for this purpose, with interest on those loans billed to ordinary people. Governments, including those in Canada, have proceeded to pay back these debts on the backs of working-class people.

While the criminals on Wall Street and Bay Street are protected from their crimes and rewarded with bailouts, Canadian workers face economic insecurity and a vastly strengthened state security apparatus. Homelessness, evictions, and hunger are on the rise across the country, but only the military and police forces are immune from further spending cuts, even as the national crime rate continues a 20-year decline. The Harper government’s decision to spend $1-billion on security at the G20 summit in Toronto — a meeting of world leaders specifically on how to push through austerity — was a harbinger of things to come.

Seemingly not satisfied with the omnibus crime bill, the Conservatives introduced Bill C-30 into the House of Commons on Feb. 14. As the National Post reported, the deceptively-named Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act would “require telecommunications companies to give police customers’ information without a court order. The bill will also require ISPs (internet service providers) and cell-phone companies to install equipment for real-time surveillance and create new police powers designed to obtain access to the surveillance data.”

Despite the bluster of Public Safety minister Vic Toews that Canadians “can either stand with us or with the child pornographers”, the ostensible goal of cracking down on kiddie porn is merely the pretext for a wide-ranging assault on privacy and vast escalation of the state’s surveillance powers. Opponents are likely to mount a court challenge to the bill on the basis that it violates the section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms protecting against unlawful search and seizure. But, as the British Marxist Ted Grant liked to point out, the capitalists can move from “democracy” to dictatorship as easily as a person in his day could move from the non-smoking to the smoking compartment of a train.

In the context of such an aggressive increase in the power of the state apparatus and the surveillance of Canadians, the fact that the Harper government is considering the purchase of American drones for the purpose of “domestic patrols” can only be regarded by Canadian workers and activists with alarm.

The Los Angeles Times reported in December that police in North Dakota used a Predator B drone to locate and apprehend three men. That same month, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Obama administration was making a concerted effort to sell armed drones to its allies in order to ease the American burden in its various overseas conflicts. As the world’s largest arms dealer, the U.S. has now turned to Canada and apparently found a willing buyer in the Harper government for its arsenal of flying death machines.

Should the government purchases these drones — with its commitments in Afghanistan winding down and the effects of austerity creating an angrier, more rebellious working class — it is inevitable that these drones will eventually be turned against the civilian population of Canada to assist police with surveillance and apprehension. Given the criminalization of dissent at the G20, such an outcome should be cause for worry for anyone opposed to the austerity agenda.

As Marxists, we understand that the state is a product of irreconcilable class antagonisms, consisting in the end of armed bodies of men in defence of existing property relations. The collapse of the world capitalist economy has led to austerity measures that aim to pay for the crisis by bleeding dry the most vulnerable segments of the population. Declining economic prospects for Canadian workers and youth will inevitably lead to an explosion of social anger. Already we have seen the forces of the state deployed against peaceful demonstrators at the G20, and in imposing the closure of Occupy encampments across the country.

The erosion of civil liberties in Canada and the United States reflects the erosion of the state’s legitimacy as an expression of the popular will and its increasing resort to naked force to defend the existing social order. While Harper’s crime policies are justified on the basis of cracking down on killers and child predators, in reality they will be more extensively utilized to crush challenges to the austerity regime imposed on the working class in the interests of global financiers.

It is up to the organized working class to resist such measures wherever possible. As the Official Opposition, the NDP must take a lead in fighting against each new draconian crime and surveillance bill pushed by the Harper Conservatives. The trade unions must use every weapon in their arsenal, including strikes, to challenge the legitimacy of the encroaching security state.

However, so long as the capitalist mode of production prevails and a tiny majority control the wealth of society, a well-funded state security apparatus will remain a much-needed last line of defence for the ruling class against working-class demands for a more equitable system.

Only through the elimination of class antagonisms can we eradicate completely the need for the state and its armed bodies of men. Only through expropriation of the capitalists and the transition to a socialist economy can working people begin to run society for themselves along truly democratic lines.

Robocalls Scandal Further Exposes Façade of Bourgeois Democracy

This article originally published at Fightback.

The Harper government has come under fire after Elections Canada’s announcement in February that it had traced fraudulent phone calls made during the last federal election to an Edmonton-based call centre that worked for the Conservative Party in ridings across the country.

Elections Canada launched an investigation after receiving thousands of election day complaints from Guelph, one of 18 ridings in which voters received harassing or deceptive phone calls designed to discourage turnout. Guelph was the focus of a particularly tight race between the Conservatives and Liberals.

In cases of harassment, voters received messages purportedly from Liberal Party campaign workers at dinner hours, late at night, or on the Sabbath for Jewish voters.

In other instances, purely deceptive tactics were used. On election day, voters in Guelph received a message, apparently from Elections Canada, informing them that their polling stations had moved. Such disinformation led to chaotic scenes at polls and in many instances discouraged voters from casting their ballots at all.

Elections Canada traced the calls to Racknine Inc., a call centre that worked for the Conservative Party’s national campaign and the campaigns of at least nine Conservative candidates, including Stephen Harper’s own race in Calgary Southwest.

The “robocall” allegations have led to a flurry of accusations and denials on Parliament Hill. Unsurprisingly, the Prime Minister has strenuously denied any allegations of wrongdoing, asserting that “the Conservative Party...has no role in any of this.” His party’s MPs, meanwhile, have fired back at a variety of targets.

Conservative backbencher Maurice Vellacott suggested that Elections Canada voter lists were flawed. Harper’s parliamentary secretary Dean Del Mastro, taking a lead from his boss, turned the tables by arguing it was in fact the opposition parties who had been conducting a sleaze campaign. Del Mastro accused Liberal MP Joe Volpe of hiring a North Dakota-based automated calling company during the federal election. Del Mastro’s accusations have subsequently been proven false. But, voters in Volpe’s riding did receive harassing phone calls that were traced to a North Dakota area code.

Harper’s former chief of staff Guy Giorno went on the offensive, self-righteously proclaiming to the Toronto Star that “suppression of vote is a despicable, reprehensible practice and everybody ought to condemn it...I wish Godspeed to Elections Canada and the RCMP investigators. We want them to get to the bottom of this and let’s hope the full weight of the law is applied.”

To date, Elections Canada has received a massive 31,000 complaints related to the federal election. Jean-Pierre Kingsley, the chief electoral officer of Canada from 1990 to 2007, described the level of complaints as unprecedented; the agency typically receives between 500 and 1,200 complaints per election.

The robocalls fiasco underscores the hypocrisy that underlies the facade of bourgeois democracy. The Canadian government, like its counterpart in the United States, parades around the world as a self-appointed expert in freedom and democracy, even running overseas “democracy training” programs.

We are told that we live in a thriving democratic society in which everyone’s vote counts. As Canadian workers increasingly realize, this Schoolhouse Rock conception of how government works is largely myth, yet it remains enshrined in ruling class dogma.

After the latest scandal came to light, the universal reaction among bourgeois analysts was to condemn it as an isolated instance of corruption in an otherwise functional democracy. “This is a direct affront to the very foundation of our system,” said Kingsley. “We’re talking now about the very core of it.”

But contrary to the proclamations of bourgeois moralists, such corruption is not an exception in an otherwise fair and democratic system. Rather, it is the inevitable consequence of a system that is unfair at its core.

In his book The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Friedrich Engels noted:

The democratic republic no longer officially recognizes differences of property. Wealth here employs its power indirectly, but all the more surely. It does this in two ways: by plain corruption of officials, of which America is the classic example, and by an alliance between the government and the stock exchange.

Engels went on to describe universal suffrage as merely another instrument of bourgeois rule:

Universal suffrage is the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more, in the present-day state; but that is sufficient. On the day the thermometer of universal suffrage registers boiling point among the workers, both they and the capitalists will know what to do.

The robocalls scandal has led to a visceral sense of anger among the Canadian working class and brought it that much closer to boiling point. Demonstrations have already taken place in Ottawa and Vancouver. At the time of writing, more protests are planned in Toronto and Calgary.

The bourgeois parties’ involvement in the robocalls has deepened a growing sense among Canadian workers that their democracy is a sham. The anger against the robocalls recalls the widespread protests that accompanied Harper’s repeated prorogations of Parliament.

Harper first prorogued Parliament in 2008 to defeat the proposed Liberal-NDP Coalition. At the end of 2009, Harper again prorogued Parliament, ostensibly to keep the legislature in recess for the duration of the Vancouver Winter Olympics. But the move was widely seen as an attempt to distract attention from revelations of Afghan detainee abuse. 20,000 people across the country protested Harper’s blatantly anti-democratic move.

In each case, the Conservative leader turned to an unelected representative of an unelected monarch, the Queen of England, to shut down the democratically-elected Parliament. As Fightback pointed out in 2010, any such move by an opponent of Western imperialism, such as Hugo Chavez, would be endlessly decried in the bourgeois press as an authoritarian affront to democracy.

Many commentators have suggested that the robocalls scandal may represent Harper’s “Nixon moment.” Indeed, there are many parallels between the two leaders in terms of their obsessive desire for secrecy and total control. However, objective conditions have changed greatly in the past four decades.

Today, the capitalist system is in crisis everywhere. Credit was used for decades to artificially extend the postwar boom, but the 2008 crisis indicated that the economic day of reckoning could be postponed no further. At present there is nothing on the agenda for workers but austerity, layoffs, cuts and poverty.

Workers now broadly perceive the blatant inequality of the system. If the bank bailouts illustrated that the wealthy have incomparably greater sway over elected politicians than ordinary workers, anti-democratic moves like prorogation and the robocalls have thrown into doubt one of the most cherished myths propagated by the ruling class: that the Canadian form of government is fair and democratic.

The suppression of democracy in Canada is only an expression of a deeper crisis within the system. The Occupy movement struck a chord in its depiction of a battle between the long-suffering majority in society and an obscenely wealthy minority that controls the levers of power. An ever increasing number of workers and youth realize that, in truth, the vast majority of Canadians have little say over the political process.

Record low turnouts in recent elections are an expression of the instinctual feeling among Canadian workers that their votes do not count, that no matter which party wins the banks and corporations decide policy. The robocalls scandal, like prorogation, is only the clearest manifestation of the contempt that the ruling elite has always held for democracy, which is favoured only when it is convenient.

Any movement against the anti-democratic actions of the government, whether real or alleged, will inevitably find itself awash in opportunists from the Liberal Party and elsewhere. The NDP and the unions must put themselves at the forefront of the fight by making concrete demands that illustrate the connection between economic and political democracy.

So long as a tiny minority controls the wealth of society, the notion that we live in anything approaching a real democracy will always remain a farce. True democracy can only be attained when the majority of the population, in the form of the working class, gains control over the economy and runs it democratically for the benefit of all.

More War! If They Want It

Can't really say it any better than this guy here. "Our" government has just decided on three more years of war and it isn't even debated in Parliament, supposedly the people's central deliberative council. A more direct refutation of bourgeois democracy I can't imagine. I wouldn't expect anything less from Stephen Harper or Michael Ignatieff, but Bob Rae's disgusting display makes me even more bewildered as to how he ever became leader of the NDP. Rae's entire political career has been little more than a warning to future generations of idealists.

A very close relative of mine is currently deployed in Afghanistan for a one-year mission. The idea that the war would be ending in 2011, near the end of his deployment, had helped blunt more blatant antiwar sentiment on my part. But the sneaky, deceitful way this war has been extended without any deliberation by the people's main legislative body (a farce to think of it that way, I know, but I'm just humouring popular Canadian mythology here) is a devastating indictment of any claim we might have to be a "democracy". I might level a lot of criticism at the NDP leadership, but in this case Jack Layton is absolutely right. While I would prefer that he advance the possibility of total withdrawal immediately, the fact that arguing for this to be debated in Parliament comes across as a radical "protest" point of view is a damning critique of our entire political system.

When the majority of a nation's people do not support a war, and that nation's government continues to prosecute that war against the will of the population, you cannot credibly claim to be a democracy. "Democracy" = "rule of the people". Good one.

In The Belly of the Beast: My G20 Experience

It had been, I felt, a productive day of protest. Thousands of people had defied the rain on this gray Saturday, June 26, 2010 to vent their rage against the global corporate elite as its leading representatives met in Toronto for the G20 summit. My friends and I took advantage of a free bus ride offered in Kingston by the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) to make our way to the T-dot that weekend, and what I had seen so far had left me deeply moved. The sheer size of the turnout was impressive, especially given the poor weather, and seeing so many passionate activists engaged in that most basic and essential of democratic activities - grassroots protest - was a powerful rebuttal to any suspicions I might have had that the Canadian public was too lethargic to get out in the streets and make its voice heard.



True, there had been some worrying signs after the masses assembled in Queen's Park and peacefully marched down University Avenue. We had seen a young man with his hand over an eye, blood running down his face, as his comrades ushered him through the crowd and cried out for a medic. Maybe he got in a cop's face, we thought. Eventually the protesters found themselves blocked off by a line of police at Queen Street East. The 5-0, decked out from head to toe in their latest quasi-fascist militarized police togs, shields raised and batons ready, may have been an intimidating presence, were it not for a crowd that refused to let itself be intimidated. A drum circle directly in front of the line provided a defiant flow of tribal beats; animal rights activists defended the sanctity of all life on this planet while I got my picture taken with a girl dressed up as a giant gray seal (a moment recorded for a TV update on Global News). When the cops took a menacing step forward, a girl cried out, "Sit down! They can't move us back if we're sitting down!" I grabbed my friend's megaphone and further spurred the crowd on to a sit-down protest - "the easiest form of protest", I declared - and the police were stopped in their tracks.


We experienced one unsettling moment when the police were ordered to don their gas masks. "Put on your bandanas!" yelled people in the crowd. As one officer perched high and aimed his riot gun menacingly at the protesters, we saw signs of tear gas in the air behind us. Yet for this afternoon, on this particular street, the crowd seemed safe for the time being. After a while, my friends and I decided to grab a bite at a Vietnamese restaurant and eventually found our way to Kensington Market, where we rented a room at a backpackers' hostel. Taking a breather, we switched on the TV for an update on how the Canadian media was reporting what we had just seen.

There was zero resemblance between the two narratives. What the CBC News Network, like the others, aired over and over was a single shot of a police car burning, sandwiched in-between footage of black-clad protesters smashing in the windows of banks and a Starbucks. There was no reporting whatsoever on what the protesters had actually been saying - i.e. what they were protesting against, or the myriad progressive solutions they put forth. Rather, there was a generic focus on "violent protesters", alarmism over the "anarchists" that had apparently swarmed the city, and an overall narrative that purported to offer all the necessary justification for Stephen Harper's $1.3 billion in security costs.


From this moment on, the dominant voices of the Canadian establishment completely submerged the voices of the protesters and drowned them in a sea of media-inspired agitation over the anarchist mob. I had seen members of the so-called Black Bloc as we filed out of Queen's Park: a wave of young people clad completely in black walking past me with bandanas covering their faces. It quickly became apparent that these people represented the outer boundaries of protest tactics - willing to go where the larger mass of people did not. The majority of the marchers I saw wielded a more subtly effective weapon: words. Chants of "peaceful protest" and "this is what democracy looks like" interspersed with "this is what a police state looks like" made clear the protesters' essentially Gandhian approach while maintaining a full-blooded stance of anger at the corporate elites who have plundered and poisoned our planet, destroyed the Canadian manufacturing base, pushed for bloody wars of imperial conquest all while relentlessly punishing the poor for the crimes of the wealthy bankers who crashed the world economy.



The most telling quote I heard the whole weekend came from an older gentleman beside me who faced down the line of police at University and Queen and asked a question as simple as it was profound: "What are you afraid of?" he demanded to know.

The answer, if you want it, is right here. But to summarize: the massive turnout of the police and tightening of the security apparatus was not simply about protecting the delicate ears of the G20 leaders. Rather, it was a dress rehearsal for the suppression of working class revolt by the Canadian capitalist elite, which fears the legitimate rage of a population facing long-term unemployment, endless war and looming ecological disaster. In this powder keg atmosphere, the corporate-financial elite is determined to hang on to its remaining privileges and power by any means necessary, including (as that formulation inevitably does) naked physical force.

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to find something very fishy in Black Bloc protesters managing to set multiple police cars on fire and break store windows in a city virtually under martial law, with over 5000 police officers patrolling downtown Toronto alone. I walked those city streets myself and you could not walk more than 25 metres without passing a cop. The idea that police would leave squad cars alone in this environment is difficult to believe, and leaves open the possibility that the Black Bloc was infiltrated by police provocateurs who incited and/or led the destruction of property in order to justify a brutal crackdown on the protesters. Such a suggestion is not fantasy; there is well-documented precedent for just such infiltration. After the images of the burning cars and broken windows were broadcast ad nauseum to a clueless Canadian TV audience, with newscasters squeezing the word "violence" as frequently as possible within allotted time frames, the picture of the protest as anarchist war zone was complete, and for the rest of the weekend police had a convenient excuse for any repressive measures they wished to enact.

My friends and I would learn that firsthand the next day.

We largely stayed out of the protest scene on Saturday night; with intermittent rain and a general cluelessness as to where the main action was, we caught the patron saint of independent media, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman, at Trinity St. Paul's United Church. She was promoting her new book, Breaking The Sound Barrier, but also reporting on the G20 protests for the show. As a matter of fact, we passed her on University Avenue during the afternoon march; she seemed in a rush, but asked if we would attend her lecture that night. Full of wit and stories of her reporting adventures, Goodman eloquently put forward the case for a media that does not merely kowtow to the powerful, but performs the heavy investigative lifting that makes the Fourth Estate such a crucial pillar of democracy in popular lore.

On Sunday, after a brief lunch at vegan restaurant Urban Herbivore, we headed to Queen's Park in expectation of a protest similar in size to yesterday's. However, we found that the crowds had thinned out considerably. We first came across the anti-Zionist Jews fiercely denouncing the state of Israel; amusingly, other protesters soon set up a sign directly next to them admonishing passers-by to "support the state of Israel against Hamas".


But that was part of the protest's charm as we saw it; divergent groups (albeit with a broader progressive unity than apparent in this example) coming together to protest the corporatist policies of the G20 and the Canadian state. It seemed like democracy at its finest. While there were no large protests at Queen's Park this day, we did sit down with members of the Zeitgeist Movement sitting on the grass next to the Earthians. Like most of the protesters I talked to, they were well-read, passionate yet friendly and laidback individuals. I interviewed Lawrence, a member of the Zeitgeist Movement (far right in picture below).


The Zeitgeist Movement, he explained, is a non-political social movement advocating technological salvation for humanity by building on the foundational similarities between cultures to develop a more sustainable economic model. He held that the technology already exists to create a higher standard of living for all, but is held captive by our current monetary system which subordinates such visions to a more base pursuit of profit and raw materials.

We have the means to make sure that wars don’t happen. What are the barriers to that? A lot of it is because of resource scarcity. So you see wars happen over areas that are very resource-rich. What needs to happen is that all the resources of the planet need to be declared the common heritage of all the world’s people. The Zeitgeist Movement is the activist arm of something called the Venus Project, and the Venus Project is what’s putting forward these standards. It is the total redesign of the culture, talking about technologically unifying the globe. If we just update our thinking, and update the knowledge of the population as to the potential of our present-day technology to free us from boring and monotonous, socially offensive labour that you’re required to perform in order to feed and house yourself...we live in a society now where we’re wage slaves, essentially economic slaves. You know, a slave, you’re required to feed and house a slave. But an economic slave is required to feed and house themselves.

Impressed by his summary of the evils of capitalism, I told him that we had a lot in common and went into my usual argument about how socialism was the answer to humanity's problems. While he agreed with some of what I said, he intriguingly explained his opposition to my ideas by declaring that socialism didn't go far enough:

The one thing about socialism that is the same as capitalism, that’s the same as anything - free enterprise system, the same as fascism - is that they all operate within a monetary system [...] Money is really a root to a lot of large-scale problems. If you cannot get paid to do a job...I mean, 70% of non-violent crime is either drug-related or monetary-related, or related to money in some way.

We’re looking at unifying everyone. The problem with socialism is that it’s not radical enough. It’s radical, but it’s not radical enough. And when I say radical enough, I mean, when we’re talking about means of production or workers’ government, there doesn’t need to be that. The technology exists today to free everyone from food production, to free everyone from fabrication of homes and things like that. The technology today is incredible, and we’re able to do this.

So I understand where a socialist is coming from, where they’re like, “we want the people in power, we want a government of the people.” People not profits, that’s totally admirable. But is that possible in a monetary system? Greed and corruption are inherent in any sort of...when money is involved, when money is the reason for acquisition, incentive and exchange, especially incentive, especially incentive, when your incentive is to make money, then that comes first before [the] common good of [the] people.

After our chat with these interesting folks, my friends and I decided to head on down to where the action was. I made the decision to turn left onto a crosswalk, and didn't really perceive the danger of the cops on the traffic island until they said, "we're searching your bags." Note that was not a request. Anxious to avoid any legal trouble since I started a new job that requires a security clearance, I submitted to the search along with my two friends, one of whom had walked right into the lion's den. When the cops searched his bag, they found Ziploc bags filled with flour and paint that he had intended to pass out to protesters (telling them to add water) as a non-violent means of countering repressive crowd control by splashing the cops and making them look silly - in his words, "street theatre".


Barely seconds after the cops opened his bag, my friend was under arrest, in handcuffs and soon led into the back of a police van. The entire story of his imprisonment at "Torontanamo" is viewable here, but the gist is that his experience was rife with subtle forms of psychological torture. Those arrested were kept cuffed even when they were locked in a cage; they were denied food and water for long periods of time; forced to sleep on a cold concrete floor; he told of a couple 17/18-year-old girls who had been in lock-up for thirty hours without being allowed to call for legal aid. He was eventually processed, and the end charges were unbelievable. While the arresting officers had talked of a mischief charge, my friend is now accused of carrying dangerous weapons and looking at a six-month jail sentence. In a blatant violation of his Charter rights, he is banned from attending any future protests due to the bail conditions he agreed to in order to get released. No matter what you think of my friend's plan (and even he seems to think it was pretty stupid now), the threatened punishment in this case is grossly disproportional to the alleged crime. Although job considerations prevented me from acting in solidarity at his moment of arrest - although the only likely scenario would be my getting arrested too - I am fully supportive of him as he prepares to battle these outrageous charges.

Understandably, he describes his weekend as "cataclysmic", and it's hard to argue with that assessment. The weekend was full of innocent (and not-so-innocent) bystanders being arrested, harassed, or beaten by cops. The McGuinty government's cynical use of the 1939 Public Works Protection Act to radically expand police powers, which they attempted to slip past the media before it turned up on the e-laws website, is a useful gauge of this government's contempt for the people it claims to represent, as well as the intent of the police to go as far as they cared to go in harassing people. Although the law claimed people could be searched or arrested for not having ID within 5 metres of the perimeter fences, my experience on Sunday confirmed that in fact the police were exercising this power indiscriminately throughout the entire city. Following my friend's arrest, my remaining companion and I were searched on at least three more occasions that afternoon. On the initial search, police confiscated our ear plugs and bandanas - i.e., the only things we had to protect ourselves against crowd control devices like the LRAD sonic weapons and tear gas. No self-defense against the Canadian police state could be countenanced, it seemed.


Despite all the police violence and harassment, there remains one word I use to describe my experience of the G20: inspiring. Being stuck in small-town Kingston, it's hard to get across my excitement upon seeing thousands and thousands of committed activists all around me, whether labour groups like the PSAC, environmentalists such as Greenpeace ("There is no planet B" being one of my favourite signs), peaceniks, communists - in essence, all the groups that the media and mainstream discourse works hard to erase from the picture. They were all there in full force, daring to face down the militarized might of the capitalist state in order to reclaim democracy for the people (a sadly relevant distinction). I was inspired by the heartfelt dedication of the masses. Although I happened to see, believe it or not, a couple of Tea Party activists with an American flag - not to mention an old lady carrying a sign "Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged" - this was not that twisted parody of a popular uprising. Rather, it was from people smart enough to know who there real enemies were, and that higher level of awareness brought hope to me when I was beginning to drown in hopelessness for the future of humanity.

Along with the representatives of labour, environmentalists and youth - including the Ontario Federation of Labour, the Canadian Labour Congress and Greenpeace - I was stunned by the level of class consciousness and organized socialist resistance. Red banners and pictures of Karl Marx abounded, along with signs that said "Down with capitalism - long live socialism!" I marched with the Marxists, the Trotskyists, the Maoists and sampled party literature that was handed out to me on the street. For me, the novelty of seeing committed Marxists around me was enough, as I had grown used to the near-solitude of spreading that secular gospel in a small town like Kingston.


At one point early on, I talked to Adil Ahmed, representative of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq in Canada. He discussed the work of Iranian communist Mansoor Hekmat, and his reasons for being in Toronto reflected the heart of the anti-capitalist movement. "We came here to protest this summit, of course," he said, "this summit for the capitalist system. They came here to save the capitalist system, of course. And we are here to protect the people, that is, the worker class. This summit is against workers and poor people around the world, and we came here to say no to your policy, no to your system [...] Socialism is the only solution for humanity."


As I heard the union groups around me singing "Solidarity Forever", I drank in the populism. Adil came from an older tradition than I, but his doctrine of socialist internationalism was precisely my ideological cup of tea. Where before I had despaired of the future for organized political action by the working class in Canada, now I knew there were millions of people out there willing to fight for justice in the face of corporate enslavement. The overwhelming task that now faces us is the unity of the working class as it enters this new era of unadulterated class struggle. With his description of the solidarity of workers across national borders, Adil brought out my inner optimist.

We are here. It doesn't matter what kind of peoples, what languages they speak. We're all together here to say no to capitalism. We are stronger [than the elites], of course. We are 90% of the people, they are 5% of the people of the world. If we unite, we can do everything we want - if we do. If we unite, we can do anything. That's why we are here.

All photos by Andréa Prins.

Israel: International Outlaw

I’ve been meaning to write about the Gaza flotilla incident for the past couple of weeks, but I’ve been busy getting into my new job. Suffice it to say, the storming of the flotilla was essentially an act of piracy condoned by Canada and the United States. Benjamin Netanyahu was in Ottawa visiting Stephen Harper on the day of the massacre, and Canadian government’s solidarity with Israel was unsurprising, given Harper and Michael Ignatieff’s previously-stated beliefs. The American position was even less defensible, given that one of the dead, Furkan Dogan, was an American citizen. But he was raised in Turkey and has a Turkish-sounding name, so no worries; he’s not a “real” American.

As Dave Lindorff pointed out, five of the nine dead civilians on the flotilla were shot from behind, which narrows their deaths down to two possibilities: either they were shot from behind as they attempted to flee, or an Israeli shot them from the front and then fired into their backs to finish them off. Both are war crimes. But you won’t find any of that information in corporate American (and much Canadian) media, which largely replayed the heavily-edited Israeli tape of the incident showing civilians attacking Israeli commandos with knives and clubs. Detainees released by Israel in the days afterward claimed the soldiers were shooting at them before they even came on the ship. If Israel’s version of events were correct, wouldn’t they want as much facts as possible to be known in this case? Instead, they detained all journalists onboard the flotilla and confiscated their film and cameras. The fact that Israeli authorities refuse to release the raw footage suggests they have something to hide.

Never fear, though: our brave leaders courageously pushed for a full investigation into these events – led by Israel, of course. Break out the whitewash.

Israel has become a rogue state whose aggressive inclinations dangerously threaten the stability of the Middle East. Unfortunately, Canadian and American politicians are largely bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. Independent media needs to make sure the continued suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza does not go ignored. Those brave activists who sign on to defy the Israeli blockade and attempt to deliver humanitarian aid to the impoverished Gazan population are heroes all and deserve our respect.

Keith Jones and the Socialist Alternative

The dysfunctional state of Canadian politics may be a regular topic of discussion among the nation’s leading news outlets, but the system itself is rarely challenged. While the New Democratic Party is derided by conservative elites as “socialist”, its actual policies leave much to be desired among Canadian progressives (to note but a few examples: dropping all serious opposition to the war in Afghanistan, propping up the Harper government, rebranding itself as a “business-friendly” party dedicated to balancing budgets while the vast legions of unemployed continue to suffer).

The need for a challenge to political business as usual has rarely been more urgent. While Kingston has been insulated to some degree from the ravages of the Great Recession due to its large public sector workforce, the city has nevertheless suffered from the economic downturn. The local unemployment rate rose from 5.1% in February 2009 to 5.5% in February 2010, according to Statistics Canada. Well over 18,000 people live below the official poverty line, based on 2001 census numbers (the most recent data available for this area). And with one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country, affordable housing has become increasingly hard to find.

But politically speaking, Kingston remains a Liberal stronghold, represented by Speaker of the House Peter Milliken federally and MPP John Gerretsen provincially. Voters looking for left alternatives are effectively tied to the NDP and the Green Party. More radical parties, such as the Communist Party of Canada, have abandoned Kingston, directing their supporters to vote either Liberal or NDP depending on the comparative strength of the Progressive Conservatives. The radical left, in effect, barely registers on the electoral radar, whether in Kingston or nationwide.

Hoping to fill that void is the Socialist Equality Party. The SEP is a Trotskyist party affiliated with the International Committee of the Fourth International. While originating in the United States, the party aims to create an independent working class political movement with an international perspective, based on the Marxian principle that “the workers have no country.”

The SEP’s youth wing, International Students for Social Equality, has a Queen’s chapter organized by history student Graham Beverley. On Wednesday, March 31, the ISSE invited Keith Jones, national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (Canada), to speak at Mackintosh-Corry Hall.

Jones is a regular writer for the World Socialist Web Site, the SEP’s primary means for communicating its ideas. A teacher for many years, Jones writes on Canadian and international issues for the WSWS, which analyzes world news from a Trotskyist perspective (for the uninitiated: Leon Trotsky was a leading figure in the Russian Revolution who was exiled from the USSR and eventually killed on Stalin’s orders. He and Stalin engaged in a power struggle after Lenin’s death partly based on differing ideas: Stalin’s “socialism in one country” vs. Trotsky’s “permanent revolution”. Trotskyists are staunch anti-Stalinists who harshly criticize the former USSR as led by a counterrevolutionary bureaucracy).

In sharp contrast to what it derides as the “reformist” tendencies of social democratic parties like the NDP, the British Labour Party or the German Social Democrats, the SEP follows a sharply anti-capitalist line. Their website explains:

The Socialist Equality Party is a political party of and for the working class. The SEP seeks not to reform capitalism, but to create a socialist, democratic and egalitarian society through the establishment of a workers’ government and the revolutionary transformation of the world economy. We seek to unify workers in the United States and internationally in the common struggle for socialism—that is, for equality and the rational and democratic utilization of the wealth of the planet.

Speaking at Queen’s to a small audience of half a dozen committed socialists (and one or two curious newbies), Jones presented a harrowing view of the Harper government rooted heavily in class analysis. He began:

It is the contention of the Socialist Equality Party, that this government both represents a continuation, in a certain sense, a natural evolution from the right-wing policies that were carried out by the Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, but also that the Harper Conservative government represents something new…a further lurch to the right…and has carried out a series of significant attacks on democratic rights.

The Harper Conservatives have co-opted an aggressive style of partisan politics from U.S. Republicans (such as referring to NDP leader Jack Layton as “Taliban Jack”). In a climate of deepening inequality, Jones argued that Canada’s ruling elites have cultivated such reactionary appeals as a means of building a social base for their anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian agenda.

Recalling the 1993 federal election, Jones noted that the Liberals ran on a platform that included three main points:

1. Overturning the conservative policy of focusing on the deficit at the expense of jobs;
2. Eliminating the GST, and
3. Getting Canada out of NAFTA.

On this side of history, those pledges now look ridiculous, since the Liberals quickly used their electoral victory to begin dismantling the welfare state. Unemployment Insurance was reduced to Employment Insurance; today, less than half of workers are entitled to it. The haemorrhaging of Canada’s manufacturing sector also began under the Liberals.

The Chrétien government justified massive cuts to social spending by citing a supposed deficit crisis, with the same pattern playing out nationwide. In Ontario, the Conservative government of Mike Harris sharply reduced government spending; Harris initiated a draconian program of spending cuts, taxes on unions, and slashing welfare rates by 21% while cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy. In Quebec, Lucien Bouchard’s Bloc Quebecois carried out similar cuts with the collaboration of the trade unions.

While the SEP is committed to working with the trade unions, the party has long criticized the unions’ bureaucratic leadership, which it sees as having interests antithetical to those of the workers they claim to represent. In a recent example, the Canadian Auto Workers leadership collaborated with General Motors and the Canadian and U.S. governments to force its members to accept deep wage and benefit cuts.

Jones characterized government actions from 1995-2000 as a massive reversal of the social benefits won by workers in the years after World War II, when widespread anti-capitalist sentiment – bolstered by the traumatic experience of depression and war – compelled even Liberal prime minister Mackenzie King to run under the slogan “For a New Social Order”. In the immediate postwar era, a worldwide offensive of the working class produced universal healthcare for Canadians, as well as the American Civil Rights Act and Great Society programs. Protests against the war in Vietnam created a thriving counterculture that sufficiently unnerved the ruling classes to result in a reactionary backlash at the end of the 20^th century in the form of conservative rulers Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

By the end of the 1990s, the Liberals’ policies had borne the fruit of a balanced budget, but the tax system had been radically redesigned to serve the interests of the wealthy. Canadian fiscal policy now corresponds with Lenin’s observation that the state is “an apparatus for the domination of one class over another.”

The effects are visible in Harper’s recent budget and the austerity programs currently being pushed by governments worldwide. In Ontario, Premier Dalton McGuinty has introduced the harmonized sales tax, heavily favoured by big business because it transfers the tax burden from businesses to consumers. Kingston MPP and Environment Minister John Gerretsen supported the HST, but managed to conveniently miss the actual vote.

The Harper government has also built on the Chrétien-Martin legacy by increasing military spending. In 1999 Canada played a leading role in NATO’s campaign in Yugoslavia, and it was the Chrétien government that initiated Canada’s involvement in the Afghan War. While it did not officially sign on to the Iraq War, the Liberal government’s lack of support was characterized by Jones as an eleventh-hour decision finalized only when it became clear France and Germany would not support the invasion. The Chrétien government recognized that Canada’s global position might be jeopardized by flagrant U.S. unilateralism. Yet Canada played a larger role than many official members of the “coalition of the willing”; only two weeks prior to the invasion, Canadian military planners helped design the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign. Jones stated:

In effect, what is being said here is that if the Canadian ruling elite is going to be able to advance its interests on the world stage, it has to be an active participant in the division and redivision of the world, and certainly has to align its foreign policy even more closely with that of the United States.

It was a Liberal government that first attacked democratic rights by overturning key civil liberties in the heat of post-9/11 hysteria. Jones was careful not to overlook the role of current Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, a supposed human rights expert who supported the Iraq War and helped provide the intellectual framework to justify torture in his book The Lesser Evil.

Economically, the Harper government has continued Liberal tax cuts that transfer wealth to the already wealthy, as well as reducing the state’s fiscal capacity in order to erode social programs and thwart their further expansion. Harper has been a huge proponent of the discredited policy of deregulation; when the government was obliged to hire new meat inspectors for Canadian exports to the United States, Harper advocated “self-inspection” by companies. Deregulation, Jones noted, is intimately tied up with the government’s unhelpful attitude towards the tar sands and global warming.

Current events have followed a similar pattern in all capitalist countries. There has been a vast increase in social inequality, most marked in the United States, but by any measure an international phenomenon. In the fall of 2009, Western governments put up hundreds of billions of dollars to back up the same financial aristocracy that had mercilessly pushed an anti-working class agenda over the last few decades in the name of efficiency. Jones went on to say:

Recent months have proven to be extremely profitable for Canada’s banks, as it has banks in the United States, and of course these same banks are resisting tooth and nail any suggestion – not that they need to worry about it from the Harper government…that there should be increases in taxes because the banking system worldwide has benefited from state support.

The financial system has been held together; at one point there was serious concern it was going to completely collapse. It’s been held together by basically socializing the debt, by transforming the debt of these large financial institutions and making them into government debt. And now of course, what we’re seeing is all over the world, big business is demanding, and governments are delivering, massive budget cuts on the grounds that these debts are unsustainable. They have to be repaid, and who has to repay them? They’re going to have to be repaid by working people, in the form of cuts to social programs and social services, university tuition hikes, other fee hikes, and this is now beginning.

Jones cited austerity measures announced in recent weeks by the federal Conservative government, the Ontario government and the Quebec government, which he says will lead to a change in class relations at least as significant as those in 1995, as big business takes the wrecking ball towards whatever remains of the welfare state.

For example, The Globe and Mail – disparaged by Jones as the voice of Bay Street – has lately been talking about the “unsustainability” of Medicare. He summarized their view as, “we’ve got all these people that are getting old, we’ve got these massive debts, what the hell are we going to do? We need to find new sources of funding for health care.” The reality, he said, is that Canadian elites intend to use the crisis created in the health care system by government budget cuts to build up a popular constituency for the dismantling of Medicare and the promotion of private health care.

“There are two objectives behind this,” said Jones. “First, they want to transfer the burden of health care back onto the individual. And secondly, health care is a massive business, and they want all obstacles and impediments to making profit off of this business…removed.”

Such open class war, Jones declared, would provoke massive resistance by working people – resistance that must be guided by socialist principles.

Jones ended his lecture with a discussion of the political crisis of November/December 2008. He argued that while Harper succeeded in proroguing Parliament with the support of the Canadian elite, the programme of the potential Liberal-NDP coalition government would have been equally right-wing: fiscal responsibility as primary concern, implementing Harper’s corporate tax cuts, and staying in the Afghan War until 2011. Of course, like Harper, the Dion-led government would have taken “some” action to stimulate the economy – mainly to ward off social unrest and keep Canada competitive with other countries.

In rock ‘n’ roll terms: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Since the programme of the coalition government was so similar to Harper’s, why did Canadian elites so vehemently oppose it?

“The reason that they opposed it was, quite frankly, because they didn’t think it was necessary under these conditions,” said Jones. “Certainly they have had a situation where the NDP has had a share of power – not federally, but in various provinces – and while the NDP hasn’t necessarily done everything that big business has wanted, it certainly has shown itself to be a party that is devoted to the capitalist order in Canada and will carry out right-wing attacks against the working class, impose austerity measures and so forth. But big business didn’t want to see a government of this particular composition at this time, and it was quite prepared to see democratic rights – basic parliamentary norms – set aside to prevent it from coming to power.”

Jones posed the question to his audience: if elites will happily disregard democratic norms to serve their own interests, as in this case, what would they do in the face of a real challenge by the working class? The Liberals, the NDP and the trade unions were all willing to join in a right-wing programme and played possum after Harper shut down Parliament. These groups, Jones argued, are dedicated to preserving the existing order and serve as a “safety valve” for the bourgeoisie.

Jones pointed to the memoirs of NDP national campaign director Brian Topp, which detailed Liberal-NDP coalition negotiations in which the first priority was picking a cabinet, with policy a distant second. The NDP has been pushing for a coalition since 2004, and Layton continued to plead for one long after Ignatieff made it clear he was not interested. While the NDP feared an election, they also wanted to show big business that it had nothing to fear from an NDP government. Since September 2009, the NDP has supported the Conservatives after gaining minor concessions to unemployment benefits.

Jones urged students to help the working class break free from their nominal leadership, the NDP and the trade unions, which have become completely integrated into the capitalist establishment. Canadian youth, he stressed, were one of the primary social groups that could assist the working class in advancing a truly socialist programme.

The discussion period that followed weighed realistic strategies for advancing a socialist agenda in Canada. Asked what he thought of the Communist Party of Canada, Jones dismissed it as defending the legacy of Stalinism. While the CPC has admitted to certain mistakes by the Soviet Union and the CPC, it still holds that the political line of the Soviet leadership was basically correct. Historically, the CPC justified Stalinist opposition to the proletarian internationalism that was the hallmark of Leon Trotsky (and lately, the SEP). It promotes Canadian sovereignty from American imperialism, an overly nationalist perspective in the view of the internationally-minded Socialist Equality Party. The CPC supported the NDP-Liberal coalition and, according to Jones, appeared overly enthused by the election of Wall Street puppet Barack Obama. Finally, it has mainly devoted its energy to pressuring existing political parties (and therefore, in Marxist parlance, advocating a “reformist” stance”).

To borrow another phrase from Lenin, what is to be done? Over the past few decades, social democratic parties have steadily dismantled the very social programs they claimed showed that capitalism could be reformed. For Jones, the key task is to develop an independent, non-reformist political formulation to lead the working class.

The deepening of geopolitical conflict in the midst of the economic crisis, Jones predicted, would have a radicalizing effect. Unions in 2010 have a very different perspective than unions in the 1970s, let alone the more militant 1930s. Although there has been a “huge degeneration” in workers’ class consciousness, the basic idea of unions – that the rights of the working class can best be defended through collective bargaining – remains as viable as ever. But actual class struggle will always be an uphill battle; witness the widespread derision that DriveTest employees (represented by the United Steelworkers) faced when they went on strike last year.

Revolutionary socialists, it seems, must work outside existing state structures in order to achieve their desired end: a society based not on the pursuit of profit but on serving human needs.

Cognitive Dissonance

Whaddya know...Our Glorious Leader does a damn good Beatles cover. Musical talents aside, does anyone else find it a little odd to see Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a reactionary opponent of cannabis decriminalization, sing about getting high with a little help from his friends?

You Don't Know Jack

Jack Layton came to Kingston the other day, and I had the good luck to catch him as he swung by Queen's University. Supporting the Harper government has been a pretty controversial move on the NDP's part, and the crowd made sure Jack registered its disapproval, with a friend of mine even asking why he was helping to continue Stephen Harper's "reign of terror." Honestly, I think it's a pragmatic move. The NDP has fallen pretty low in the polls lately, with a mere 12% approval rating, so an election probably wouldn't help them at this point. I also believe the party is sincerely focused on expanding Employment Insurance. Besides, if you're a party that has never formed a government in the history of Canadian federal politics, there's no need to force an election merely on the desire to see your party back in power (Iggy, I'm looking at you).

As a politician, Jack seems very much a man of the people, even coming out to the Grad Club for a few post-speech beers. Certainly to a greater extent than the more "bourgeois" parties, the NDP represents working-class Canadians and activists motivated by social justice issues. But at the same time, the party has come a long way from its more socialist roots with the CCF. During question period, I asked Jack whether he would consider incorporating a more explicitly anti-capitalist message in the party's platform, given the enormity of the global financial crisis. Since the Conservatives and Liberals will label the NDP "socialists" whenever the party gets on their bad side, I reasoned that they should embrace both the word and the ideology, in the same way that rappers reclaimed the N-word and made it a positive thing.

In his answer, Jack said the party was open to new and radical ideas, and made reference to their past support for the nationalization of Hydro Quebec and the party's efforts to promote a massive green jobs campaign. I was satisfied with the answer, since Jack is obviously constrained by political reality from saying anything too obviously threatening to the status quo, and the programs he mentioned were exactly what comes to my mind when I imagine what a democratic socialist government could do for Canada. At the same time, the NDP's reluctance to advance a straightforward critique of capitalism bear witness to how far the party has come from Tommy Douglas and the CCF. The Regina Manifesto of 1933 bluntly stated that "No CCF Government will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism and put into operation [a] full programme of socialized planning."

Given the obvious failures of a command economy as practiced in the former Soviet Union, these sentiments may seem overly simplistic and ideological to modern ears...but is it any more ideological than the "free market" fundamentalists in the United States urging more deregulation as the solution to every problem, where everything can be solved by the magic of the market? It's like this: if you were to ask me whether I'm a capitalist or a socialist, my answer would be socialist for the simple fact that I consider the progression of society a more important value than the accumulation of my own personal capital. The NDP should embrace the "socialist" moniker because socialism envisions a more just society than that of a callous laissez-faire capitalism. While the party advances sensible policies that embody socialist values, it should not be afraid to make its bold opposition to the status quo known. After all, should the party continue in the opposite direction - forever watering down its policies, becoming the "Democratic Party", moving rightward until it is indistinguishable from the Liberals or even the American Democratic Party - then the purpose of the NDP ceases to exist. The party is a vehicle for the impassioned Canadian Left, and the magnitude of the current crisis should make it more open to radically different ideas.

I understand concerns about "electability", but honestly, there's nothing that would rouse my political passions more than a party that pledged to make radical changes in the fight for a more egalitarian society. The cautious pragmatism of the current NDP stands in sharp contrast with the more radical socialism of workers in the 1930s, and this is a pattern I've seen in many countries. After 30 years of neoliberal indoctrination, we seem to have accepted the omnipresence of the capitalist mode of production as a historical inevitability, and lost our agitation for more radical change. Call such an approach "old-fashioned" if you must, but you have to compare the huge gains made by the more radicalized Left in the 1930s to the incremental progress made today, where those of us concerned with social justice often content ourselves with writing stuff on the internet (guilty as charged). If there's one thing I've learned from the American health care debate, it's that passion and emotion, no matter how misdirected, can still be a powerful force in political discourse. If we could just turn out with the same force as the teabaggers, but with facts and history on our side...we might be unstoppable.