Canada Votes on June 28:
Socialists Fight For NDP Government
by Barry Weisleder

A volatile electorate and an unusually close race are likely to produce the first minority government in a quarter century when Canadians go to the polls on June 28.

The ruling Liberals under Prime Minister Paul Martin are falling, according to a survey by EKOS Research Associates issued during the first week of the election campaign. The newly merged Conservatives, and the labour-based New Democratic Party (NDP) are on the rise. In fact, the survey shows the NDP is favoured as the second choice of voters, so its base has room for growth. And in Quebec, the pro-sovereignty Bloc Quebecois has a commanding lead over the staunchly federalist Liberals.

If the latest EKOS figures hold – Liberals at 38%, Conservatives 30.4%, and NDP 18% – the probable result will be a Parliament in which the left-leaning NDP and the BQ have considerable influence, across the aisle from a weakened Liberal Party.

Deep Discontent

Popular discontent with the government was galvanized in February by the infamous sponsorship scandal in which $100 million went to Liberal-friendly advertising agencies in Quebec, without any accountability, prompting criminal charges.

But deeper and more significant is the well of anger over the deterioration of public health care, education, social housing and urban infrastructure caused by the massive spending cuts administered in the 1990s by then-Finance Minister Paul Martin.

Federal Liberal cutbacks, regressive tax changes and anti-labour laws went hand in hand with the employers’ drive across Canada, and around the world, to boost sagging profits rates and to preserve capitalism at the expense of working people.

Current efforts by Paul Martin to justify his record, including his pro-war, bankers’ budget in March 2004, are falling flat. Coupled with his slew of recycled promises of billions of dollars for health care, urban transportation, and other starved social needs, Martin’s words on the campaign trail are having a decidedly hollow ring with voters.

Indeed, Liberals are suffering a well deserved credibility crisis – compounded by the recent Ontario Liberal provincial government budget which raised taxes to pay for health care, directly violating its own pre-election promise. Severe fiscal attacks on public services by provincial Liberal regimes in British Columbia and Quebec have created almost insurmountable electoral problems for the federal Liberals in those key provinces. Of the 306 seats now up for grabs, 217 are in Ontario, B.C. and Quebec.

For their part, the Conservatives sound like Liberals in a hurry. The new Conservative Party is the offspring of a hostile takeover of the old Progressive Conservative Party by the upstart, radical right wing Canadian Alliance, formerly the Reform Party. The new Conservatives, led by former flat tax publicist Stephen Harper, are openly reactionary on social issues such as gay/lesbian rights, abortion, language policy, marijuana use, immigration, affirmative action and gun ownership. But on economic policy, Conservatives simply advocate doing more brazenly and more briskly what the Liberals have done somewhat deceptively – cut taxes for the rich and foster privatization of vital services.

The economic policy gap between the two parties has narrowed in a fashion not atypical of the major opposing big business parties around the world. Neo-liberalism is their received wisdom; public debate is reduced to the tactics of the timing and pace of pro-business ‘reforms’.

As the Liberals move further to the right under Paul Martin, the Conservatives have tacked slightly to the ‘centre’. Harper hasn’t been able to paper over the dissension of former ‘red’ Tories who have bolted to the Liberals, particularly in the Atlantic provinces. But he has won the acceptance of the Canadian establishment as a ‘credible’ and necessary alternative to the “perpetual party of power”, the Liberals.

NDP Renaissance

The NDP, under the media-savvy direction of new federal Leader Jack Layton, a former Toronto city councillor, is experiencing a renaissance. It enjoys the backing of most labour unions in English Canada. NDP membership has doubled to over 100,000 over the past 20 months as a wave of progressive individuals and social organizations are returning to the NDP fold after a twenty year hiatus. The party is still burdened by the bitter legacy of earlier NDP provincial governments in Ontario and the West which legislated retrenchment neo-liberal style. But the worse deeds of subsequent Tory and Liberal regimes have dimmed those memories.

“Today’s NDP has new energy and a vision for a green and prosperous Canada that leaves no one behind” reads the party’s central slogan. Behind it is an extensive, though quite moderate platform of reforms that, if implemented, would blunt the bosses’ agenda and begin to restore public services. Layton has smartly capitalized on the emergence of the mass anti-war and anti-capitalist globalization movements of the past decade by endorsing and attending their major public actions – while being careful to steer clear of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist policies.

Instead, the NDP is offering voters a dose of left populism. It is seeking to reverse recent major tax concessions to the rich in order to fund medicare, a new public drug plan, child care, education, green energy and job initiatives, and to secure pensions. Though such policies do not broach issues of class power or address the inherent evils of the system – much less challenge capitalist rule -- the business media have already bared their teeth and launched attacks that verge on red-baiting.

In a May 27 editorial, Canada’s biggest circulation daily paper, the Toronto Star wrote: “Layton has chosen the divisive strategy of once again pitting the rich against the poor.”

How has he done that? By means of NDP proposals to hike taxes for individuals with income over $250,000 a year, to tax banks and corporations, and to put a 40% tax on inheritances over $1 million (excluding small business and family farms)? Similar taxes existed in the past. Doesn’t it beg the question: So who launched the attack on the incomes and social benefits of workers and the poor, to enrich the wealthy, starting in the mid-1970s? Could it be the Star’s preferred party, the Liberals, who ran the government for all but about nine of those years? Was that divisive or inclusive?

The way the business media have pounced on modest NDP tax proposals, and savaged Layton for suggesting that Paul Martin’s elimination of federal funding for social housing construction led to more homelessness and deaths due to it, reveals more than just a crude ruling class reflex. It is a sign of the growing frustration, even a hint of desperation amongst some capitalists, at the prospect of Liberal losses and NDP gains.

For an NDP Government, Not a Prop for a Liberal Minority

Though far from waging a ‘class war’ campaign, the NDP is riding a wave of social struggles, which the recent public sector strikes in Newfoundland and B.C., and the anti-Liberal government protests in Quebec exemplify.

A victory for the NDP, in fact any significant gains for the NDP, will foster better conditions for the entire workers’ movement in challenging the ongoing neo-liberal agenda. For that reason, rooted in the fact that the NDP is the only mass party of labour and the left, socialists call for the election of an NDP government on June 28.

In a misguided attempt to appear humble and ‘pragmatic’, Jack Layton and other NDP officials occasionally muse out loud about “conditions” for their support for a minority government. A referendum on proportional representation, and various public funding initiatives are touted. But this fuels the mendacious media mantra that the NDP can’t win, that an NDP vote is a wasted vote -- at which point ‘strategic voting’ to stop the ostensibly more right wing Conservatives is proposed. This is a lose-lose line for the NDP campaign which should be jettisoned by Layton.

Socialists stress that only an NDP government can open the road to meaningful change by removing the levers of government from the parties of big business. An NDP government, coupled with resurgent labour and social movements, and a strengthened class struggle left wing inside the NDP, can shift the relationship of forces markedly in favour of the working class and its allies.

Socialists fight for an NDP government committed to socialist policies. Thus, we urge a vote for the NDP in every constituency. This includes Quebec where the party is weakest and enjoys little union support due to its historic hostility to French language laws and to Quebec self-government. While the Union des Forces Progressistes, a growing labour-leftist coalition in Quebec shows much promise, it does not run in federal elections. And the Bloc Quebecois, despite its social democratic image, is solidly linked to Quebec business and to the former Parti Quebecois capitalist provincial regime.

Thus, the English-Canada labour-based NDP represents the only vehicle in this election for independent working class political action across the Canadian state.

Every gain for the NDP on June 28 will be a gain for the working class.

The task of NDP militants now is to link the party’s electoral campaign to the living struggles and mobilizations of workers and the poor, especially to movements to end imperialist intervention in the Middle East, stop Star Wars 2, abrogate the corporate ‘free trade’ deals, and support strikes that challenge cuts to jobs and vital services.