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" The Federal Election Outcome and Beyond
January 31st 2006 Don Currie, Chair CPS
An intense discussion is underway on the left to assess, regroup and unite the peace, labour and farm movements to oust the Harper Conservatives from power. Canadians for Peace and Socialism (CPS) offer the following commentary as a contribution to the discussion.
Alberta Big Oil In Power in Ottawa
The January 23rd 2006 federal election handed legislative power to far right-wing reaction. Objectively the Harper Conservatives are the political expression of the enormous growth and concentration of foreign and domestic finance capital in the energy sector of the Canadian economy. The Harper Conservatives are the federal party of Alberta Big Oil. Their basic mandate is to protect first, the power and privileges of all those who derive their profits from the wealth generated by processing and export of Canadian oil and natural gas reserves to the US market. The Harper Conservatives cannot promote the corporate goals of the energy sector without confronting the resistance of those sectors of the Canadian capitalist economy struggling to cope with inadequate capital and rising energy prices. The Harper Conservatives are the first capitalist party to be given federal power that places a separate provincial corporate interest above the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. As such it is a divisive political force, a threat to bourgeois democratic federalism, the constitution and Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canadian sovereignty and unity. It places U.S high finance in a stronger position of political influence over the Canadian government and state than it has ever had in the past.
The Harperite Conservative rise to power is the result of a carefully orchestrated right wing political process engineered by Alberta academics and politicians working for Big Oil and other western based corporate interests to displace eastern finance capital as the dominant voice of Canadian capitalism in its collaboration with US imperialism. If allowed to remain in power and seize majority control of Parliament Harper’s policy will be to subordinate all federal fiscal, monetary, budgetary and foreign policy decisions including those that are crucial to Canada’s peace, security and national unity to that separate interest.
Why Capitalist Parties Fight One Another
The Harper Conservatives could not have proceeded to seize power and enact Big Oil’s agenda without conducting a political struggle to discredit the Mulroney Conservatives and displace the Liberal Party from federal power. Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien and Paul Martin were all beholden to Bay St. and Montreal corporate power in particular to the Demarais Power Corporation Empire. Their mandate was to perpetuate the dominance of eastern Canadian finance capital over all national economic development, including NAFTA, and to ensure it controlled and benefited from the movement of investment capital to the western Canadian energy sector. That is why the Liberals were cool" |