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Don Currie, Chair Canadians for Peace and Socialism, Editor Focus On Socialism
This is the first in a series of CPS election bulletins that will appear until the federal election is called and continue during the campaign. We invite our readers and supporters to enter the discussion with us.
CPS takes the view that the next federal election will not be routine. It will occur during a period of deepening economic hardship for the working people of urban and rural Canada, massive profit taking by finance capital and Canada’s continued participation in foreign US NATO wars of aggression and occupation.
Prime Minister Harper and Finance Minister Flaherty will seek to convince Canadians that there is no future for Canada as a sovereign independent state. They will argue that to survive Canada must become more closely integrated into the G7 states led by US imperialism and accept the supremacy of the decisions of the IMF, the WTO, the World Bank and NATO over the Parliament of Canada.
The parties of the profit system the Conservatives and the Liberals will do everything in their power during the election campaign to evade discussing the consequences for the people of Canada of such a bleak vision of Canada’s future.
The main consequence of Canada’s continued subordination to IMF, US-NATO supremacy over the Parliament of Canada is to set our country against the new progressive, anti-imperialist, pro-peace global trends emerging among developing countries of Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa that reject belligerence and war as the norm for international relations.
International finance capital views all struggles of the people of the world for economic independence, for new anti-monopoly forms of governance including socialism, to be a direct threat to their global supremacy and dominance and quest for maximum profit.
International finance capital has powerful class forces in all developed G7 capitalist states that share that view. In Canada they are represented by the Conservative and Liberal Parties.
Prime Minister Harper and Finance Minister Flaherty are reaching in the next federal election for a Conservative Parliamentary majority on behalf of the small minority of wealth and privilege in Canada that live parasitically from the labour of the Canadian people, from the sale of the country’s natural resources and the basic industrial and manufacturing and agriculture industries both private and public that are the creations of the Canadian working class and farmers on which they rely for their economic survival.
There are powerful anti-monopoly political forces that don’t share the view of Prime Minister Harper and Finance Minister Flaherty. These forces include the organized labour movement and the political parties of the working class and the democratic and patriotic movements of the people of Canada. Together these forces represent the interests of the majority of Canadians who must sell their labour power to live.
It is the latter that can be mobilized and united in the next federal election to defeat the neo-conservative program of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. That is the task of organized labour, the progressive left and all patriotic movements of the people that seek a new direction and future of peace and prosperity for Canada.
Now is the time for organized labour and the progressive left to open up a discussion about what that new vision of Canada should be, embody it in an electoral program and take it to all Canadians to make it their own.
Left Turn Canada!
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