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No. 25 - January 26, 2011

Canadians for Peace & Socialism

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Special Election Bulletin From Focus On Socialism - Number Two

Don Currie, Chair Canadians for Peace and Socialism, Editor Focus On Socialism

From Small “c” to Big Oil, Big Banks, Big Military…

The Consequences of a Conservative Party Majority

The forthcoming federal election will be the culmination of a long process of rightwing reaction to win unrestricted majority political power over Parliament and the state.

Another Harper Government should it be elected with a majority will be overtly anti-labour and anti-peace and hostile to all mass democratic actions of the people.

Everything that can be done to prevent such a calamity overtaking our country must be done by all of the anti-monopoly forces of labour, peace and democracy.

A Harper majority will give full sway to the profit taking ambitions of those private investor classes, foreign and domestic, that derive their wealth from the private ownership of the energy sector, the banks, the major corporations and a bellicose fast rising 21^st Century military industrial complex profiteering out of serial NATO wars.

A Harper government given a majority, will carry forward without pretence all of the calumnies that it worked to implement covertly as a minority government. A Harper majority will rule in an extra-parliamentary way, relegating Parliament to a rubber stamp to enact legislation determined at the highest levels of finance capital at the IMF, the WTO, and the World Bank and at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

A Harper majority will add new powers to all the organs of state repression.

A Harper majority will lead Canada into more foreign wars.

A Harper majority will accelerate the process of ending Parliamentary democracy as the Canadian people have come to know it.

Finance Capital and Canadian Sovereignty

The Harper Conservatives represent that sector of finance capital that has abandoned Canadian sovereignty and with cosmopolitan disdain for the achievements of the Canadian people presumes to be entitled to appropriate to itself that which serves its purpose and to discard what it considers extraneous regardless of the consequences for the people and the unity of Canada.

Prime Minister Harper has never repudiated his June 1997 speech when he was vice-president of the arch-conservative right wing National Citizen’s Coalition. In his speech, Harper contemptuously dismissed the achievements of the people of Canada as a northern European welfare state “in the worse sense of that term”. In that same speech Stephen Harper expressed his hostility and disdain for the workers of Canada, the Canadian Labour Congress and the NDP.[1]

The Prime Minister has no vision for Canada other than what he perceives to be the needs of finance capital

Harper rose to power as a major player in a right-wing extremist political movement bent on rolling back all of the post WW2 social gains of the Canadian people.  The Conservative Party retained all of the principles and program of the right-wing Reform-Alliance softening its extremist rhetoric. Today the Harper Conservatives continue to seek an end to all vestiges of state capitalist protections of the home market.  It seeks to tear down all impediments to the movement of private foreign and domestic capital to exploit the achievements of the Canadian people, plunder Canadian natural resources, and buy and sell Canadian assets, both private and public, without regard of the consequences for the Canadian people.

The Harper Conservatives have the fulsome support for this anti-Canadian policy of US Republican right wing reaction with which it is intimately connected and the entire international class of monopoly capitalism and its agencies such as the IMF, the World Bank, the EU, OECD, NATO, and all of the ancillary think tanks and agencies that serve their purpose.

Its principal cheer leader in Canada is the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) and its executive director former Liberal finance minister John Manley.[2]  Harper appointed the former NDP Premier of Manitoba, Gary Doer as Canadian Ambassador to Washington[3].  Harper has recently appointed as his PMO chief of staff a former Onex Corporation insider and Bay Street operative Nigel Wright.[4]

Respectable Liberal, NDP and Bay Street notables now adorn the Harper entourage  

Harper rose to power with the active support of Alberta oil investors and a cabal of right wing reactionary academics at the University of Calgary headed by Professor Tom Flanagan who recently called publicly for the assassination of someone with whom he disagreed.[5]

Harper represents upscale Calgary Southwest, home to big oil.  He is well connected to the Calgary Petroleum Club and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.[6]

Finance Minister Flaherty a governor of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is Harper’s point man on the economy. He is an intimate of Bank of Canada President Mark Carney and has seamless access to Canada’s major banks and the corporate board rooms of Bay Street with whom he consults on a regular basis.[7]

The Harper Government, unlike the Liberals, expresses its contempt for organized labour by rarely meeting with the leadership of the CLC and the Quebec Federation of Labour (QFL). Harper’s hostility to organized labour goes back to his earliest days as an assistant to Calgary MP Jim Hawkes volunteering to study the unemployment insurance program with the view to making it more difficult for workers to access on the grounds that EI payments discouraged the unemployed from seeking work.[i]

The most recent affront to the 4.5 million member CLC and QFL was Finance Minister Flaherty’ s betrayal of a commitment to expand the coverage provisions of the Canada Pension Plan (CPP).  The CLC is conducting an investigation into who lobbied Flaherty on behalf of private insurers.[8]

Prime Minister Harper’s Canada First Defence Strategy (CFDS)[9]

The Canadian Peace Congress (CPCon) exposed the real purpose of the Harper Government’s CFDS in a statement it issued three years ago and subsequently embodied in its convention documents of October 2008. CPCon President Dave McKee made an exposure of CFDS as one of the main themes of his address to the Canada-US-Mexico Trilateral Conference in Toronto October 2009.[10]

The Prime Minister Harper right wing minority government seeks to end any pretence of an independent Canadian foreign policy based on adherence to the original tenets of the UN Charter. It works to subordinate Canadian foreign and military policy to the global ambitions of NATO, the USA and the EU with which it seeks a privileged position. Its entry into these imperialist circles is via militarization of the Canadian economy and the transformation of Canadian military doctrine from defence of Canada to aggression against countries and people’s posing no threat to Canada or its people.

CFDS takes the path of complete and total interoperability of the high command of the Canadian armed forces with the US and NATO high commands as its primary function. Under a Harper Government the Canadian military will be integrated into the US NATO command structure given the role as a specialized high tech  mobile strike first force, trained to operate in theatres where the use of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons are deployed. Under a Harper Government, Canada’s long standing formal rejection of sanctioning the use of nuclear weapons will be over.  Canadian armed forces will be compelled to accept the nuclear first strike strategy of the US and NATO military doctrines. 

As such, the Harper Government makes a mockery of the ideals of young Canadians who join the Canadian armed forces believing they do so to represent the interests of the Canadian people and to protect their peaceful enjoyment of our country.  The Harper Conservative military policy is not about the peace and security of Canadians.  It is about the security of the export of Canadian investment capital to all corners of the globe.  It is about plans to assign Canadian armed forces to the next US NATO foreign war possibly in Africa, on behalf of the global investment ambitions of domestic and foreign investor classes.  The transformation of the Canadian armed forces into an extension of the global ambitions of international finance capital is the antithesis of the defence of Canada.  Such a reckless policy has already irreparably damaged the reputation of Canada as a non-belligerent state. Under the Harper Government Canada is now viewed internationally as just another NATO enforcer.

To see the naked ambition and amoral stance of the Harper Government’s foreign and military policy one need only expose its role in Haiti to close critical scrutiny.  The Canadian Government abandoned all claim to have a disinterested role in Haiti when it first helped the USA and France to depose the twice popularly elected President of Haiti Jean Bertrand Aristide [11]and now failing to call for the arrest and prosecution of the appointed dictator Baby Doc Duvalier.

Prime Minister Harper’s Zionist zealotry has become an international embarrassment.  Such a stance reduces his government to the role of an uncritical cheer leader for Israeli expansionism and an opponent of the world- wide support for the just cause of the Palestinian people.

The Harper Government’s condemnation of nuclear development programs in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran fall to the ground with Harper’s utter silence about Israeli possession of nuclear weapons.

The Harper Government is the anti-labour government of big capital, big oil and militarism

The Conservative Party in the five years since Harper has come to power has muted its extremist right wing rhetoric while never repudiating its essence.  Today the Conservative Party is the favoured party of big capital and is overflowing with corporate funding but utilizes its extremist wing to win votes.

 Prime Minister Harper remains loyal to his ideological and political roots as revealed in his January 23, 2011 speech to party faithful in Ottawa.  Harper speeches can’t be dismissed as cynical appeals to his right wing extremist base.  They are much more than that. They are statements of intent.

Harper is going into the next federal election pledging to use the state to jail youth.  The Prime Minister is going into the election to prepare for more wars by spending on jet fighters instead the needs of the people.  The Prime Minister will continue to impose IMF diktat on the Canadian economy.[12] (More on the Harper IMF connection in the next bulletin)

He and his government must be defeated and decisively in the next federal election.

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