Pensioners Can’t Afford Harper, Flaherty and Carney!

Defeat the Schemes of the Bay Street Troika!

End Supplementary Benefits to the Banks and the Wealthy!

End the Corporate Tyranny Over Parliament.

Don Currie, Chair, Canadians for Peace and Socialism

February 2, 2012

www.FocusOnSocialism.ca 

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, a Bay Street Troika, acting for a small class of wealth and privilege, have declared class war on poor pensioners. The most vulnerable Canadians, pensioners relying on OAS and Income Supplement have been chosen by Prime Minister Harper as the first victims of an illegal and immoral appropriation and reallocation of state funds.

For decades, the Canadian working people, out of their labour and tax dollars, entrusted the state with funds more than adequate to pay for perpetual universal entitlement to publicly funded health care, retirement pensions and insurance payments to the unemployed.

Successive Liberal and Conservative governments have directed such funds to general revenues to pay for NATO wars and outlandish military expenditures, corporate tax reductions and bailout funds for corporate boondoggles, and now seek to make the Canadian people the victims of their gross negligence and incompetence.   

Betraying the trust of the people, Harper, Flaherty and Carney, relying on autocractic power have been meeting for months behind closed doors at the IMF in New York with foreign financiers and with elite groups of privileged and unelected Canadians, to devise ways to undermine the profoundly Canadian principle of universal and free public health care, pensions and unemployment insurance.

The first duty of any Canadian government is to protect and allocate state funds, to provide work or unemployment insurance for the working class, free public healthcare for all, well funded public education, affordable public housing for the homeless and universal pensions for all. That should not be an occasional temporary requirement of government. It must be a fundamental and permanent requirement. That is what the economy is for is it not?

Let the Prime Minister and his Conservative supporters say otherwise. If the economy and government serves some other purpose, let the Prime Minister at least have the courage to say what it is.

The government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper is at odds with Canada. The grasping and parasitical class of wealth and privilege he represents has separated their individual interests from the common good of the country and made a conscious and deliberate political choice to abandon the vision that most Canadians have our country. That vision is of a progressive and industrious and peaceful society. Under his tutelage, Prime Minister Harper by stealth has imposed an alien imperial vision of a Canada perpetually engaged in NATO wars, reliant on a single sector economy, energy exports, with the oversight of bank tyranny.  

The liberal and the NDP opposition is floundering in presenting an alternative vision of our country that challenges the imperial vision of Prime Minister Harper and captures the spirit of what the Canadian people believe they have been working for since confederation, peace and progress.

The next federal budget will be pivotal. It will represent another incremental step by the Harper Conservative Government in the direction of imposing a more open and dictatorial rule of finance capital over Canadian economic and political development. Any illusion that the Harper Government is simply a pendulum swing to the right that can self correct is illusory.

The next federal budget is more than an economic statement. It is a political statement of intent. The Flaherty budget is not just a big business budget it is the economic framework supporting the doctrine of open corporate rule and as such is profoundly anti-labour anti-democratic and anti-peace.

The next federal budget will be about tearing up what is left of the so-called social contract with working Canadians and devising a new one on behalf of absolute corporate power over the state and the allocation of its resources exclusively to the pursuit of maximum private profit. What happens to the living standards of the Canadian people is incidental to the cold blooded planners of such a predatory view of governance.

The Bay Street Troika has concocted a budgetary scam. If such an enterprise was devised by any entity other than government and the Bank of Canada, it would be considered a betrayal of fiduciary trust and grounds for prosecution and conviction. 

The Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, with the active assistance of the Governor of the Bank of Canada, has set itself against the aspirations and needs of the majority of the people of Canada, who rely on wages, salaries and pensions to live. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is the leader of the party and the government of the separate interest; corporate power, extreme wealth and privilege. As such its mandate to govern is strictly formal and completely without moral authority.

The privately owned and controlled corporate mass media actively collaborates with Harper, Flaherty and Carney to callously demonize pensioners as the preliminary step to demonizing the working public civil service, their wages, benefits, pensions and union representation. The attack on the civil service if not opposed will lead to an assault on the private sector unions and ultimately on all of the laws that protect collective bargaining. It is the aim of the Harper government to disarm the organized labour movement.

Moral outrage and appeals to reason are futile against such unconscionable and predictable class hatred. The only appropriate answer is to organize and adopt working class mass independent action. Either the labour movement by its action leads the Parliamentary opposition or it is relegated to an ineffectual cheerleader.

Every working class leader knows that what is said by Prime Minister Harper is an affront to the working people who are denied the wealth they have created. To be a working class family struggling on survival wages and living two pay cheques away from economic disaster and be also hectored by government leaders and their ilk, who live in comfort and security, to save more for retirement is the ultimate insult. Such capitalist arrogance takes the royal adage “let them eat cake” to the lowest depths of aristocratic capitalist cynicism.

Mark Carney’s dire warning of retirement hardship while helping to sink every life boat and destroying every life preserver that working people have, establishes a new low in corporate cynicism. Mark Carney and Finance Minister Flaherty know that every Canadian who works for a living yearns for secure retirement and doesn’t have the funds to provide it. That is why workers for decades have voluntarily paid out of their meagre earnings into a fund for OAS and the Income Supplement as well as the CPP. To be told now by government that there are inadequate funds is an act of betrayal plain and simple.

The Federal Government and the Bank of Canada has the power, legislative, fiscal and monetary, to provide all of the funds necessary to provide full retirement incomes for all Canadians now and into the future. The Canadian working people have created unimaginable wealth out of their combined labour. They have an entitlement to it. The people’s wealth has been misappropriated and directed to private hands.

The organized labour movement, the NDP and all opposition forces in the country are called upon to do their job. Stop pleading with the main architects of corporate privatization of Canada’s health, pension and unemployment insurance programs. Stop creating the illusion that with exposure and clever arguments in Parliament that that alone will change the situation.

There is no alternative for any Parliamentarian claiming to represent the people, any labour leader elected to a position of trust, except to organizine a massive unstoppable protest movement to nullify the Harper-Flaherty-Carney scheme.

The opposition parties must get on message and over the heads of the establishment go directly to the people where they live and work and stop this corporate steam roller before it bulldozes every social gain ever made by the struggles of the Canadian working people.

The budget may pass. What is vital is that it not be allowed to pass without a great public mass movement against it.