The 2012 Federal Budget

The 2012 Federal Budget!

March 24, 2012

Don Currie, Chair CPS


Capitalism Created the Global Depression!

Finance Minister Flaherty and His Corporate Advisors Wracked Up the Budget Deficit!

We Will Not Pay For It?

On Thursday March 29th the corporate controlled mass media will move into high gear and attempt to bully Canadians into accepting Prime Minister Harper’s IMF austerity and NATO war budget.

Conservative shills will assert that wage freeze, reduced farm income, germ laden hospitals, overworked teachers and nurses, 17% youth unemployment, and poverty ridden First Nations communities is the price Canadians must pay to reduce the federal deficit and set aside billions for the next NATO war.

Who Is the Economy For?

Finance Minister Flaherty consults his big business pals on how to manage the economy. They consider the Federal Treasury to be their personal account. Workers and farmers who create the wealth of the country are excluded.

Prime Minister Harper promotes the profit goals of banks, big domestic and foreign investor interests as the first priority of his government.

The Federal Treasury is Worker’s Money! Only a Struggle Led by Labour Will Ensure it is Spent On Workers Needs!

Canadian workers and farmer-producers create the wealth of Canada. Federal budgets are clever accounting by government mandarins to ensure the bulk of that wealth winds up in the hands of a small class of wealth and privilege that live parasitically from the work of others.  The media is lying when they speculate that there may be something in federal budget for wage earners and farm producers.  

Good Ideas and Logic Cannot Persuade Capitalists to Cease Being Capitalists.

Reformers have proposed a people’s alternative budget! That is an ideal solution and merits support.[1]  However it is illusory to believe that capitalists can be persuaded by good ideas and logic to stop being capitalists. When has that ever happened?

What is the stark reality?

Canadian finance capital and its right-wing Conservative and Liberal governments long ago abandoned the needs of Canadian workers and farmers. Prime Minister Harper and his government uphold the profit system on behalf of the biggest profiteers, foreign and domestic!

Working class and farm families are excluded!

If the Harper Conservatives cared about hard working Canadians there wouldn’t be a single unemployed worker in our country. There would be a lot of unemployed bankers and corporate executives!

Canadians are Highly Productive, Hard Working and Creative! Bankers and Big Investors are Indolent and Parasitical!

Every Canadian wants to work and contribute to society. It is a slander on our people when right-wing think tanks such as the Conference Board of Canada, the CD Howe Institute and the Fraser Institute accuse Canadians of low productivity.

Capitalists are responsible for low productivity by promoting unemployment to cheapen the cost of labour. They have no plan to employ everyone.

Jason Kenny and Brad Wall are making it up. There is no shortage of skilled labour in Saskatchewan or Canada in any of its sectors including the energy sector. With 17% youth unemployment in the age category 15-24, with skilled workers in eastern Canada laid off in manufacturing, with hundreds of thousands of university and college grads forced into minimum wage unskilled McJobs there is a back log of at least a million out of work Canadians ready to go to work.

Jason Kenny is changing the immigration policies to flood the country with low wage unemployed from the USA and other crisis ridden capitalist countries to undermine trade union gains and living wages of employed workers in Canada. He does that on behalf of Finance Minister Flaherty’s anti-union big corporate business advisors.

We are NOT all in this together!

The capitalists view real producers of real wealth - workers and farmers - with contempt. What a capitalist values is the ability of workers to create wealth beyond what they are paid in a wage. That is called surplus value. Surplus value is created out of unpaid labour time.

What is that?

A worker works part of the day to create enough value to pay their own wages. The rest of the day they work for free for the boss who pockets the result. That is where profit comes from.  Unpaid labour time! That is why employers strive to lengthen the working day, intensify labour and cut wages. The more they do that the more surplus value can be squeezed out the 18 million gainfully employed Canadians.

Over the decades that has made bankers and industrialists and big investor fabulously rich.

That’s what union negotiations are really about. The struggle of workers to get more pay for a day’s work! That’s why the employer class hates unions.

Placing hopes in a capitalist government and a capitalist budget to change the fundamental operation of the capitalist system and its basic law of value is illusory.

Should we give up? Of course not! Organized labour will always fight for every benefit we can get out of this unjust system until we can unite and get rid of it altogether and organize something better and for the majority. That something better, is socialism.

Socialism means that instead of a few billionaires privately owning the results of work, workers themselves become the government, own the work and the means of production that creates real values and begin to labour for themselves and their families.

Workers and farmers will continue to fall behind so long as a banker/corporate boss government run Canada!

Consider the record! Do We Want to Continue This Way?

The Harper Conservative government doesn’t have the courage to defend Canadian jobs extinguished by foreign investors. Such a government doesn’t deserve worker support.[2]

The Harper Conservative Government abolished the Wheat Board on behalf of a minority of uber-rich corporate grain marketers. Such a government doesn’t merit the support of farm-producers that work the land.[3]

The Harper Conservative government is attacking workers in the service sector, whether employed in government as front line providers or in private industry in a host of necessary jobs that keep the economy moving. Such a government does not merit the support of service sector workers.[4]

The Flaherty budget is a big business budget…PERIOD!

Whether at work or on the picket line wage and salary earners recognize another Flaherty-Harper-Carney fraud when they see one. There is nothing in the 2012 budget for wage and salary earners, retirees, pensioners and the unemployed among whom the youth in the age group 15-24 now constitute 17%.  

Regardless if it is included openly or hidden in the fine print of the budget, the Harper Conservative government has already demonstrated its intention to:

  • Force workers to work to 67 before qualifying for the old age pension.

  • Freeze wages and salaries of all workers beginning with front line public service employees.

  • Carry out massive layoffs of front line public service workers.

  • Reduce farm income by abolishing all single desk marketing and facilitate the transfer and sale of all farmer cooperatively owned enterprises to private investors.

  • Impose austerity and underfunding on all government funded social programs including health care, pensions, child and seniors care.

  • Sanction the use of back to work legislation as the principle means to scuttle collective bargaining rights of all unions.

  • Criminalize the youth by building US style prisons run by for-profit investors that will cause incarceration rates to soar in Canada as it has done in the USA.[5]

  • Put the federal budget at the disposal of NATO militarists and arms suppliers to fund wars against people and nations that pose no threat to Canada and its people.

  • Abandon Afghan veterans returning to Canada broken in body and mind.[6]

  • Blame the First Nations, indigenous and native people on and off reserves for being poor and disadvantaged.[7]

  • Promote an immigration policy to serve the demands of corporate interests for non-union low wage workers.[8]

More could be said. This is only a partial list of the amoral stance of Prime Minster Stephen Harper right wing Conservative government of austerity and war.

The Flaherty budget has already been rejected by the actions of striking BC Teachers, Toronto Librarians, Quebec university students confronting steep tuition rises and locked out Aveo Fleet Maintenance Inc. workers, Air Canada employees and scores of unions confronting tough bargaining in the anti-union environment promoted by Prime Minister Harper and Jim Flaherty and Labour Minister Lisa Raitt.[9],[10]

Canadian farmers deprived of the Wheat Board also reject the new oligopoly Viterra. Viterra has already gouged another chunk out of hard earned farm income and pocketed obscene profits and corporate salaries.[11]

Opposition Parliamentarians Must Stand With Canadians Against the G7 IMF Fraudsters!

The Harper-Flaherty-Carney budget will have IMF austerity stamped all over it. The Harper Conservatives are committed to G7- IMF financial oligarchs representing foreign and domestic banks both viable and bankrupt. Capitalism looks after its own. Prime Minister Harper at Davos pledged his allegiance to banks and corporate interests.[12]

The Harper-Flaherty-Carney troika is committed to underwrite bloated US-NATO military budgets at the expense of the needs of the Canadian people. Flaherty seeks to hoodwink Canadians that the government can squander billions on clunker British used subs and a CF35 US produced jet aircraft and at the same time sustain a modern Canadian health care system. They are lying. The Flaherty Budget will ensure that military spending trumps health care.

The Harper-Flaherty-Carney budget is the Canadian finance capitalist variant of what the European Central Bank has imposed on the workers of Greece. The Flaherty budget deserves the same response as the PAME-WFTU led manifestations in Greece.[13]

Flaherty’s first commitment is to his IMF pals

The Flaherty-Harper-Carney budget is the Canadian finance capitalist variant of international finance capitalist collusion. Their mission is to bully Parliament into rubbing stamping a made-at-the IMF budget in the interests of both foreign and Canadian banks, energy giants and the global profit system.

The IMF on behalf of the global 1% have agreed to cut spending on social needs, reduce front line government employees, impose wage freeze on collective bargaining and use back to work legislation to enforce it in all capitalist countries.

The underlying principle of all capitalist governments is to impose all deficits arising out of the US instigated global financial collapse and NATO imperialist wars, on the backs of those who had nothing to do with it, the average taxpayer and wage and salary earners.

The Alternative People’s Budget enunciated by CCPA Monitor and supported by the CLC and the NDP is all very well. More can be said but it is a start! The Alberta Fed has some good ideas on a supportable struggle to changed energy policy! The Ontario and BC Fed have indicated their support for teachers, librarians and all public sector workers!

It is not yet enough! What is missing and what is required is all in unity around an alternative labour-farmer program of planned economic development and an end to support for NATO Wars!

  • Peace is Possible!

  • Full Employment Is Possible!

  • Increased Purchasing Power in the Hands of Workers and Farmers Is Possible!

  • Early Retirement On Good Pensions Is Possible!

  • Free Pharma-care is Possible!

  • Clean Hospitals and More Health Care Providers Is Possible!

  • Decent Housing and Clean Water and Health Care for First Nations Communities Is Possible!

  • Affordable Housing and Universal Free Child Care for Working Class families is Possible!

A Better Canada Is Possible!

Everything for the Working People! Nothing for the War Planners and the 1%

Reject the Flaherty Big Business Budget! Â