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" Miguel Figueroa, Leader, Communist Party of Canada Addresses Delegates to the 35th. Communist Party Convention, Toronto February 1, 2007 On Pre-Election Issues. Communist delegates from all provinces and Quebec met in Toronto on February 1-4, 2007 and unanimously adopted the Main Resolution document that calls for the defeat of the Harper Government in the next federal election. In his keynote address to delegates Party Leader Miguel Figueroa said “the Tories under Prime Minister Stephen Harper have now become the preferred party of most sections of Canadian and international finance capital, not just the resource and military contractors, but also the banks and other monopolies.”
Citing the twelve month record of Tory rule, the deepening involvement in the ‘dirty war’ of occupation in Afghanistan, the increase in the military budget, the abandonment of the Kyoto targets, the cancellation of the federal childcare program, the cuts to environmental, Aboriginal peoples, confirmed the necessity of preventing Harper’s re-election even to minority status.
Figueroa reviewed the records of the opposition parties blaming open collusion by the Liberals, Bloc and NDP on major issues as the reason that Harper was able to impose his reactionary program in spite of their minority status. The Communist leader noted the extension of the Anti-Terrorism Act (C-36) for five more years, the sell-out agreement on soft wood lumber and the May vote in the House that saw 30 Liberals join with the Tories to extend the “mission” in Afghanistan for an additional two years, “contrary to the wishes of the majority of the Canadian people.”
Figueroa observed, “ the above cases …show that no one should have any illusions about whether Stephane Dion and his Liberal ‘team’, the petit bourgeois nationalist BQ, or the right-wing social democratic leadership under Jack Layton, stand for a fundamentally distinct political alternative, one which breaks with neo-liberal, pro-war and pro-integrationist policies of the Harper Conservatives.”
The Communist leader posed the question, “How then should progressive and class-conscious people vote?” Figueroa pointed to the Party’s plan of work calling for the fielding of 25 Communist candidates and called upon delegates to work in the election to win as many votes as possible for Communist candidates. “This may mean giving grudging support to NDP candidates in those ridings where there is no Communist in the field, while criticizing the right-opportunist policies of that party’s leadership.”
Figueroa said, “The Green Party, which has situated itself somewhere between the Liberal and the NDP parties on most social and economic issues, is – with very few exceptions – not worthy of the support of progressive voters.”
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