Ontario Workers Face Liberal Austerity

Fresh off its June reelection, the Ontario Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne is set to intensify its attacks on workers and the poor. During the election, the Liberals styled themselves as “progressive” and aimed their fire at the right-wing Tories of Tim Hudak, a smirking frat boy who vowed to axe 100,000 government jobs. But as Wynne’s own budget documents show, she is preparing the biggest spending cuts since the Mike Harris Conservative regime of the 1990s. Harris’s former deputy finance minister Bryne Purchase told Bloomberg News (3 June): “She’s not talking about war with the public sector unions, but that’s what those numbers imply to me.”

The Liberals’ undeclared war will mean drastic cuts to social programs, tens of thousands of job losses and a pay freeze for government workers. This comes atop the plant closures that have devastated manufacturing in Ontario, bringing mass unemployment to former union strongholds like Windsor. Yet the union bureaucrats who head the Ontario Federation of Labour saluted the Liberals for producing the “most progressive budget this province has seen in recent years,” and tacitly supported Wynne’s reelection through a “Campaign to stop Tim Hudak.”

Meanwhile, another wing of the labour bureaucracy, centred on the Steelworkers and Ontario Public Service Employees Union, maintained the union tops’ traditional support to the NDP social democrats, even as the party ran its most overtly right-wing campaign in decades. Far from posing as a left alternative to Tory/Liberal austerity, Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats positioned themselves on the Liberals’ right flank. Courting Tory voters with populist nostrums, Horwath echoed Toronto’s arch-reactionary mayor Rob Ford with a pledge to “respect the value of taxpayers’ dollars.” She responded to the Liberals’ tiny hike to the minimum wage by demanding an offsetting tax cut for small business, and refused to endorse a proposed provincial pension plan.

Horwath Pays Homage to Corporate Canada

The NDP had propped up the Liberal minority government for the previous two years, first under Dalton McGuinty, who banned strikes by Toronto transit workers and attacked teachers unions, and then under Wynne. This was nothing new for the New Democrats, who have supported various other Liberal and even Tory governments over the years as well as running their own capitalist regimes in provinces from Ontario to B.C. But the latest NDP makeover, underway for about a decade and now on the fast track, goes further. It is a conscious attempt to weaken and perhaps break the party’s organic links to the unions and refashion it as a purely bourgeois formation akin to the U.S. Democratic Party.

In the lead up to the election, Horwath embarked on what the Globe and Mail (21 April) termed a “charm offensive with big business, holding closed-door sessions with top players on Bay Street and other corporate leaders.” According to the Globe, Horwath pledged that an NDP government would “do whatever it takes” to balance the books, “including cutting government spending and playing tough with public-sector unions.” The CEO of Chrysler Canada responded favourably: “She also mentioned that if there was anything she could do to help Chrysler, to call…. I appreciated the outreach.”

The NDP was created in 1961 through the joint efforts of the social-democratic Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and the Canadian Labour Congress. During the anti-communist witchhunts of the late 1940s and the ’50s, the CCF and allied union bureaucrats had worked to drive the most militant elements out of the unions. Thoroughly pro-capitalist in its leadership and outlook but linked to the labour movement through the top union officialdom, the NDP was from the start what Marxists call a “bourgeois workers party.”

The New Democrats’ roots in Christian populism and anti-communist witchhunting placed them on the right wing of the spectrum of such parties internationally, even compared to such pusillanimous pro-capitalist outfits as the Labour Party in Britain. Ever since, whenever the NDP has been elected to office it has ruled unambiguously for the bosses: breaking strikes, attacking Native militants, implementing capitalist austerity.

Today, sensing an opportunity to replace the Liberals as the main alternative to the ruling federal Tories, the NDP’s leaders view the labour connection as an electoral liability, especially as the party is no longer financially dependent on the unions. This trajectory gathered steam under the leadership of the late Jack Layton. Tom Mulcair, who moved seamlessly from the Quebec Liberal Party cabinet into the NDP’s upper echelons, has accelerated and deepened the process. Last year, the party voted by a big majority to drop from the preamble to its constitution an empty paper commitment to “democratic socialist principles” and an expression of mild aversion to profit-driven production.

A further measure of the NDP’s push to drop even nominal social-democratic reformism can be seen in the candidacy of prominent New Democrat Olivia Chow for mayor of Toronto. Her endorsement list is studded with outright capitalists like Margaret McCain of the McCain food empire and Richard Peddie, former CEO of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment. A spokesman for the Chow campaign called this “our nod to the business community and to Toronto’s establishment that they don’t have to worry” Globe and Mail, 23 May). Indeed they don’t.

The Blair Project

What’s going on in the NDP is not just a local phenomenon. Toronto Star columnist Martin Regg Cohn noted on May 31 that in “leapfrogging past the Liberals in hopes that Tory voters will take a leap of faith toward her,” Horwath and her NDP strategists were “following the lead of Tony Blair, who dramatically revamped the U.K.’s Labour Party.” After taking over the Labour leadership in 1994, Blair set out to sever the party’s historic link to the unions, which were instrumental in founding it more than a century ago.

The “Blair project” took shape in the aftermath of the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet Union. This was the world’s first workers state, product of the October 1917 socialist revolution, and despite its subsequent degeneration under the rule of a Stalinist bureaucracy its destruction was a defeat of historic proportions for workers and the oppressed everywhere. Blair also took advantage of the fact that Britain’s industrial working class had suffered major defeats in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives, most significantly the defeat of the heroic year-long miners strike of 1984-85.

Blair pushed through the abolition of Clause IV of Labour’s constitution. This was a formal commitment to “common ownership of the means of production” adopted in 1918 as a ploy to dupe the workers amid the revolutionary tide that swept Europe after the October Revolution. Blair’s move both fed off and contributed to the capitalists’ ideological campaign that “communism is dead,” a theme echoed by various reformist left groups who have been openly discarding their “Marxist” facades in the post-Soviet period.

All of this came in the broader context of widespread disillusion among workers in Europe with their historic parties. This has resulted in the creation of new “broad” reformist and populist parties in various countries, such as Die Linke in Germany and Syriza in Greece. Many of the reformist “socialists” who used to champion British Labour and its continental analogues—and who criminally backed the forces of “democratic” counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet Union—now look to Syriza et al. as the way forward. But these parties also serve as “left” parliamentarist props for the capitalist order.

The Gang of 34 and the NDP’s Kept “Socialists”

The transformation of British Labour is a process that remains unfinished, but Labour is now moribund as a reformist party. Barring an unlikely major shift by the unions to “reclaim” the party, the same can be said of today’s NDP. In Ontario, the party’s right-wing populist rhetoric and distancing from organized labour has unsettled a layer of long-time New Democratic stalwarts. During the election, 34 of them—including union bureaucrats, former party functionaries and anti-poverty activists—cosigned an open letter denouncing the lurch to the right. “If the NDP does not stand with working people, poor people, with women, with immigrants,” it asked, “what does it stand for?” At the same time, the “gang of 34” lauded the ruling Liberals’ budget as “progressive.” Horwath’s supporters quickly slapped down this feeble revolt, denouncing the writers as “champagne socialists.”

The NDP’s rightist lunge has also discomfited the reformist groups who have made a career out of trying to nudge the party to the left. “Should socialists abandon the NDP?” asks the Fightback group (marxist.ca, 13 June). Their answer, not surprisingly, is “no.” The Socialist Action (SA) group, which runs the NDP’s “Socialist Caucus,” calls for “a bold initiative”: a petition asking Andrea Horwath to resign. The claims that the NDP can be won to a “socialist program” (Fightback) or a “workers’ agenda” (SA) aren’t merely delusional. Insofar as they influence any militant workers or youth, these groups actively mislead them by tying them to a party committed unreservedly to capitalist rule.

Some other elements on the reformist left have given up on the NDP and now call for a new, broad and vaguely leftist party. Their model is Québec Solidaire (QS), the populist party which now has three deputies in Quebec’s National Assembly. An article by Roger Annis in The Bullet (2 July), e-bulletin of the Socialist Project, asserts that “a new, left-wing and anti-capitalist political direction and party is needed,” adding:

“Though there are political weaknesses in the QS political platform (from a socialist perspective)…, the existence of Québec solidaire provides an important experience in which to debate and apply policy and further develop a left-wing, anti-capitalist platform and direction.”

The article salutes QS’s “vision of a progressive, sovereign Quebec and a government that can lead a fight to win that” and concludes: “we need a revolutionary, democratic government that carries through a transformation of politics and economics one confident step at a time.”

The idea that a “revolutionary, democratic government” run by QS or a federal analogue can open a road to socialism a “step at a time” is a reformist fantasy that is utterly belied by history. As we have documented extensively, QS is a populist obstacle to working-class consciousness and struggle. (See, for example, “Québec Solidaire: No Choice for Workers,” SC No. 165, Summer 2010.) QS, which does not even pretend to be a socialist organization, is led by housebroken former radicals who have consciously embraced a program of reformist palliatives instead of working-class revolution.

For a Marxist Perspective

The working class needs a party that fights for its own class interests: a multiracial, binational revolutionary workers party dedicated to the fight to overthrow the capitalist order. Such a party would defend all of the oppressed, demanding full citizenship rights for immigrants, championing the struggles of Native people and advocating independence for Quebec. It would hammer home the Marxist understanding that boom-and-bust cycles are endemic to the capitalist system, which is the root cause of all exploitation and oppression.

What is needed to fight the massacre of jobs and social services is a mobilization of the working class in a struggle to secure jobs for everyone through a shorter workweek with no loss in pay. A massive organizing drive must be launched to rebuild the unions, especially among minority and immigrant workers. In the course of such a struggle, more and more workers will come to see the need for an assault on the entire capitalist system. Workers revolution is the only road to the creation of a rationally planned economy based on production for need, not for profit; to the necessary qualitative advance of the productive forces in the interests of humanity; and to the consequent elimination of poverty, scarcity and want on a global scale.

As we wrote last year:

“The future evolution of the NDP remains uncertain—whether it remains a pro-capitalist labour party that utilizes its direct ties to the unions to help contain and defeat struggle, or whether it severs such ties and becomes a party more like the U.S. Democrats. Regardless, the task of Marxist revolutionaries is manifestly not to build the NDP or pretend it can institute a ‘socialist program.’ It is rather to work to break the workers, starting with the most advanced, from the politics of pro- capitalist social democracy.”

—“Tailoring Program to Practice: NDP Ditches ‘Socialism’,” SC No. 177, Summer 2013

The Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste fights to build the nucleus of the revolutionary leadership necessary both to give direction to today’s struggles and to make the workers conscious of their historic task of sweeping away the rule of capital.