Capitalist Canada Gets a Facelift

Liberal Government: Enemy of Workers and the Poor

Prominent union leaders and various activist groups have hailed the election of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party as a harbinger of “progressive” change. This is false to the core. Stephen Harper and his Tory government waged a particularly vicious war against working people and the poor. But any hopes that the new Liberal regime has aroused among workers and oppressed minorities will soon be cruelly dashed.

Trudeau quickly scuttled some of Harper’s most irrational policies, for example restoring the long-form census and unmuzzling government scientists so they can speak to the media. Women’s, indigenous and immigrant groups have saluted his “inclusive” cabinet, which has 15 women, two Native people (one as justice minister), four Sikhs and, for the first time, a Muslim woman. And when the new prime minister addressed a Canadian Labour Congress meeting on November 10, the CLC bureaucrats called this “the onset of a new era in relations between the labour movement and the federal government.”

Nonsense. Trudeau’s smiling demeanour may have replaced Harper’s rancid scowl but the Liberals are, as they have always been, one of the dual parties of the Bay Street capitalists. Whatever posture Trudeau may strike today, whatever palliatives he may dole out, he is charged with managing the profit system for the filthy-rich owners of industry and commerce. That will mean more austerity, more imperialist wars, more attacks on the unions and more of the usual handouts to big business.

Just look at the Liberals’ new finance minister. Bill Morneau is the ex-CEO of Canada’s largest pension management firm and a former chair of the right-wing C.D. Howe Institute. He laid out his views in a 2013 book, The Real Retirement, warning that the government will “force Canadians to assume more responsibility for certain health care costs” and “cut back on its pension programs to reduce or eliminate early retirement benefits.” Then there’s new defense minister Harjit Sajjan, a Sikh immigrant from India—and a former Vancouver cop and lieutenant-colonel in the Canadian army. Sajjan deployed to Afghanistan three times as part of the U.S.-led occupation of that country, and served as the army’s intelligence liaison to the notoriously corrupt provincial government in Kandahar.

Add to that warhorses like Stéphane Dion, John McCallum and Ralph Goodale, veterans of the Liberal governments of the 1990s and early 2000s which launched the war on social programs that the Tories continued and deepened. All have prominent roles in the new Trudeau regime as ministers of foreign affairs, immigration and “public safety,” i.e., state surveillance and repression.

As we wrote shortly before the October election:

“Parliamentary democracy—the chance to ‘choose’ one’s oppressors every four or five years—serves as a façade for the rule of capital. The stark fact is that none of the opposition parties—NDP, Liberals, bourgeois Greens or nationalist Bloc Québécois—offer an alternative that even starts to meet the needs of working people. The economic wreckage that defines much of Canada today is the product of an irrational and deeply unjust system based on production for profit derived from exploiting the working class.”

—“For Class Struggle Against Canadian Capitalism!” SC No. 186, Fall 2015

The illusions in Trudeau’s Liberals fostered by the labour misleaders can only shackle the workers to their exploiters and oppressors. What is necessary is a perspective of social struggle against the inevitable attacks of this government and the ruling class that it serves. This struggle must champion the cause of all of capitalism’s many victims, at home and abroad.

A successful fight against this ruinous social system requires an understanding that the interests of the workers and the capitalists are counterposed and cannot be reconciled. The working class produces the goods and services that make society function. This gives it tremendous potential power, which can be wielded not only to throw back particular attacks but to put an end to the entire capitalist profit system.

NDP Debacle

The election was a disaster for the NDP, which lost well over half its seats and finished a distant third. Two months before the vote, it was leading the polls and seemed poised to form a first ever federal government. The reformist left groups who have made putting the New Democrats in power their life’s work were over the moon. But the Liberals were able to capture the broad “anyone but Harper” sentiment by outflanking the NDP on the left, especially on economic issues.

Trudeau’s calls to tax the rich (a bit more), run (tiny) budget deficits and rebuild (a little) infrastructure, hollow as they were, contrasted starkly with NDP leader Tom Mulcair’s pledge to “balance the budget” above all else. Finding traction among youth, immigrants and workers fed up with the Tory onslaught, the Liberals surged in the polls as the New Democrats collapsed. In the end, the NDP plunged from 59 seats in Quebec to only 16 and failed to win a single riding in Greater Toronto.

The NDP’s right-wing campaign showed just how determined its leaders are to excise the party’s former social-democratic rhetoric along with its already frayed links to the unions. Founded by the CLC and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in 1961, the NDP is what Marxists call a bourgeois workers party. At the organizational level, its creation was an expression of working-class independence from the bosses’ parties; at the same time, it had a thoroughly pro-capitalist leadership and program. Its occasional pretense to “democratic socialism” was always a sham, as shown by the repeated cuts to social programs and strikebreaking by NDP provincial regimes. Nonetheless, the party used to be formally committed to various reforms in the interest of working people, and its attacks were constrained to some extent by the ties to the unions.

But over the past decade the NDP’s leaders have sought to “modernize” the party into an outright bourgeois formation akin to the U.S. Democratic Party. The shift began under former leader Jack Layton and accelerated after the 2011 election, which saw the “orange surge” in Quebec and the collapse of the Liberals to third-party status. Following Layton’s death, Mulcair—only recently a Quebec Liberal cabinet minister—took over the NDP leadership and moved it even further to the right.

The more or less explicit model is “New Labour” in Britain under Tony Blair. Sidelining the unions and discarding the Labour Party’s traditional pro-worker rhetoric, Blair embraced much of the viciously anti-working-class program associated with the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher. His decade as prime minister starting in 1997 saw a sweeping assault on workers’ rights and social programs, while British troops were sent to join the U.S.-led wars and occupations that ravaged Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mulcair signalled his embrace of Blairism during the election campaign by reaffirming his earlier, disgraceful praise for Thatcher’s policies as a “wind of liberty and liberalism.” The campaign also showed how much the labour bureaucracy has been decoupled from the party. While a few union leaders have kept tight links, most called for “strategic voting” for whatever party was best placed to beat Harper in a given area. The CLC leaders’ hosannas to the Trudeau government point to likely further disengagement.

The NDP’s transformation has gone far, but it is not finished. The Liberals again occupy most of the political space available to a putatively progressive capitalist party. Mulcair is vowing to stay the course, but cracks are emerging. On the right, defeated Nova Scotia MP Peter Stoffer is calling for a complete break with the unions, saying “no political party should be tied to any…one group over others.” And on the left, outgoing Ontario Federation of Labour president Sid Ryan has criticized the party’s campaign in a 25 October Postmedia op-ed article titled “NDP Lost Election by Veering to the Right.”

Saying “New Democrats would be wise to wrap themselves in their social democratic values,” Ryan cites Jeremy Corbyn’s recent successful campaign for British Labour Party leader: “Across the pond, the moribund U.K. Labour Party has been reinvigorated with the election of Jeremy Corbyn and his unapologetic advocacy for a ‘return to the welfare state’.”

Corbyn’s victory was indeed a welcome event. As our comrades of the Spartacist League/Britain noted in a recent article (reprinted on page 21), it “has delivered a body blow to the Blair project and has reawakened working-class expectations towards Labour.” But unlike in Britain, where “old Labour” politicians like Corbyn (and before him Tony Benn) have long been a part of Labour’s parliamentary caucus, the NDP has for decades had little in the way of an influential left wing, while its roots in the labour movement have never been as strong.

More fundamentally, the crucial issues that confront workers and the oppressed cannot be solved in the framework of “old Labour”-style parliamentary reformism, which has always upheld the capitalist system. Only through mass mobilization in struggle can the working people fight for their own class interests and act on behalf of all the oppressed.

Imperialist War and Anti-Muslim Reaction

International issues played little role in the election because the parties basically agreed on most questions. The New Democrats purged any would-be candidate who dared breathe a word in defense of the Palestinians against Israeli state terror. Like the Liberals, they endorsed the Tories’ dispatch of Canadian troops to support the far-right government in Ukraine, which is trying to crush a just struggle for self-rule by the largely Russian-speaking population in the east of the country. The NDP even one-upped Harper by demanding stronger economic sanctions against Russia.

The Liberals pledged to pull Canadian fighter jets out of the U.S.-led war against the Islamist ISIS in Iraq and Syria, but there’s much less here than meets the eye. Trudeau is not talking about withdrawing Canadian military forces, but redeploying them by increasing the number of “trainers” and “advisers” to the Kurdish and Iraqi forces who currently serve as Washington’s on-the-ground military proxies. The Liberals are just as committed as the Tories to supporting Washington’s unrelenting wars and occupations in the Near East.

The Tories did distinguish themselves from the Liberals and NDP by running the most unabashedly racist campaign in modern Canadian history, particularly against Muslims. They railed against so-called “barbaric cultural practices” and especially against the minuscule number of Muslim women in Canada who wear the full-face veil known as the niqab. Denouncing a Federal Court of Appeal ruling, Harper insisted that such women could not obtain citizenship unless they removed their veils. This affected only two of nearly 700,000 citizenship applications in the past four years, but the real purpose was to stoke the fires of anti-Muslim reaction that the rulers in Canada and other imperialist countries set ablaze with their so-called “war on terror.”

As Marxists and fighters for women’s liberation, we recognize that the niqab, and the Islamic headscarf more generally, is a symbol and instrument of women’s oppression. But the moves by the ruling class to restrict the democratic rights of Muslims, including the right to wear the veil, are part of a bigoted crusade against a vulnerable minority.

The capitalists foment racism against immigrants and minorities to divide the working class on racial and ethnic lines and defeat its struggles. Today, Muslims are in their direct crosshairs. But the ultimate targets of the rulers’ machinery of state repression are the workers movement and opponents of the exploitative profit system. The Anti-Terrorism Act (Bill C-51), passed earlier this year with Liberal support, outlaws any interference with “critical infrastructure” or “economic or financial stability.” This is a direct attack on workers’ right to strike. Wiretapping, electronic surveillance, no-fly lists, increased police powers—and the billions of dollars invested in them—are not aimed at supposed threats from suicide bombers, but at regimenting the population into accepting as sacrosanct the “law and order” of oppressive capitalist rule.

Trudeau and Quebec

The niqab furor had particular traction in Quebec, which has one of the country’s largest Muslim populations. Pushing chauvinist “identity politics,” the Bloc Québécois echoed the Tories’ xenophobic rants. While the NDP and Liberals did not, this was hardly a principled defense of democratic rights, especially on the part of Mulcair, who complained of a “distraction” from “what’s important to people.” Nonetheless, the anti-Muslim uproar served to undermine NDP support in Quebec, to the benefit of the Tories and Bloc in the regions with few immigrants and of the Liberals in and around more cosmopolitan Montreal.

The Bloc got a few more seats than last time, but this was based on an even lower popular vote. A decade ago it got almost half the Quebec vote; now this is down to 19 percent. The Liberal government in Quebec City and the English Canadian media are again gleefully declaring that the Quebec sovereignist movement is in a death spiral, but this is delusional. Overwhelmingly, the francophone Québécois focus on provincial politics in the belief that this is where Quebec’s future will be decided. Insofar as Québécois workers took any interest in the federal vote most simply wanted to get rid of Harper. And opinion polls show support for sovereignty at around 40 percent.

The election of another Trudeau as prime minister could well set the stage for another “national unity” crisis. For all his talk of “sunny ways,” Trudeau’s hostility to Quebec’s national rights is as virulent as his father’s. It was Pierre Trudeau who ordered the military occupation of Montreal in 1970, aiming to crush growing nationalist agitation. And eight years ago, when the Tories enacted a for-the- record parliamentary resolution stating that the Québécois “form a nation within a united Canada,” Justin Trudeau opposed this in the language of crude chauvinism. He told a Montreal newspaper, “The problem I have with recognizing the Québécois as a nation is that this creates divisions, this separates groups from other groups” (cited in lautjournal.info, 16 October). “Who are the Québécois to be recognized as a nation?”, he asked.

That Quebec is a nation with a distinct language and culture is an obvious, even banal, statement of fact. Its right to self-determination is a basic democratic right that has never been recognized by the Canadian rulers. An earlier Liberal government (with Stéphane Dion as point man) passed the Clarity Act, effectively banning Quebec’s right to independence. As for “divisions,” it is English Canadian domination and its attendant chauvinism that has “separated groups from other groups”—the classic divide-and-rule stratagem of capitalist ruling classes everywhere.

In particular, the working class of this country is, and has long been, divided along national lines. The Maple Leaf nationalism promoted by the union misleaders and the NDP’s “Canadian unity” demagogy serve to tie English Canadian workers to their own exploiters. In turn, Québécois workers have been driven into the arms of bourgeois nationalism, especially the Parti Québécois. As consistent opponents of chauvinism and oppression, Marxists advocate independence for Quebec. We do this not least because it would create better conditions for the workers of both nations to see that their enemies are their own national capitalists, not “the French” or “les anglais.”

The Necessity of Revolutionary Leadership

Even while acknowledging that the Liberals are a party of “corporate Canada,” various reformist left groups have asserted that the election result is a big step forward. The Communist Party of Canada, an organization long practiced in the arts of class collaboration, calls it a “significant victory for the working class, for indigenous peoples, for women, youth and students” (communist-party.ca, 27 October). The International Socialists have been positively giddy, gushing: “We should take joy that Harper is gone, and that he was voted out on desire for change and that movements outside Parliament should feel emboldened to fight harder” (socialist.ca, 22 October).

The Socialist Action (SA) group seeks to entice would-be leftists into building the NDP, giving a “left” cover to pro-capitalist social democracy. While saying “It’s time for Mulcair and his team to go,” SA quickly adds: “The NDP, the only mass, labour-based political party in North America remains viable as a potential challenger to capitalist austerity, climate injustice, social inequality, racism, sexism and war” (socialistaction.ca, 1 November). The idea that the NDP is, or can become, the kind of party needed to take on capitalism and its many depredations beggars belief.

Working people and the poor need a different leadership, one that represents their interests independently of and in opposition to the capitalists. Such a leadership would defend the rights of all workers, including through organizing them into the unions. It would demand full citizenship rights for everyone who has made it here, including access to all social services. Against the double oppression of working women, it would fight for free 24-hour childcare, paid maternity leave and free abortion on demand. It would oppose imperialist wars and occupations through the methods of class struggle. Against unemployment, including the mass of hidden unemployed, it would fight for a shorter workweek with no loss in pay.

For the working class to secure jobs for all at decent wages, free education and health care and quality housing for all requires the overturn of the bosses’ profit system through a socialist revolution. That, in turn, requires transforming the political consciousness of the working class so it can pursue its historic role of sweeping away capitalist rule.

The indispensable instrument for this is a revolutionary vanguard party, whose best historical model is the Bolshevik party of Lenin and Trotsky which led the workers to power in the Russian Revolution of October 1917. Under the rule of the working class and the establishment of a collectivized planned economy, production will be for human need and not for profit. The global extension of working-class rule will lay the material basis for the rational expansion of production and elimination of scarcity, allowing for an unprecedented development of human freedom and learning in all spheres. It is to the building of such a revolutionary workers party that the Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste, Canadian section of the International Communist League, devotes all of our resources.