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A
little joke currently circulating goes like this: "Stephen Harper
took 4 years to unite the right. He took 4 days to unite the left. He
took 1 1/2 days to find the Liberals a new leader." Setting aside
the error about what constitutes "the left", we could add:
"And at the same time, Harper killed the Liberal-NDP
coalition."
Stephane Dion stepped down, replaced
as federal Liberal Leader by Etobicoke-Lakeshore
MP Michael Ignatieff, Bay Street's original choice for the job
in 2006. The quick switch was executed by the Liberal parliamentary
caucus and an enlarged backroom council of advisors.
That
slimy maneuver usurped the constitutional role of the party's convention,
set for May 2009. It is a fitting companion piece to how Conservative
Prime Minister Stephen Harper undemocratically 'prorogued' Parliament to
avoid defeat in an early December non-confidence vote. (Harper went one
step further to abuse the legislative shut-down period by appointing 18
prominent conservatives to the Senate, in violation of his longstanding
promise either to have an 'elected' Senate, or to abolish the chamber of
bag men and party hacks.)
Once
Tory Finance Minister Jim Flaherty puts a few more billion dollars in
corporate bail-out money into his much-anticipated Jan. 27 budget, Ignatieff will have an excuse to vote to sustain the
government, dump the Liberal-NDP coalition, and avoid an early election
campaign the Liberal Party cannot afford to wage.
But
who is the new Liberal leader—the potential next P.M.? Like Harper, Ignatieff is pro-war, pro-torture, and a George Bush
cheerleader. He's also a fiscal conservative. The 61-year-old patrician
academic, the author of 16 books, comes by his reactionary politics
honestly. Ignatieff is the son of Russian
royalty (Canadian diplomat George Ignatieff)
and a Canadian Establishment mother (Alison Grant). He lived most of his
life abroad—in Britain, the United States, the South of France (where
he maintains a family home in Provence).
He
has written reflectively about "we Americans", and praised the
Empire even after President George W. Bush legislated
the rights-suppressing National Security Strategy in 2001. He supported
the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. He ridiculed the United
Nations' refusal to back the invasion over justified suspicion about the
mythical weapons of mass destruction.
Retroactively,
Ignatieff tried to excuse his pro-imperialist
war position by arguing that he had been wrong for the right reasons
(saving the Kurds from Saddam Hussein), while opponents of the war may
have been right for the wrong reasons (ideological opposition to Bush).
In his book "The Lesser Evil" he argued that "to defeat
evil, we may have to traffic in evil," referring to coercive
interrogation, targetted assassinations,
"even pre-emptive war."
Along
with the rest of the Liberal caucus, he voted to extend the Canadian
occupation of Afghanistan to 2011. Look for him to find
ways to extend further the imperialist military operation in future.
Like
his life-long friend, former college room-mate and recent NDP turncoat,
MP Bob Rae, Ignatieff is a staunch supporter of
the Israeli apartheid state and a firm opponent of Quebec sovereignty. But unlike Rae, Iggy worries more about covering his right flank. Ergo,
he will happily fold the coalition with the labour-based
New Democratic Party, backed by the Bloc Quebecois—unless the
Conservative minority government foolishly decides to duplicate its
December provocations.
The
Canadian corporate elite is not facing a robust
challenge from the workers' movement, so the need to try to co-opt the labour party in English Canada is not pressing.
But
in scuttling the class-collaborationist coalition, Ignatieff
and Harper are inadvertantly giving NDP Leader
Jack Layton a precious New Year's gift—a chance to assert the
independence of the NDP by fighting for the interests of working people
in the face of a global capitalist depression, rather than trying to
co-manage the crisis with enemy parties of the business class.
Layton's decision to propose and
enter a coalition with the Liberals was deeply undemocratic. Regardless
of the fate of the confab, it urgently merits debate. For that reason we
support the call of the NDP Socialist Caucus for an emergency session of
the NDP Federal Council to be convened, a.s.a.p. to discuss and vote on
the coalition concept.
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