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Layton’s Hypocrisy
Undermines the NDP
Fear
that a Fall Canadian federal election would decimate the ranks of New
Democratic Party MPs drove Leader Jack Layton to a self-inflicted act
of desperation—voting for a rotten Tory budget.
Months
of failing to advance socialist policies to meet human needs and
differentiate the NDP made Layton’s parliamentary caucus more
vulnerable to a tactical shift by the Liberal Party. On Sept. 18,
Michael Ignatieff had his Liberal MPs vote
non-confidence in the Conservative minority government of Stephen
Harper. But it would take a vote by all three opposition parties in the
House of Commons (Liberals, NDP, and Bloc Quebecois) to defeat the
government and force an election. Worried that NDP support would bleed
towards the Liberals, and that voters would punish the NDP for
precipitating a fourth federal election in only five and a half years, Layton and company opted to prop
up the more rightist Tories.
According
to opinion polls, 60 per cent of Canadians don’t want an election now.
Many want employment insurance reform and the $6 Billion home
renovation tax credit in the budget Harper tabled. But 40 per cent do
want a federal vote to dump the labour-hating,
Tar Sands-loving, war mongering Tories. That segment of the electorate
is much more likely to consider supporting the NDP than the
anti-election crowd—provided the party gives them some good reasons to
do so.
By
selling out so cheaply (that is, for E.I. changes that won’t help most
of the 1.5 million unemployed), and by propping up the Conservatives
just to avoid an election, Layton comes off pretty badly. He
looks like a hypocrite and alienates the NDP base (of 2.5 million
voters) at one stroke.
The
labour-linked NDP, the left, and the workers’
movement as a whole are squandering a golden opportunity to put
capitalism on trial, and to seize upon the global capitalist crisis as
a tailor-made platform to fight for public ownership and green energy
conversion through workers’ and community control of industry. If Jack
Layton isn’t up to the task, which was evident at the federal NDP
convention in Halifax in August, he should step
aside. The sooner, the better.
Toronto labour
must dump Miller
The
mayor of Canada’s biggest city, David Miller, betrayed labour, disappointed his business allies, and was
so low in the polls that he announced on Sept. 25 that he will not seek
a third term in office. Although the next Toronto municipal election is more
than a year away (Nov. 10, 2010), the mega-city’s corporate
elite has been busy auditioning potential candidates for the mayor’s
chair. The labour movement should get busy
too. It’s time to replace Miller and find standard bearers who will
fight for a Workers’ Agenda, rather than fight workers.
Miller
began his electoral career as a labour-based,
New Democratic Party-backed councillor for
the west-end ward of High Park in 1994. Before his
successful run for Toronto mayor, in 2006, he hooked
up with Liberal Party fund-raisers, got Conservative Party strategist
John Laschinger to run his campaign, and
subsequently let his NDP membership lapse.
Miller’s
policies were implemented by an informal Liberal-NDP alliance that
controlled the 44-member Toronto city council. Those
policies included corporate subsidies, tax incentives, and/or deferrals
for costly environmental clean-ups, and tax rebates and minimal
property taxes for major commercial developers. At the same time, City
Hall imposed steeply rising taxes, rents, and fees for small homeowners
and tenants, and serious cuts to services like street cleaning, snow
removal, public access to swimming pools, arenas, community centers,
and libraries. Welcome anti-corruption reforms were coupled with an
economic assault against the majority of residents that still left the
city short of operating funds.
The
class collaborationist coalition hit a big bump in the road when city
hall bosses tried to squeeze the wages, benefits and work place rights
of Toronto civic workers. One hundred
and twenty pages of management take-away demands precipitated a 39-day
strike by 30,000 inside and outside employees, members of Canadian
Union of Public Employees Locals 79 and 416, in June and July.
The
workers won a partial victory by resisting most concession demands and
making modest gains (see Socialist Action, August 2009). Then Toronto and York Region Labour Council served Miller and several other city
politicians their just desserts by telling them they were not welcome
at the 27,000-strong Toronto Labour Day
Parade, Sept. 7.
Meanwhile,
some of Miller’s Liberal backers, including lawyer/bagman Ralph Lean,
and fund-raising co-chair John Ronson, jumped
ship. Prominent bourgeois politicians, led by Ontario’s Liberal Deputy
Premier George Smitherman, former Ontario
Conservative leader John Tory, and several right-wing city councillors are testing the water for a mayoral
run. The class forces they represent resent Miller for not punishing
city workers enough, and for not privatizing services. In the game of
municipal musical chairs, the ex-NDP sell-out realized that he would
have nowhere to sit.
Labour Council should learn the bitter lesson from backing
a gaggle of Liberals and NDPers in 2006 who went on to legislate in favour
of rich developers, bankers, and businessmen, at the expense of working
people. It’s time to assemble a team of NDP and Labour
activists who will fight for a socialist City Hall in 2010.
To
make that team accountable, the NDP should convene a Toronto NDP
municipal convention, open to all Toronto members. It should debate
policies, adopt a programme, and determine a
method for the selection of candidates for all municipal offices—and
find a way to hold them all accountable to that programme.
This is how the NDP functioned officially in Toronto up to the 1970s,
before a wave of liberal opportunism and populist reform sidelined open
and honest labour party politics at the local
level. Hard times demand that labour and the
NDP head back to the future.
Family: soldier’s
death “useless”
For
once, the corporate media felt compelled to feature an opinion critical
of the Canadian military intervention in Afghanistan. It is a view shared by
over 60 per cent of the population, but it took the expressed grief of
a slain soldier’s family to get it reported.
Jonathan
Couturier, a 23-year-old private in the Canadian Forces, in
mid-September became the 131st fatality of the Canadian
intervention. As his body was being flown back to his home in Montreal (in Quebec, where opposition to the
war is over 80 per cent), his brother and sister-in-law lambasted the
mission.
“That
war over there, he found it a bit useless – that they were wasting
their time over there,” Nicolas Couturier told the Quebec City-based
daily Le Soleil. His wife agreed: “(Jonathan)
didn’t want to know anything about going there,” said Valerie Boucher.
“He didn’t want to talk about it, he stayed positive, but at some
moments he said he was fed up.”
Military
booster, retired Maj.-Gen. Lewis Mackenzie downplayed the family’s
reaction; he insultingly portrayed it as marginal. But Bloc Quebecois defence critic Claude Bachand
endorsed the comments of the soldier’s family. The fact that such
poignant criticism of the intervention is prominently reported, even
though impugned by militarists, reflects the wavering resolve of
Canada’s ruling business and media elite for the failed imperialist
occupation of Afghanistan.
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