The other day on a phone call with my dad, I was telling him that I was going to the Edmonton Marxist School of Revolutions. He knows I am a communist but we never talked about it. He then asks me, “why would you want to be a communist? People lose their rights while the one leader at the top has all the power.” Typical red scare stuff. My dad is a Harper conservative, but doesn’t like to talk politics usually. When he does, he often talks about how Harper was the best prime minister because he brought us out of recession with firm fiscal policies. He’s a “lift yourself up by your bootstraps” kind of guy, believing that if you work hard, things will work out for you. He’s a safety officer for a big oil and gas company, always looking out for the safety of the workers. So all it took was a conversation about the Horne smelter in Quebec to get him to understand why I call myself a communist.
The smelter emits 30 times the safe level of arsenic, and rather than spend the 300 million dollars to fix it, Glencore – a multi-billion dollar company – would rather close down the factory and lay off its workforce. I explained to him that Glencore suggested that the provincial and the federal government split the cost and only go down to 8 times the safe level of arsenic! My dad correctly replied to this: “so taxpayers would pay for it.” What won him over is when I explained to him that capitalism has forced these workers to choose between cancer or starvation. I said that workers would benefit immensely more if they occupied and ran the factory themselves than just advocating for reforms. He came to understand from a safety point of view that workers should not have to make a choice between poisoning themselves and their community, or being able to provide for their families. The conscious decision to offload the cost of creating a safer worker environment onto the workers, who are already struggling, should not be made in the pursuit of profit. That the workers themselves could make the best decision themselves: the decision that would positively impact the community, not Glencore’s bottom line. Afterwards my dad agreed that it is a good idea for the workers. His exact words were “yeah that isn’t a good choice for those workers. I don’t know enough about communism, and what you’re telling me doesn’t sound awful and actually makes sense.”
– Jonas D., Abbotsford
