In a cynical move, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has sent Canada into a pandemic election. The Liberals say that this is to give them a mandate for the post-pandemic recovery. But the reality is that the only reason they have dissolved their minority government is to gain a majority. They don’t want this majority in order to carry out their election program—precisely the opposite. They want a majority so they can abandon their campaign commitments and be free to implement potentially unpopular austerity and make the workers pay for the crisis.
After six years in power the Liberals are presiding over a growing list of broken promises. They have failed to bring in promised pharmacare, they have failed to end the on-reserve boil water crisis or end injustice against Indigenous peoples, they failed to enhance the Canada Pension Plan, they abandoned their commitment to electoral reform, and they bought a multi-billion dollar pipeline while delaying environmental action. If we had the space we could dedicate pages to Liberal electoral campaign lies.
Instead the Liberals have given favours and hand-outs to their corporate buddies. Scandals such as SNC Lavalin and WE, that led to the resignation of the finance minister, show that this is a government of entitlement. They have ruled in favour of the bosses—legislating postal workers and Montreal dockers back to work, while blocking anti-scab legislation. After the massive Black Lives Matter protests Trudeau took a knee without doing anything about RCMP violence. His black-face racism is the true face of this Bay Street government behind the fake façade of “progressiveness”.
During the pandemic the Liberals were forced to open their wallets. Some sectors of the working class were saved from abject disaster due to the $2000 per month Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB). But a far higher figure was gifted to corporations via the misnamed “wage subsidy” program and other handouts valued at over $750 billion. The wage subsidy was gobbled up by profitable firms as they laid off thousands while giving out executive bonuses and shareholder dividends. But this has now led to a structural deficit somewhere in the range of $150 billion per year. The question remains, who will pay for this massive deficit? The Liberals and their big business backers want to put the burden on the working class, but to do that they need a strong majority government. Already CRB has been cut to $1200 as a prelude to its abolition, despite the rise of the fourth wave of the virus. On the other side of the class divide corporate handouts are being continued and enhanced.
The weakness of the Conservative official opposition has provided the Liberals with an opportunity they are hoping to exploit. The charisma-deficit of the new O’Toole leadership of the Tories is indicative of the splits and crises within Canadian conservatism. The base of the Tory party is beholden to a far-right Trumpite ideology, but recent elections and opinion polls have shown that these reactionary ideas are repugnant to the majority of workers in Canada. The naked homophobia and racism of these people has been successfully (and hypocritically) revealed by the Liberals to win a series of elections. Erin O’Toole won the Tory leadership by leaning towards the right-wing base, but has since tried to moderate the Conservative image. But the rank-and-file of the party rewarded his efforts with a vote to not recognize the existence of climate change, undermining O’Toole’s strategy. The disorder within the Tories is a gift that keeps on giving to the Liberals.
The NDP has the potential to play spoiler in Trudeau’s plan, but it remains to be seen if they can channel the anger in society. During the pandemic Canadian billionaires increased their wealth by $78 billion while workers suffered. At the same time corporate Canada increased its total reserve of uninvested “dead money” to $1.66 trillion. Unsurprisingly this has led to a generalized feeling against inequality. Over 70 per cent of Canadians believe that large corporations and the wealthy do not pay their fair share in taxes and 89 per cent would support some form of wealth tax. Even 84 per cent of Conservative voters would support a wealth tax. The issue of making the bosses pay for the crisis in society has the very real potential to upset Liberal plans to implement austerity.
The NDP has launched its election campaign with the call to “make the ultra-rich and large corporations pay their fair share”. This call has been popular and the NDP has been trending up in polls in the last period. But can it cut through Liberal obfuscation and corporate media distortion?
Unfortunately, actions taken by the NDP leadership during the last parliament serve to weaken the impact of their anti-corporate message. The NDP propped up the Liberals on numerous occasions, essentially demonstrating that there is no fundamental difference between the two parties. They also proposed, and are still trying to take credit for, the corporate wage subsidy that has been one of the main conduits of corporate welfare and legalized corruption. They even went so far as to appeal to the Governor General, the unelected representative of a feudal monarchy, to halt the current election. In essence the NDP leadership has been saying that it has more confidence in the Liberals than they have in themselves.
Also, when one looks at the actual “anti-corporate” tax plan the NDP is proposing, their demands are far too moderate. They are calling for a one per cent tax on wealth above $10 million plus a 15 per cent excess profits tax on pandemic profiteers. The exact calculations on how much revenue this will bring in have yet to be released, but it is likely to be between $25 to $50 billion. Even in the unlikely event that corporate sabotage doesn’t lower this figure, this is far too small an amount to resolve a $150 billion deficit. In any case, why should the profiteers keep a single penny of their ill-gotten gains?
However, we should be aware that what we see as socialists is not necessarily what the general population see. It is possible that the NDP will pick up support on the basis of anti-corporate rhetoric and people will not look too closely at the fine print.
But the task in front of us is not to gain 10 or 20 extra seats for the NDP. The task is to stop Liberal and Conservative austerity in its tracks. The only thing that can do that is a mass movement of workers and youth. Asking the rich to “pay a little more” is insufficient to bring about such a mass movement. Indeed, the NDP bureaucracy is wedded to parliamentary cretinism and are allergic to actions that would mobilize people on the ground. They have repeatedly blocked socialists and pro-Palestinian activists from NDP nominations and, while occasionally adopting “left” rhetoric, have done everything in their power to keep total control of the party structures.
Minor tax measures are not enough to create a mass movement. To do this we need ideas that undermine the foundations of capitalist austerity. Two years ago a poll revealed that 58 per cent of Canadians support socialism, a number that is sure to have risen in the post-pandemic world. The recent polls around tax fairness are indicative of the leftward shift amongst the working class, but as they were conducted by the reformist Broadbent Institute they deliberately did not survey opinions about socialism and nationalization. Instead of tax measures that can lead to capital flight, we need to expropriate the underserved wealth of the pandemic profiteers. Instead of minor reforms to a failing system we need a movement that attacks capitalism as the root of the crisis. Instead of corporate bailouts we need to put the economy under the democratic control of the working class.
Such a socialist program could unite a movement to reveal the bankruptcy of the Liberals and their coming austerity. Sooner or later it is inevitable that such a movement will arise, created by the crisis of capitalism itself. But the actions we take today, and the actions of the mass organizations, will determine how long we have to wait and how many cutbacks workers will have to suffer. Fightback stands on the basis of a revolutionary socialist platform for the workers’ organizations as the only way forward. There is no time to waste.
