Electoral Coup in the Making

Block the Ruling Elite's Push for Majority Government

May 27, 2014 - On May 23, a protest letter to NDP leader Andrea Horwath signed by 34 people describing themselves as life-long supporters of the NDP was made public. The letter denounced the NDP election platform released a day earlier and the entire election strategy of Horwath and the NDP. The authors suggested that the position of the NDP left working people with no other choice than to vote Liberal or to not vote.

NDP election campaign co-chair Gilles Bisson characterized the protest letter as another Liberal dirty trick and dismissed its authors as "disguised Liberals." However, those signing onto the protest letter included several well known political and media celebrities which gave the media the opportunity to widely publicize the letter. The monopoly media was already spinning a story about the NDP election strategy being fatally flawed and the protest letter became grist for the spin mill.

What should working people make of what has become an obvious effort to push the NDP to the sidelines in the election? In particular, what is to be made of the advice of the protest letter authors that working people allow the NDP vote to collapse by either voting Liberal or becoming completely passive?

Efforts to push the NDP to the sidelines are patently designed to clear the way for a two-party race in which they must think the Liberals have a chance of forming a majority government. This would greatly strengthen the hand of the ruling elite which requires a Liberal or PC majority to impose austerity with impunity. The rich are already using majority governments to ram through austerity and a full panoply of neo-liberal measures in Ottawa, Quebec and several provinces. It is clearly in the interests of working people to block this from happening in Ontario.

In the opposition to the neo-liberal anti-social agenda in recent years, working people and their organizations have gained experience with the self-serving manoeuvring of the dominant political parties to form governments which restructure the state in favour of private interests and impose austerity agendas. Awareness has grown about the futility of relying on these parties to defend workers' interests and of the need for working people to take independent political stands in defence of their own interests. In the current election, defending working class interests means rejecting any attempts to render workers passive or to line workers up behind one or another of the dominant parties. It means looking at every riding and sorting out what practical work can be done to ensure that none of the parties are able to form a majority government.

PREVIOUS ISSUES | HOME

Read Ontario Political Forum
Website:  www.cpcml.ca   Email:  ontario@cpcml.ca