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April 14, 2014 - No. 42 Small Parties Oppose Bill C-23, Bill C-23 Must Not Pass Small
Parties
Oppose
Bill
C-23, the Anti-Democratic "Fair Elections Act" Self-Serving
Eulogies
and
Undeserved
Praise Small Parties Oppose Bill C-23, the Anti-Democratic "Fair Elections Act" Bill C-23 Must Not PassOttawa - April 11, 2014 -- Registered political parties currently without representation in the House of Commons met in Ottawa to consider Bill C-23, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to certain Acts. The parties listed below agreed to issue the following statement. These parties are also concerned about many provisions in Bill C-23 aside from those outlined in the statement and they encourage the media to contact them individually. The Conservative Party of Canada, overseen by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, is hoping to steal the next federal election. Bill C-23, the so-called Fair Elections Act, is their game plan. We are working together to stop the Conservatives, and to protect every Canadian's right to vote in a fair and honest election that is free of voter suppression schemes, of election fraud, of the denial of fundamental rights, and all watched over by an independent and effective Elections Canada. The Conservatives and Stephen Harper are terrified because they can't win a fair election; they hope they can win a rigged one. Opposition to Stephen Harper's Bill C-23 is almost universal, condemned by national and international election officials and experts on democracy and elections. It is supported only by Conservative politicians who hope to benefit from its worst provisions. Bill C-23 helps people commit election fraud and get away with it; encourages mayhem, confusion, and long delays on election day; and deprives hundreds of thousand of Canadians of their right to vote. Bill C-23 goes even further. It prevents Elections Canada from warning Canadians who are targeted by fraud and voter suppression schemes. It even bars Elections Canada from encouraging citizens to vote, especially youth, new Canadians and First Nations people. From now until the next election and beyond, if necessary, we will be working together to protect Canadians from Stephen Harper's and the Conservatives' cowardly, self-serving attack on their fundamental right to vote. We will fight for our fellow Canadians and their hard won rights wherever we can -- in the courts, in the streets, in elections, on social media, in class rooms -- wherever Canadians who believe in democratic rights and honest government gather. We reach out to all Canadians to help us stop Stephen Harper and the Conservatives stealing their elections and stealing their rights. For further information contact: • Animal Alliance
Environment Voters Party of Canada, 416-462-9541, www.
environmentvoters.org Self-Serving Eulogies and Undeserved Praise The State Funeral for Former Finance Minister and
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"'That's [advertising and
partisan hardline] very uncommon this
far
in advance,' said Mr. Beardsley. "There's no real reason for the party
to be doing saturation advertising, not this far in advance. That's one
thing that has people paying attention. The bill's [
 Airline workers oppose back-to-work legislation, outside Labour Minister Lisa Raitt's office, October 13, 2011. |
The 2011 airline workers' strike exemplifies Flaherty's agit-prop role and how he used his position as a Minister of the Crown to intervene against working people. Even though the damage to the economy from the strike was directly the fault of Air Canada and labour relations is not a ministerial responsibility, Flaherty joined Labour Minister Lisa Raitt in supporting the preparations for back-to-work legislation to criminalize the workers instead of defending Canadian workers. Can this be called a human quality? Through unjust and disruptive parliamentary and bureaucratic measures to negate the rights of airline as well as postal workers, the state machine led by the Harperites stood exposed as a tool of the owners of big capital against the working class.
Air Canada, for instance, sought to use its dominant position to renege on its pension obligations and impose a two-tier workplace, even though these obligations were a condition for the court's acceptance of the plan of arrangement provided by Air Canada for it not to seek bankruptcy protection (which it also used to make a big score on the workers' backs).
The fact that the government of Canada and Flaherty personally, participated in brokering that plan of arrangement means that they neglected their duty to defend the workers as well as being in blatant conflict of interest. The workers have a good case to hold him and the government to account.
Flaherty publicly acknowledged his direct responsibility. "I've been very mindful of the Air Canada situation. I was involved in it back in 2009 when we worked out an agreement with the unions and management about the pension situation to buy some time -- several years -- with respect to the pension issue there. But this is of economic consequence. I'm pleased that the Minister of Labour is going to act."
A Nation Wrecker
Monopolies such as Air Canada, Canada Post, U.S. Steel and the auto, forest and agricultural monopolies all cite their alleged concern for the economy -- which they called "making Canada competitive" -- to justify using their dominant position to extort concessions from the workers. Their political representatives and the media feign that the government does not intervene to stop these attempts at extortion. Instead of holding the companies to account, Flaherty and the Harper government joined them in citing concern for the economy and intervened to criminalize or isolate the workers and let the companies off scot-free.
Flaherty and his cabinet declared in 2011, in the words of Tony Clement, that "now U.S. Steel can do whatever they want." U.S. Steel took over Stelco Inc. and put 1,500 workers out of work at its Hamilton and Lake Erie plants in 2009 for refusing to kowtow to the concessions it demanded. It closed the production of steel at the Hamilton Stelco works, allegedly for good in 2013, in violation of all its contractual commitments under the Foreign Investment Review Act. Local 1005 of the United Steelworkers Union in particular courageously drew a line in the sand on the pension issue, concessions, the wrecking of manufacturing and the elimination of steel production as a national asset of the Canadian economy. Instead of responding to the union's measured proposals which have won the support of the Hamilton civic government, the Harper, McGuinty and Wynne governments cowardly facilitated the destruction of Stelco. Today Canadian steel-making is wrecked. The cratering of manufacturing, especially in Ontario and Quebec, lessens the amount of wealth workers produce and the amount available for social programs, and pushed the annexation of Canada into the U.S. empire.
According to Local 1005's newsletter, Information Update, "Since invading Canada in 2007 to seize control of the Stelco steel complex, U.S. Steel has pushed its politics of doom. It has preached the futility of steel production in Hamilton U.S. Steel sees the destruction of steel production in Canada as a means to weaken competition for steel production at its plants in the United States, which for many years have had low levels of capacity utilization." Yet Flaherty capitulated to and lay down with U.S. Steal, rather than standing with steelworkers and Canada's producers.
Disinformation on the Nature of Flaherty's Budgets
The Harper-Flaherty mania
to reduce corporate taxes and
then make the resultant deficits and debt an issue has been a preferred
political and ideological weapon. Harper and Flaherty repeatedly
declared in a dismissive tone to Canadians: These demands for pensions
for all,
a national child care system and
public medicare and pharmacare and other means to ensure people's
well-being are simply not affordable.
The ex-Finance Minister is applauded for "rescuing" Canada from the 2008 recession, though there was no shortage of public resources to alleviate the brutality of its consequences, with a budget described as "non-ideological" because it budgeted for a deficit. The disinformation includes stories as to how he "stood up" to Harper or went against his "conservatism" as well as the demands of extremist centres such as the Fraser Institute and Frontier Centre which called for deep wage cuts, etc., to eliminate the deficit.
By seeming to follow his own prescription and heart, not those of the extremists, Flaherty could pretend his budgets were "moderate," "mainstream," "non-partisan" and "non-ideological" -- not right-wing extremist, conservative or ideological instruments of big capital.
However, resources were mobilized by the state for private, not public ends. And that is declared not ideological!
One of the most common features promoted by Flaherty, for example, was neo-liberal privatization. In 2009, a new agency was created, PPP Canada, that required municipalities to "partner" with private corporations to finance and or deliver public infrastructure and services for a profit. The initial budget was one billion dollars.
Budgets for Annexation and War
Flaherty put budget
after budget in the service of
the United States of North American Monopolies in its drive for global
domination, especially through Obama's Asia-Pivot strategy. This is
characterized by the 
militarization of the
economy, creation of the
North American Security Perimeter, integration
of the armed forces and their deployment to the farthest reaches of the
U.S. Empire. While overall program spending has been slashed, as noted
above, Flaherty more than doubled the federal military budget in
the past eight years from the annual $11 billion spent by the Paul
Martin Liberals. An estimated $100
billion is earmarked for a multi-year program to build a new fleet of
bluewater naval warships and coast guard vessels to open up the North
West Passage for the oil and gas monopolies. Additional billions of
dollars are being expended on the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic coasts
for so-called "gateway" schemes -- involving
the modernization of port and intermodal transportation
infrastructure -- to speed up the transport of goods, resources and
military personnel and armaments from overseas to the American
heartland and vice-versa.
Dictatorship
On October 4, 2011 Flaherty introduced Bill C-13, An Act to Implement Certain Provisions of the 2011 Budget as Updated on June 6, 2011 and Other Measures. The name of the bill gave the impression that it dealt strictly with the funding of individual government programs. However, this was not the case. It included substantial changes to the Canada Pension Plan including schemes to establish individual savings plans in place of public pensions, changes to international trade regulations, the Canada Human Rights Act and the Canada Elections Act. Although not referred to as such, it was in effect an omnibus bill (644-pages long and divided into 22 parts) and contained broad changes to the Canadian state.
Introducing the bill, Flaherty stated: "Our Government is focused on what matters to Canadians -- creating jobs and promoting economic growth. While Canada has the strongest job growth record in the G-7 with nearly 600,000 net new jobs created since July 2009 and the IMF projects that we will have among the strongest economic growth in the G-7 over the next two years, we are not immune from global economic turbulence. That's why we need to stay the course and implement the Next Phase of Canada's Economic Action Plan." In an attempt to prevent any substantial discussion on the direction in which the bill takes Canada, on October 6, 2011 the government moved to limit debate on the bill to three sitting days even though it controlled a majority in the Parliament.
Necessity to Build a Workers' Opposition
The challenge people face is to unite to stop and turn around this anti-social direction of the Harper government that puts the demands and narrow private interests of the global monopolies ahead of Canadians and the public interest.
The refusal of the global monopolies and their political representatives such as the former Finance Minister to recognize public right and the rights of the actual producers, the working class, created disequilibrium in the country. Disequilibrium is reflected in the inability and unwillingness of the global monopolies and political class to solve the economic crisis in favour of the people. Even worse, the global monopolies and political class are using the crisis as an excuse to extort concessions, consolidate their economic and political power and block the working class from assuming positions of authority to put into practice its own pro-social program and agenda to resolve problems and the crisis in a manner that serves the interests of the people and society.
The Canadian economy is
affected by both conscious and
spontaneous factors. Government intervention in the economy through
budgets and policies such as free trade can directly affect the
spontaneous factors. The conscious and spontaneous factors set the
direction of the economy for good or bad. To defend
its rights and the rights of all and set a new direction for the
economy that favours the people and nation-building, the working class
movement has to intervene in the economy with its own program to
influence the conscious and spontaneous factors.
These actions include examining the content of government intervention, such as federal, provincial and municipal budgets, and determining how the government's conscious policies will affect the spontaneous factors and the general direction of the economy. From this analysis the working class movement can both hold the government to account for its actions and develop its grasp of its own independent agenda to intervene in the economy to defend its rights and the rights of all.
The sheer volume of the media's inhuman and ahistorical eulogy of a finance minister which will reach a crescendo around the state funeral on April 16 itself highlights the absence of a powerful and effective Workers' Opposition that can mobilize the people for a change in the direction of the economy. The issue before Canadians is to do all they can to organize and build a Workers' Opposition.
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Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca