PEOPLE'S VOICE - Issue of October 1-15, 2022

 

The following articles are from the October 1-15, 2022 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading socialist newspaper.

1. Liberals’ cynical inflation relief plan completely inadequate
2. Tyson Strandlund enters Victoria school trustee race, pushes for funding and equity
3. Tenant union running municipal slate in Kingston
4. The critical struggle against imperialism, for peace and international solidarity
5. Health coalitions across country denounce for-profit blood supply deal
6. Abortion access and reproductive autonomy are essential to working class liberation
7. Black Alliance for Peace calls for month of action against AFRICOM
8. Venezuela: Communist Party presses for wage indexation, healthcare improvements
9. Pages from our past…Kanesatake siege: A reckless action
10. Tackle Poilievre head-on!

 

 

 

 

Liberals’ cynical inflation relief plan completely inadequate

Dave McKee

“Beer and popcorn money.”

That’s how the Liberals described the childcare plan introduced by Stephen Harper’s newly elected Conservatives in 2006. Right after their swearing in, the Tories scrapped the $5 billion in early learning and childcare agreements that the Paul Martin Liberals had announced just prior to the election, and which were seen as the first concrete steps toward building a Canada-wide public childcare program. In their place, Harper introduced a taxable monthly allowance of $100 for children under six years of age.

The Liberals were rightfully (if opportunistically) indignant and, more importantly, childcare advocates and workers across the country quickly mobilized a broadly-based coalition (Code Blue for Child Care) that engaged more than 100,000 people in just two months.

Of course, $100 a month is better than nothing for families needing childcare but depending on the age of the child and the type of care this allowance generally only covered around 10 percent of costs. The plan was completely inadequate to address the need and reflected the Harper’s cynical style of politics.

Fast forward 16 years and it’s difficult to not see the recently announced inflation relief measures in a very similar light.

The Trudeau Liberals are promising to double the GST credit for six months, which roughly amounts to an extra $230 for eligible individuals and $460 for eligible families. Based on StatsCan figures for the median annual income for GST credit recipients, this part of the Liberals’ plan will increase income by about one percent. At best, that’s one-tenth the amount that food prices are increasing, and it’s only available for six months.

The plan also promises a one-time payment of $500 to low-income renters to help with housing costs. Data from August shows that rental costs have increased by an average of 11.1 percent, or $196 per month. So, the government’s largesse will help for a grand total of 2.5 months. Furthermore, this benefit is only paid to people who rent their housing, so people struggling to pay for homes they own – seniors on fixed incomes, for example – get nothing.

The third promise from Trudeau and Co. is for a dental benefit of $650 per year for children under 12 who have no other coverage. Dental service fees vary from province to province, but in general $650 will cover three fillings or extractions. This benefit is only promised for two years, after which time it is completely unclear what will happen. The government and the NDP suggest that it will be expanded to include more sectors of the population, but that is far from certain. After all, the NDP-Liberal confidence-and-supply agreement only continues until mid-2025 at the outside, so this program can just as easily be taken away as expanded.

Furthermore, by virtue of being only available to people with no private coverage, this dental plan represents a two-tier system in which private for-profit providers establish the parameters with the public paying them to provide minimal care to the most desperate. Rather than provide a basis for expanding public dental care, the Liberal plan is far more likely to be the conduit for expanding privatization and multiple-payer schemes in other areas of healthcare. Presented as a progressive breakthrough, this plan undermines the key principle of universality – which is precisely why it is acceptable to the private sector, insurance corporations and the Poilievre Conservatives.

Without a doubt, all of these measures will be welcome news for the many people who desperately need them. As with Harper’s childcare credit, something is better than nothing, but why are we asked to celebrate such minimums? At a time when the economic crisis is so deep and so broadly felt, when the need for progressive change is so great, is “better than nothing” really the benchmark we want to use?

The fact is these measures are inadequate. They provide minimal relief to a very modest number of people. They do nothing to address the root causes of inflation – there is not even discussion of price controls, action against price gouging and price fixing, or increased taxation on corporations who are raking in profits at a rate far higher than inflation. They do nothing to provide social housing with rent geared to income, or to roll back rents and control them. They avoid the issue of a livable minimum wage or a guaranteed livable annual income.

Moreover, they are all designed to be temporary. As with CERB and other pandemic income supports, there is no effort to introduce permanent changes to EI that will benefit all working people – increased payments for the duration of unemployment, coverage for all workers, elimination of workers’ contributions and restoration of government contributions. 

At the end of the day, this is a business-friendly plan that the Tories themselves would introduce. In fact, it greases the rails for Poilievre to push for even broader privatization, even deeper tax reductions and even less universality.

Key programs like Medicare and employment insurance were won through years of dedicated struggle by the working class and its allies in government. The first motion for public healthcare was introduced in the Manitoba legislature in 1936 by Communist Party MLA James Litterick. It was voted down but elected communists in Ontario and in Ottawa kept pushing it while working people mobilized on the ground. This long continuing fight paved the way for the big breakthrough by the CCF/NDP in Saskatchewan in the 1960s. It’s the kind of struggle we’re facing now.

Working people in Canada need real action against inflation. To get it, they need the labour movement to lead a real fight for housing, jobs and incomes, price controls and expanded universal social programs. If the government can pony up $19 billion to purchase 88 new fighter jets and another $77 billion to maintain them, it can pay for people’s needs.

What is takes is for working people to set the bar much higher than beer and popcorn.

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Tyson Strandlund enters Victoria school trustee race, pushes for funding and equity

PV Vancouver Bureau

One of the most critical school board races in the October 15 municipal elections across British Columbia is in Victoria (District 61), where a record 33 candidates are vying for nine at-large positions. First-time trustee candidate Tyson Strandlund is making a strong push for election, with the backing of a wide range of progressive and labour activists who also support the outgoing board's progressive incumbents.

But a far-right transphobic slate is also attempting to take control. Six so-called "Viva Victoria" candidates linked to the reactionary People's Party of Canada are targeting District 61's Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) policy, but their campaign also aims to reverse the current board's record of fighting for improved public education.

Born and raised in Victoria, Strandlund is a member of the Métis Nation of BC. His campaign is focused on "ensuring a safe and effective learning environment, while keeping public education completely provincially funded, without added fees, and universally accessible to ensure equity for all students."

Public education is a vital foundation of any democratic society, Strandlund says, advocating for students, parents, and unions to participate in decision-making processes.

A longtime supporter of Indigenous solidarity movements, Strandlund is committed to protecting and supporting Indigenous education. He recently completed his MA through the University of Victoria’s history department, writing his thesis on the history of decolonization and national liberation struggles in the 20th century. His education also reflects his Ukrainian family heritage, having spent a semester abroad studying in Kyiv prior to the war at the Kyiv-Moyla Academy.

For several years, Strandlund has been active in a range of progressive causes in Victoria, including the labour, peace and student movements. During his studies at UVic, Tyson worked as a teaching assistant. Presently, he works as a regional director for a non-profit organization focused on educating the public around social, historical and political issues.

For more information: visit tysonstrandlund.com, phone 250-883-7321, or email Ty-sonStrandlundSD61@gmail.com

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Tenant union running municipal slate in Kingston

In response to deteriorating living conditions and a rising cost of living, the Katarowki Union of Tenants in Kingston, Ontario is running a slate of candidates for mayor and council. People’s Voice spoke with mayoral candidate Ivan Stoiljkovic about the campaign.

PV: In your People’s Platform you say you are going to end homelessness. Do you really think this is possible to do without help from provincial and federal governments?

IS: Politicians like to deflect blame and their go-to answer is always to point to another level of government.  Between the phrases “we can’t” and “it’s not us, it’s them,” you pretty much have the art of traditional, mainstream politics covered.  

In municipal politics, the majority of candidates act as if decisions about parking signs and potholes in the roads are the biggest issues.

Why run for public office if “we can’t” is the motto? Of course, we can end homelessness. It’s all government policy. Political decisions have been made at the municipal level to benefit real estate developers and other capitalists in the housing game. If development applications were denied or if developers were made to provide RGI housing as part of their for-profit project, they wouldn’t be as wealthy and there wouldn’t be as many homeless people on the street. 

But where are you going to get the money?  

The problem is not that there is no money. The problem is that almost all of it is being handed over to large landlords and developers for their for-profit developments under this guiding principle of supply and demand, trickle-down economic theory.  

Mainstream opinion is that we need to get more housing built and then prices will drop.

Vacancy rates and increasing market supply is a landlords’ and developers’ talking point.

We now see that when supply increases, so too does rent. Landlords and homeowners are hoarding housing and speculate that they will see returns on their investment, driving rents higher and higher all the time.

I don’t actually see homeowners as “the enemy.” They are looking out for their future in a situation in which the social welfare state is failing us and our public pension funds have been depleted. For a lot of people, owning a second home is their retirement. The system is pitting people against each other and forcing people into landlordism which in reality functions as social murder. One person’s child’s college fund or retirement plan is another person’s homelessness, suffering and premature death. That’s why we need universal and public services for all.

You are running on a slate with other people. Why should people vote for you as mayor and for the others to be city council?  

I am not friends with Kingston’s large landowners and developers. I’m a tenant and all my friends are tenants. I’ve been poor and working class my whole life and I’ve always been outspoken about injustices perpetuated by our economic elites and their representatives at all three levels of government. My friends and I at Katarokwi Union of Tenants are the reason why some of the housing money is actually being spent on actually helping people and managing homelessness. We are some of the people who have done most to prevent people who are on the streets from freezing to death and helping people who are living with bedbugs and who are living in fear of being evicted and who are being evicted and constantly moving. These are my friends whose kids are going hungry.  

The current council is out of touch with the reality of working-class peoples’ lives. All their friends are very well-off businesspeople, landlords and developers. They drink at the yacht club and at the country club. Their concerns are not the concerns of ordinary people.

My friends and I are all tenant and housing rights activists. We feed homeless people through our food program and supply them with things like tents and batteries and firewood that they need to survive out in the cold, we help other tenants deal with their landlords, we fight evictions, we work with community legal clinics.  We write, research and expose the wrongdoings of the City and the landlords and we develop alternative policies that are in the interest of tenants. 

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The critical struggle against imperialism, for peace and international solidarity

Adrien Welsh

The world around us is characterized by an ongoing disconnect between the danger of growing war – and possibly nuclear war – and the lack of a coordinated response to that danger. This makes calls for Canada's withdrawal from NATO, for nuclear disarmament and for international solidarity all the more important.

On September 23, tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Montreal for climate justice. This occurred in a global context in which the US military (to which Canada is linked through NATO) is polluting more than 140 countries, in which the federal budget’s largest CO2 emitting item is defense, in which the government is purchasing 88 F-35 fighter jets which each burn 4.4 tonnes of fuel per hour of flight. But despite this context, only the Mouvementquébécois pour la paix(MQP) and the Ligue de la jeunesse communiste dared to make the connection between the military-industrial complex and environmental destruction.

Why such silence? Because among democratic and popular movements, the struggle for peace necessarily implies an internationalist effort which attacks the power of the monopolies head on – against free trade agreements, against the domination of global capitalism which brings war the same way clouds bring rain. It is a struggle that, more than any other, reveals the barbarity of capitalism.

To make us accept imperialism and war, the ruling class rewrites history to make us believe that NATO is a defensive alliance. They make us believe that Western imperialist countries have a responsibility to protect. But protect what? Ask the people of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and elsewhere. They will answer, "it is to protect the narrow interests of their monopolies!"

NATO does not care about the peoples of the world. It does not care about national sovereignty. The proof of this? It has always been the global army of US imperialism, as evidenced by the fact that the Supreme Allied Commander of the Alliance is, by NATO’s own rules, always an American military officer.

This rewriting of history facilitates the demonization of governments that try to escape from the yoke of the US military. From Havana to Pyongyang, through Tehran, Laayoune and Ramallah, peoples who assert their inalienable right to self-determination are confronted with increasingly militarized international relations.

The UN, imperfect as it is, represents a balance of power won through struggle at the end of World War II. Its Charter is the basis of international law. Today, this balance of power – which is based on the victory of the USSR and the peoples of the world over Nazi-fascism – frustrates the imperialists and monopolies seeking to impose their domination.

This is the context for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As deplorable as it is, the repeated provocations of Russia by NATO and its allies are the root cause.

Today, we must put everything in perspective and remember who the main enemy is.

Today, we must demand Canada's immediate withdrawal from the criminal and murderous NATO cartel.

Today, we must press the labour, democratic and popular movements to take up their historical fight for peace, against imperialism and against NATO.

For today, it is unacceptable that hundreds of thousands of people mobilize without challenging the bosses whose political representatives play with the dangers of globalized and possibly nuclear war.

From a speech by Adrien Welsh, leader of the Parti communiste du Québec, to September 24 peace rally

Translated from French by PV staff

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Health coalitions across country denounce for-profit blood supply deal

PV staff

Canadian Blood Services (CBS) has signed a 15-year deal with global health corporation Grifols, allowing the company to collect blood plasma for profit.

In response, the Canadian Health Coalition and 8 provincial health coalitions have issued a joint statement denouncing the deal and calling for the resignation of the CBS Board of Directors and CEO.

Under the agreement, Grifols will pay donors for plasma. This is in violation of legislation in BC and Ontario which bans private payment for plasma. Healthcare experts and advocates have strongly opposed such payments, which are also against the advice of the World Health Organization and other international health bodies. The Royal Commission of Inquiry on the Blood System in Canada (Krever Commission), which was created after the 1980s tainted blood scandal and led to the creation of CBS, identified five governing principles of the blood system including that blood should be a public resource and that no one should be paid to donate blood or plasma. The CBS deal with Grifols violates those principles and the trust which the public placed in the agency when it was created.

The health coalitions note that voluntary blood and plasma donations have been negatively affected in provinces which allow private payment. They also note that Grifols has a record of taking busloads of people from Mexico into the US to harvest plasma and then return them to Mexico the same day. 

Grifols is based in Spain and operates in more than 30 countries around the world. In the first half of 2022, the corporation made profits of EUR 618 million (about $892 million). The company’s financial statements state that this profit was primarily driven by plasma collection, which increased by 22 percent in the period and which Grifols expects to “further accelerate” in the second half of 2022. In the face of such blood profiteering, Grifols’ claim that its operation in Canada “reflects the company’s global strategy enabling countries to reach self-sufficiency in plasma”is exposed as utterly false.

The health coalitions charge that the deal “endangers the sustainability of Canada’s blood supply by opening up a precious and medically crucial public asset to profit-making. Instead of blood being a universal and free public resource, this deal opens up the doors to private, for-profit corporations moving into the blood collection system.”

The coalitions also point out that there are proven public and non-profit avenues for increasing and protecting the voluntary blood and plasma supply. These include building more publicly operated collection sites.

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Abortion access and reproductive autonomy are essential to working class liberation

Elliott Elliott

On June 24 the US Supreme Court released their anticipated decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to abortion. In a speech that afternoon, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the decision “horrific” and later tweeted that “no government, politician, or man should tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her body.” The irony is that, while the Canadian public healthcare system may seem enviable to those looking in from the US, abortion in Canada is not meaningfully accessible to many people.

While there have been no criminal restrictions on abortions in Canada since 1988 (when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that a 1969 decision limiting legal abortion to those deemed “medically necessary” violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms), in practice, no providers in the public system will perform them after 24 weeks and, in some provinces, the cutoff is even earlier (14 weeks in Newfoundland and Labrador, for example). Such barriers are compounded by the fact that almost all abortion providers in the country are in urban areas and some provinces have no providers at all. Access in some parts of rural Canada abortion resembles that of conservative states which have seen intense anti-abortion activism.

Recent legislation in Texas, for example, mandates that doctors must have hospital admitting privileges to perform abortions, which drastically limits the number of clinics offering the procedure. While still technically legal in these areas, onerous requirements and restrictions make abortion inaccessible for most working-class people. How meaningful is a right if you don’t have the practical ability to exercise it?

The systemic restriction and manipulation of reproduction has historically been and continues to be an instrument of social and psychological control wielded against women. At the same time, it is a tool of class maintenance. The wealthy will always have access to the safest abortions available, regardless of the legality. Legislation restricting access only meaningfully restricts the working class the poor, who cannot afford to skirt the law or traverse the myriad obstacles to access their right. This is to say nothing of the countless other ways reproduction is controlled by the state, particularly for working-class and racialized women – these include “birth alerts” and forced sterilization of Indigenous women, which still happen regularly today.

Discrimination on the basis of sex, gender or pregnancy is technically illegal in the US and Canada, but absent is reproductive autonomy (the ability to fully control one’s own reproductive health). Without this, women’s position in the workplace (and society) remains precarious. Paid maternal and parental leave is not federally mandated at all in the US and in Canada it is based on Employment Insurance, which provides only 55 percent of previous earnings and only to workers who qualify for EI. This means lost wages, particularly for women since they take the vast majority of parental leave, and a gender-based income gap that persists into retirement. From a broader class point of view, institutionalizing tiered categories of workers like this applies downward pressure on wages and incomes for all working people.

Over the past five decades in the US, Republican interests and conservative think tanks have strategically focused on the judiciary, acting to fill the federal courts with as many of their people as possible. This has resulted in the new conservative majority on SCOTUS, with three justices appointed by the Trump administration, but the damage is far deeper with conservative judges packing every circuit in the federal judiciary. In recent years, laws introduced to restrict abortion in conservative states have served to not only deter women from seeking abortions, but also to test the law with the newly packed courts. Ultimately, overturning Roe was the result of a highly organized, decades-long effort by the right with the cooperation of the Democrats, who refused to ever codify the right to abortion. 

While “the right to choose” is fought over on the battlefields of the culture war, it would be a mistake to attribute the dogged pursuit of ending abortion rights solely to right-wing fundamentalist Christian zealots and their ilk. They are certainly on the frontlines, but behind them are the capitalist interests which fund their battles and who stand to benefit the most from prohibition of abortion. It is worth remembering that in both the US and Canada, abortion was only formally banned in the mid to late 19th century. Before then, it was nowhere near as controversial or polarizing a practice as it is today and had been part of reproductive care for thousands of years.

The added benefit of making basic reproductive autonomy an incredibly divisive cultural issue is, of course, that the “right” and “left” of the working class spend their political energy duking it out against each other, obfuscating the true class antagonism that fuels the fires. This has a deleterious effect not only on the development of working-class solidarity and class consciousness, but on any form of effective organizing to advocate for civil and democratic rights.

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Black Alliance for Peace calls formonth of action against AFRICOM

PV staff

To mark the 14th anniversary of the launch of the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) on October 1, 2007, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) is calling for a month of global action by peace and progressive organizations throughout October.

This is the third year that BAP has launched the Month of Action Against AFRICOM, through which the organization works to raise public awareness about how the US military presence exacerbates violence and instability throughout the continent. BAP will publish weekly calls to action on its website (blackallianceforpeace.com), with events ranging from a kick-off webinar to mass actions like banner drops and teach-ins. The site provides resource materials for these and other actions.

AFRICOM’s founding was the direct result of NATO and its expansion following the overthrow of socialism in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Prior to 2007, the United States European Command (EUCOM) assumed responsibility for 42 countries in Africa, but in response to NATO’s enlargement EUCOM and NATO proposed that the US launch AFRICOM.

BAP notes that the African Command exists “to use US military power to impose US control on African land, resources and labour to service the needs of US multinational corporations and the wealthy in the United States. It also serves as a major boon to ‘defense’ contractors.”

Since AFRICOM’s founding, coups carried out by US-trained and supported forces have been increasing in Africa.

AFRICOM’s role cannot be separated from that of NATO, which is the largest military organization in the world and fully in the service of US-led imperialism. BAP describes NATO as “a huge global axle in the wheel of the military industrial complex, which includes more than 800 US military bases around the world as well as joint bases or relationships with almost all African countries. These are all controlled by the U.S. empire for realizing the U.S. policy of Full Spectrum Dominance, which is driven by the ferocious appetite of international finance capital. NATO continues today in the form of AFRICOM facilitating wars, instability and the corporate pillage of Africa.”

The latest pretext for increasing US military intervention in Africa is countering Russian influence on the continent. In April, the US Congress passed bill H.R. 7311 which calls for scrutiny of Russia’s influence in Africa and threatens to “hold accountable” African governments who are “complicit in aiding such malign influence.” Margaret Kimberley calls the bill, which is clearly designed to dictate the kinds of international relations African states are permitted to have, “a racist affront to the right to self-determination of African people.”

The Black Alliance for Peace calls for the complete withdrawal of US forces from Africa, the demilitarization of the African continent, the closure of US bases throughout the world and hearings into AFRICOM’s impact on the African continent.

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Venezuela: Communist Party presses for wage indexation, healthcare improvements

PV staff

In response to deteriorating living conditions in the country, the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) is pressing the National Assembly to immediately pass legislation that would index salaries and pensions to the cost of living as determined by the basic basket of goods and services.

PCV President Perfecto Abreu Nieves explained that this is the best answer to "the high levels of inflation; to face the permanent devaluation of the Bolivar [Venezuela’s currency] and the precarization of the living conditions of the people."

The Party is calling for united action by workers in Venezuela, to win the legislation.

Abreu Nieves also reiterated the PCV’s solidarity with the struggle against salary caps that were imposed on public sector workers by the National Budget Office (ONAPRE) in March. While the National Assembly had approved a substantial increase in salaries and pensions, the implementation by ONAPRE (called “instructions”) resulted in reductions which resulted from decreased bonus payments which form part of salaries. The reductions were implemented quietly and without explanation.

Unions responded quickly by denouncing the ONAPRE’s actions as a violation of labour and democratic rights. On September 15, labour organizations mobilized at the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) to demand the repeal of the ONAPRE instructions.

"The TSJ has to establish the responsibilities of those who applied this instruction; the concrete fact is that thousands of workers of the Public Administration were aggrieved, and their contractual rights were violated," said Abreu Nieves.

The PCV also expressed its concern for "the serious situation faced by the health system." Abreu Nieves stated that healthcare facilities “are in precarious conditions; there are no auxiliary personnel in charge of cleaning; there is no water and no supplies."

The Party is calling on the labour and people’s movements to urgently mobilize for the rescue of the health system and demanded that the government take measures to provide effective medical attention to the Venezuelan people.

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Pages from our past…

Kanesatake siege: A reckless action

Canadian Tribune vol 68 no 2702 ~ July 23, 1990

The unprovoked assault by heavily armed Quebec police on Mohawk ancestral land at Kanesatake on July 11 has brought Canadian-aboriginal relations to a crossroads. There are now two paths that can be followed; one that will lead to violence and tragedy, and one that can begin the long overdue process of peaceful negotiations that can lead, finally, to justice and self-determination for first nations.

But we must be clear on where the responsibility lies. It is the federal and Quebec governments, the Quebec police and the town council of Oka who have chosen the path of confrontation. It is they, ultimately, who have created a situation where unprecedented tragedy is so near.

By sitting on the sidelines and abdicating its historic responsibility to the first nations, the federal government is an accessory to the crime and, ultimately, is just as responsible as the paramilitary police for any further loss of life.

The burning of effigies at Chateauguay, the racist chants and the physical assaults on anyone who “looked Native” showed how dangerously easy it is to fan the flames of racism in Canada.

All along the Mohawk people, and the first nations across the country, have stressed that they wanted a non-violent solution to the crisis. Despite being a people under siege – outgunned and outnumbered and with attempts to cut off their vital supplies – they have acted in the spirit of restraint and the willingness to compromise.

If there is a tragic and violent outcome to this dispute it is clear that the fault will not lie with the first nations.

Whatever the outcome, and as we go to press the situation is very volatile, the wounds will take long to heal. The incident at Oka is the consequence of an attitude in which the rights of first nations are held in contempt.

It is a denial of the rights of first nations to self-determination and until that denial is ended history is doomed to repeat itself – not as farce but as tragedy.

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Tackle Poilievre head-on!

Editorial

Brian Mulroney had some words of fatherly advice for Pierre Poilievre over a three-hour lunch at Stornoway: “You have got to go fish where the fish are.” The idea being that, having built a far-right populist base and used it to win the Conservative Party leadership, Poilievre should shift his rhetoric to a more electable centre-right variety.

We might be quick to dismiss this as doomed counsel, since the opposition leader seems to have securely welded himself to a host of fringy ideas like using bitcoin to avoid inflation and pretty much anything to do with the “Freedom Convoy.” But we would do so at our peril.

After all, Donald Trump’s “MAGA” movement may be financed by capital, but its foot soldiers are working-class people who have been won over by his direct appeal to the difficulties they have endured for years. Working people in Ontario have seen firsthand what can happen when right populists set their sights on labour, with Doug Ford winning union endorsements and photo ops with labour leaders at the same time that he attacks labour gains and rights.

Mulroney and his distressingly large fan base among the mainstream media may croon that Poilievre will jettison the most right-wing elements of his platform and support base as he respectably moves to the political centre, but the real outcome is likely to be the exact opposite. Rather than tempering far-right discourse and movements, his leadership is a conduit for them to further penetrate the mainstream. It won’t be Poilievre who shifts, it will be the political goalposts which are drawn further right.

So, how do we confront this?

The problems that right populists speak to are, more often than not, real difficulties that working people struggle with every day – high living costs, low spending power, job insecurity, affordable housing. These are problems that arise from capitalism, so capitalist politicians can hardly claim to have the solution. But if workers aren’t getting a clear anti-capitalist analysis from the labour movement, then they are left wide open to the dangerous distortions of the right.

The sharpening contradictions of capitalism and the deepening crisis have placed labour in a very difficult position. But it is critical that the response to these conditions be rooted in a critique of capitalism and an orientation toward escalating class struggle. To do otherwise – to not tackle Poilievre and what he represents head-on – is to politically abandon the working class.

Mulroney may think of working people as a bunch of fish, but we don’t need to take that bait.

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