Conservative victory challenges labor

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TORONTO-It was an electoral landslide for the Progressive Conservative Party on Sept. 4—but not an ideological sweep.

Led by former Iron Ore Corp. President Brian Mulroney, the Conservatives captured a record 211 parliamentary seats and 50 percent of the popular vote. The Liberal Party, which has held the reins of federal government for most of the past 20 years, was reduced to 40 seats and 28 percent of the votes.

The labor-based New Democratic Party (NDP) surprised many observers by holding its share of the vote (19 percent) and winning 30 seats.

The desire for change was massive and undeniable. Big-business lawyer John Turner, short-lived successor to Pierre Trudeau as prime minister, couldn't shake the legacy of continuing high unemployment (11 percent) and high interest rates (14 percent). Dogged by a last-minute flurry of Trudeau patronage appointments, Turner, the Liberal Party candidate, opened the election campaign by appealing to conservative business interests. Adverse public response forced him to reverse direction.

Even the Conservatives felt compelled to promise to preserve social programs. High-profile, ultraright-wing Tories who argued otherwise went down to defeat, despite the electoral swing to their party elsewhere. It was that kind of election.

NDP policies coopted

Basically, it was the NDP, the party linked to the trade unions in English Canada, that set the agenda for debate in the election. Its issues became the key issues: jobs, fair taxes, peace, and women's rights—despite the media's initial concentration on leadership personalities.

But the Liberals and the Conservatives proceeded to coopt NDP policies. Unfortunately, this was not difficult to do given the staunchly reformist character of the NDP's critique of the capitalist parties.

However, in view of the ruling class's crisis of confidence in the Liberal Party, the NDP had a golden opportunity not only to hold its own, but to break through and overtake the Liberals.

In fact, west of Ontario, the NDP did establish itself as the second major party. And in several Ontario ridings [Canadian electoral districts] with a sig nificant industrial and unionized social base, the NDP captured seats from the Liberals.

NDP fails in Quebec But Quebec was a different story. The French-speaking province, oppressed nation within the Canadian Confederation, virtually ignored the NDP. There, the Conservatives capitalized on the collapse of the traditional Liberal fortress, surging to 58 seats from only one in the 1980 election.

The historically Anglo-dominated Tories attracted a number of nationalist candidates, presented a leader who is both a native Quebecer and fluent in French, and as a party enjoyed the tacit support of the bourgeois-nationalist Parti Quebecois provincial government.

Meanwhile, John Turner fanned growing disaffection with his own Liberal Party in Quebec by taking a particularly hard line against provincial rights and against those he called "separatists" among the Tory candidates. The backfire from this approach left the Quebec Liberals decimated.

The NDP wasn't even in the running in Quebec. Opposed to Quebec's protective language legislation and complicit with the Liberals in stripping Quebec of its constitutional veto, the NDP is seen as openly hostile to the national aspirations of the Quebecois.

As a minor labor-based party rooted Barry Weisleder is a leader of the Socialist Workers Collective of Canada and is a member of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union.

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ELECTION DAY in English Canada, the NDP simply cannot compete with the two main capitalist parties in Quebec on a "more federalist than thou" basis. Cut off from its natural constituency, the nationalist Quebec working class, the NDP is doomed to third-party status on a PanCanadian level.

The Sept. 4 election showed that a fundamental political realignment of forces across the Canadian state, in favor of the NDP and at the expense of the Liberals, is now more possible than ever. But it cannot occur without the NDP changing its approach to Quebec rights and at the same time linking up with a new political expression of the Quebec labor movement-an independent labor party.

For that reason, Gauche Socialiste, which stands for an independent and socialist Quebec, fights for the formation of a labor party based on the unions.

Chile-11 years after coup:

Two days of protest against the dictatorship of President Augusto Pinochet on Sept. 4-5 brought thousands of Chileans to Santiago's main square demanding an end to repression.

The demonstrations, called by a coalition of opposition groups, marked the 11th anniversary (on Sept. 11) of the coup in which the government of Salvador Allende was overturned and Allende himself murdered. The police violence against the protesters left 10 dead, dozens of injured, and over 500 arrests.

This demonstration, the tenth since May 1983, followed hard on the heels of protests of Aug. 10 in which tens of thousands of Chileans marched in Santiago, Valparaiso, and Concepcion for a return to democracy and the "right to life."

This basic right has been severely proscribed in the years of the Pinochet rule. An attempt to buy off the one million unemployed was made with the so-called "program of minimum employment" created in 1975. Those trapped in this program were placed in forced-labor camps where they received the equivalent of a kilogram of bread a day and were totally denied any kind of benefits.

The drastically reduced standard of living has been further aggravated by the huge debt amassed through the International Monetary Fund. That debt which stood at $4 billion in 1973, has now climbed to $20 billion and has 7th SEPT. 5th arrisin. MORE JOBS! TAX the RICH ELECTION PROMISES OJ POP!

PopI leadership from the ranks. But this situation is likely to change soon.

Both Mulroney and Turner campaigned for the leadership of their respective parties on a stridently antilabor, cutbacks-oriented platform. "Reduce the deficit" was their common clarion call.

The huge parliamentary majority won by the Tories will incline them to implement this brutal platform, sooner than later, notwithstanding election campaign promises to the contrary.

Their commitment to strengthen the capitalist profit recovery at the expense of working people will leave the labor movement little political recourse other than extraparliamentary mass mobilization.

This, in itself, however, offers no guarantee of victory, as the defeats inflicted on labor and its allies in Quebec (winter 1983) and British Columbia (fall 1983) demonstrate.

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