News and views from SA Canada Layton’s hypocrisy undermines NDP

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Layton to a self-inflicted act of desperation—voting for a rotten Tory budget.

Months of failing to advance socialist policies to meet human needs and differentiate the NDP made Layton’s parliamentary caucus more vulnerable to a tactical shift by the Liberal Party. On Sept. 18, Michael Ignatieff had his Liberal MPs vote non-confidence in the Conservative minority government of Stephen Harper. But it would take a vote by all three opposition parties in the House of Commons (Liberals, NDP, and Bloc Quebecois) to defeat the government and force an election. Worried that NDP support would bleed towards the Liberals, and that voters would punish the NDP for precipitating a fourth federal election in only five and a half years, Layton and company opted to prop up the more rightist Tories.

According to opinion polls, 60 per cent of Canadians don’t want an election now. Many want employment insurance reform and the $6 Billion home renovation tax credit in the budget Harper tabled. But 40 per cent do want a federal vote to dump the labour-hating, Tar Sands-loving, war mongering Tories. That segment of the electorate is much more likely to consider supporting the NDP than the anti-election crowd—provided the party gives them some good reasons to do so.

By selling out so cheaply (that is, for E.I. changes that won’t help most of the 1.5 million unemployed), and by propping up the Conservatives just to avoid an election, Layton comes off pretty badly. He looks like a hypocrite and alienates the NDP base (of 2.5 million voters) at one stroke.

The labour-linked NDP, the left, and the workers’ movement as a whole are squandering a golden opportunity to put capitalism on trial, and to seize upon the global capitalist crisis as a tailor-made platform to fight for public ownership and green energy conversion through workers’ and community control of industry. If Jack Layton isn’t up to the task, which was evident at the federal NDP convention in Halifax in August, he should step aside. The sooner, the better.

Toronto labour must dump Miller T David Miller, betrayed labour, dis- he mayor of Canada’s biggest city, appointed his business allies, and was so low in the polls that he announced on Sept. 25 that he will not seek a third term in office. Although the next Toronto municipal election is more than a year away (Nov. 10, 2010), the megacity’s corporate elite has been busy auditioning potential candidates for the (Above) Zarchary Stevenson performs at Socialist Action-sponsored Toronto concert for striking workers at INCO, Sept. 25. Workers have been on strike at the mining corporation since July. mayor’s chair. The labour movement should get busy too. It’s time to replace Miller and find standard bearers who will fight for a Workers’ Agenda, rather than fight workers.

Miller began his electoral career as a labour-based, New Democratic Partybacked councillor for the west-end ward of High Park in 1994. Before his successful run for Toronto mayor, in 2006, he hooked up with Liberal Party fundraisers, got Conservative Party strategist John Laschinger to run his campaign, and subsequently let his NDP membership lapse.

Miller’s policies were implemented by an informal LiberalNDP alliance that controlled the 44-member Toronto city council. Those policies included corporate subsidies, tax incentives, and/or deferrals for costly environmental clean-ups, and tax rebates and minimal property taxes for major commercial developers. At the same time, City Hall imposed steeply rising taxes, rents, and fees for small homeowners and tenants, and serious cuts to services like street cleaning, snow removal, public access to swimming pools, arenas, community centers, and libraries. Welcome anti-corruption reforms were coupled with an economic assault against the majority of residents that still left the city short of operating funds.

The class collaborationist coalition hit a big bump in the road when city hall bosses tried to squeeze the wages, benefits and work place rights of Toronto civic workers. One hundred and twenty pages of management take-away demands precipitated a 39-day strike by 30,000 inside and outside employees, members of Canadian Union of Public Employees Locals 79 and 416, in June and July.

mayoral run. The class forces they represent resent Miller for not punishing city workers enough, and for not privatizing services. In the game of municipal musical chairs, the ex-NDP sell-out realized that he would have nowhere to sit.

Labour Council should learn the bitter lesson from backing a gaggle of Liberals and NDPers in 2006 who went on to legislate in favour of rich developers, bankers, and businessmen, at the expense of working people. It’s time to assemble a team of NDP and Labour activists who will fight for a socialist City Hall in 2010.

To make that team accountable, the NDP should convene a Toronto NDP municipal convention, open to all Toronto members. It should debate policies, adopt a programme, and determine a method for the selection of candidates for all municipal offices—and find a way to hold them all accountable to that programme. This is how the NDP functioned officially in Toronto up to the 1970s, before a wave of liberal opportunism and populist reform sidelined open and honest labour party politics at the local level. Hard times demand that labour and the NDP head back to the future.

Family: soldier’s death “useless”

or once, the corporate media felt ical of the Canadian military intervention in Afghanistan. It is a view shared by over 60 per cent of the population, but it took the expressed grief of a slain soldier’s family to get it reported.

Jonathan Couturier, a 23-year-old private in the Canadian Forces, in mid-September became the 131st fatality of the Canadian intervention. As his body was being flown back to his home in Montreal (in Quebec, where opposition to the war is over 80 per cent), his brother and sister-in-law lambasted the mission.

“That war over there, he found it a bit useless – that they were wasting their time over there,” Nicolas Couturier told the Quebec City-based daily Le Soleil. His wife agreed: “(Jonathan) didn’t want to know anything about going there,” said Valerie Boucher. “He didn’t want to talk about it, he stayed positive, but at some moments he said he was fed up.”