Defeat the Liberals and: Conservatives! Vote NDP!

by Barry Weisleder / October 2008

“The worst Liberal campaign ever.” That was the headline one Toronto Star political columnist employed. And he’s not alone. Former Liberal Party president Stephen LeDrew, writing in the National Post, predicted that his party is “going to take a drubbing in this election, which is exactly what they need...” The recriminations, hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth by elite pundits and Grit partisans is almost audible from coast to coast to coast.

Liberal Leader Stephane Dion is clearly going down, along with his regressive Green Tax-Shift plan. Liberal leadership runners-up Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff, catapulted onto centre stage, are there ostensibly to save the furniture, but also provide a prelude to the post-election race to replace the feckless Dion. As attack ads supplant policy debate, revving up once again is the all too familiar concomitant of a failed Liberal campaign. It’s the corporate siren song that implores us to ‘unite the left, stop the Stephen Harper Conservatives at all costs!” And it’s as big a fraud as the Liberal Party’s environmental policy.

Meanwhile, the labour-based New Democratic Party is waging its strongest campaign in decades, having abandoned the self-limiting slogan of yesteryear “Lend me your vote”, in favour of a fervent fight for government. The party’s TV ads carry an anti-corporate message. (One shows trucks dumping piles of money onto a big company boardroom table.) The ads call for an end to tax subsidies to businesses that export jobs and pollute the environment. The NDP is poised to dislodge the declining Liberals as the second-largest party in Parliament. Even face to face with an ugly Tory majority in the next Parliament, an NDP-led Opposition would be a step forward for independent working class political action.

This sense is emerging also in Quebec, where Liberal support is collapsing, and the Tories are shunned as war-mongers and culture-haters. Leading members of the new leftist pro-sovereignty party Quebec Solidaire are debating the merits of voting NDP as an alternative to the bourgeois nationalist, neo-liberal Bloc Quebecois, and as a possible bridge to the labour movement in English Canada, despite the latter’s serious weakness on Quebec self-determination.

So, why the desperate appeal for ‘strategic voting’, ‘vote swapping’, ‘coalition government’ and similar disreputable schemes? Indeed, why does a wing of the Canadian establishment so exaggerate its differences with Harper?

Well, they do it for at least two related reasons. One, to keep the Liberal Party viable. And two, to undermine the labour movement and its political arm, the NDP.

But exaggeration does not stand the test of inspection. Recent Liberal federal governments under Jean Chretien and Paul Martin cut social expenditures much more than the Harper Conservatives have done, or threaten to do. While Harper has taken aim at relatively low-budget federal programmes unpopular with his base, like legal aid funds for women to take the government to court, and cultural grants, he has not dismantled what’s left of the welfare state, such as employment insurance. He didn’t need to do that. Chretien already slashed E.I. entitlement, and Martin ploughed the surplus into the coffers of the big banks -- in the name of debt reduction.

Like the Liberals, Harper funds medicare through an eye-dropper, and ignores creeping privatization, refusing to enforce the Canada Health Act.

Dion accuses Harper of squandering the $12 billion budgetary surplus he inherited. But Harper, like his Liberal predecessors, simply used the surplus to make bank debt payments, reduce taxes for the affluent, and increase federal spending, especially on the military. Lest we forget, it was the Liberals who first sent Canadian troops to Afghanistan, and they voted with Harper to keep them there until at least 2011.

Even the scandals that dog the two parties are eerily similar: the Liberal sponsorship program versus the Conservative election financing scheme.

While the two parties are not the same, what they have in common dwarfs any differences. It is their devotion to maintaining the crisis-wracked capitalist system, at the expense of working people and the environment, that unites them.

Now the Green Party wants to join the corporate rulers’ club. It is a very worthy applicant indeed. Leader Elizabeth May emphasizes the party’s fiscally conservative ideas. Her Green Shift tax plan is even more regressive than the Liberals’. She insists that the Greens would tax small business less than the Conservatives do. The Green pledge to completely eliminate Canada’s $481 billion debt attracted candidates like Adrian Visentin. He is a former Reform Party member and Canadian Alliance candidate now running for the Greens in Vaughan, north of Toronto. Also alluring to the right are Green promises to cut payroll taxes, slash the E.I. fund, and allow ‘income splitting’ on tax returns.

Because opinion surveys show that the NDP is the overwhelming second choice of Green voters, and potentially vice-versa, NDP Leader Jack Layton feels the Greens nipping at his heels. But his attempt to keep Elizabeth May out of the TV leaders’ debate was self-defeating. Layton’s embarrassing reversal on this issue, compounded by his refusal to apologize for his initial undemocratic stand, undermined the NDP’s credibility as an advocate of electoral reform and proportional representation – to say nothing of its stated opposition to sexism and environmental destruction.

The way to differentiate from the Greens and to unite the left and working people behind the NDP is to offer a leftist, working class agenda. But a ‘cap and trade’ carbon emissions policy (proven ineffective in Europe) won’t cut it. Neither will proposing a mere ‘monitoring agency’ to combat corporate price gouging at the gas pumps. Neither will forswearing deficit spending on the eve of a major worldwide recession, or talk of “working with our NATO partners” to refashion the imperialist ‘mission’ in Afghanistan.

For the NDP to survive and prosper, it must turn sharply to the left. That means projecting a major tax hike on banks, corporations and the rich (not just a reversal of recent corporate tax concessions). That is needed to pay for a public, universal, quality child care system, a public medical drug plan, expanded training of doctors and nurses, replacement of the country’s decaying infrastructure of roads, bridges and railways, for a free, mass urban public transportation system, a major expansion of social housing, restitution of lands and rights to aboriginal peoples, abolition of student debt, and the institution of free post-secondary education. It means demanding that Canada get out of NATO, no support for military interventions abroad, major cuts to military spending, and a radical re-direction of the Canadian Forces to a domestic rescue and disaster relief role. It means public ownership, under workers’ and community control, of the giant oil and gas companies, of the big banks, of major polluting industries, and the investment of their mega-profits into safe, clean energy alternatives and the development of green, sustainable jobs and manufacturing.

A Workers’ Agenda, comprised of such policies, would be in flagrant contradiction with the interests of the main backers of the Liberals, Greens and the Bloc Quebecois, which have nothing in common with the left or the needs of working people.

But a Workers’ Agenda is fully in line with the needs and aspirations of the broad base of the unions and the NDP electorate, notwithstanding the pro-capitalist views of most NDP and labour leaders.

For that reason, workers and progressive people should vote to elect an NDP federal government, and step up the fight for socialist policies inside and outside the party.