Socialists are organizing sales and reporting teams to Western Canada, visiting fighting mine workers in Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, and joining picket lines and talking to municipal workers who went on strike in the Toronto area this past week. The Communist League's Sixth Constitutional Convention will be held in Toronto over the Easter weekend, April 21-23.

At the center of the work of the delegates from Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto will be proposals on how a small working-class vanguard can organize and deploy its forces more effectively to involve itself in the continuing struggles of workers and farmers across Canada. The effects of the growing crisis of world capitalism is hitting workers, farmers, and oppressed nationalities across the country, and the league aims to recruit a new generation of fighters to the communist movement out of the battles that is engendering.

The delegates will also discuss the communist response to the growing political and social polarization in Canada, including around the unbroken resistance by the Quebecois to their national oppression and the efforts by a wing of the ruling class to build a new, right-wing party, the Canadian Alliance.

One of the main tasks of the convention is to elect a new Central Committee.

A public rally will be held Saturday evening April 22 to report on the convention's decisions. The event will celebrate the building of the communist movement in Canada and the intensified effort to digitize, translate, and distribute Pathfinder books.

The Communist League has launched an effort to increase the number of its supporters working as part of an international project aimed at bringing into a computer format the 350 titles by Pathfinder. This effort helps to ensure that these invaluable lessons of 150 years of working-class struggle remain accessible to the new generations of fighters coming into politics today and in future class battles.

The Communist League leadership also recently decided to allocate important resources to the editing and translation into French of a series of books by Pathfinder explaining the continuity of the communist movement through the 20th century. These include The History of American Trotskyism and The Struggle for a Proletarian Party by Socialist Workers Party founder James P. Cannon. Such a step is crucial for building the communist movement in Canada, where 7 million Quebecois and other oppressed nationalities speak French.

On April 13 a Militant sales and reporting team composed of socialists from Canada and the United States will leave Vancouver by car and drive for seven days to Toronto.

The team aims to meet and talk to coal miners in the Rocky mountains, Calgary Herald strikers in Alberta, farmers fighting for their survival, Native people battling racist cop violence in Saskatchewan, meat packers and other industrial workers, as well as students across the Prairies.

A second team will go to Cape Breton, on the Atlantic Coast, and visit United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) members fighting attempts by the Canadian government to close the last coal mine in the Maritimes. The team will get together with miners met during a previous Militant reporting trip and at the recent UMWA convention.

Socialists from Detroit and Toronto will team up to visit strikers on picket lines in the Toronto area, campaign for communism among youth at an April 15 demonstration against the World Trade Organization, and reach out to 20,000 municipal workers who will be attending ratification meetings following the end of their 10-day strike. Several workers have said they consider the proposed agreement a victory and the direct result of their strike.

The Communist League convention will also be marked by the recent participation of several party and Young Socialists members in the more than 200-member delegation from Canada that attended the April 1-5 Congress of Latin American and Caribbean Students that took place in Havana.

All members of the YS in Canada are invited to attend the convention as observers. Leadership delegations from the Socialist Workers Party in the United States and other communist leagues around the world will also be present.  
 
 
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Building the Communist Movement Today
Celebrate the worldwide effort to digitize, translate, and distribute Pathfinder books
MICHEL PRAIRIE,
Leader of the Communist League and director of its French-language publication program
VUK KCMAR-GRKAVAK
Young Socialists, Western Canada Militant reporting and sales team
NATHAN CALDWELL,
Young Socialists, Cape Breton Militant reporting and sales team
CARLOS CORNEJO
Communist League, participant in the 12th Latin American and Caribbean Students Congress in Cuba
Others to be announced
 
 
Saturday, April 22 7:30pm 
 
TORONTO
Essex Ballroom
Ramada Hotel & Suites
Downtown
300 Jarvis street
(Ten minutes walk from the Younge/College subway station)
 
Information
Montreal: (514) 284-5547
Toronto: (416) 588-8591
Vancouver: (604) 872-8343

Sponsored by the Communist League and the Young Socialists
Suggested contribution: $5
 
 
 
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