Called last month by Liberal Party prime minister Jean Chrétien to defend his parliamentary majority for another term, polls indicate--as we go to press--that the Liberals have instead lost support, raising the possibility of a minority government coming out of the November 27 election. The debate has been focused between the Liberals, who dominate in Ontario and English-speaking Quebec, and the rightist Canadian Alliance party, which holds sway in the country's western provinces.

Since coming to power in 1993, the Liberals have spearheaded austerity measures that have undercut the social wage of working people. The party's parliamentary majority was eroded in the last federal election in 1997, partly as a result of these attacks. To try to bolster his election results, Chrétien has announced his intention to restore billions of dollars to the national health system and a package of tax cuts over the past few months.

Liberal Party leaders have posed themselves as a bulwark against the policies of the Canadian Alliance and its leader Stockwell Day, who proposes reintroducing capital punishment, holding a referendum on abortion, which is now legal in Canada, and taking a harder stance against illegal immigration.

The Bloc Quebecois, a pro-Quebec sovereignty party that campaigns only in Quebec, will most likely increase its proportion of members of parliament at the expense of the Liberals. "Quebecers have a unique chance to send everyone a message," said Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard at a BQ rally in Montreal November 19. "Mr. Chrétien claims to like clarity," he said, referring to the so-called clarity bill passed by the Chrétien government last year that that gives the federal government the power to decide if the question and results of the next sovereignty referendum in Quebec are legitimate.

"This election is the clarity election as far as he is concerned! Quebecers are not going to vote for someone who denies the existence of the Quebec people," said Bouchard. "This sovereign country, this Quebec that we want, we will have it my friends."

Two other parties, the Progressive Conservative Party and the New Democratic Party (NDP), are vying in the race. The Progressive Conservatives, historically the main bourgeois alternative to the Liberals before the 1993 federal election, have increased their support in polls to 12 percent. The NDP, a social democratic labor party with a base in the unions, remains at close to 9 percent support. It has made defense of the national Medicare system central to its campaign.

Indications are the parliament will continue to be divided regionally and along national lines, without any capitalist party drawing significant support across Canada. The Financial Times noted, "voters will go to the polls next week faced with a choice between two leaders who have shown little appearance of inspiring the nation." This fragmentation and lack of cohesion of "the nation" worries Canada's ruling class, which, for now, has no alternative.  
 
Coarse tone marks campaign
Throughout the campaign the Liberals have tried to portray the fight as a choice between "Canadian values" represented by the Liberals and "U.S.-style" values represented by the Canadian Alliance.

For example, the Liberals have accused the Alliance of a "hidden agenda" to replace the national Medicare system with a "two-tier" health system and with planning to cut Old Age Security, after the Alliance's deputy finance critic said that an Alliance government would phase out the program.

In fact a two-tier system is well underway in a number of provinces, including in Alberta where Day is from. This is the result of massive cuts in transfer payments to the provinces by the Liberal government over the past decade, undermining health care and education. These cuts, and the assault by the Liberals on Employment Insurance, have produced a multi-billion dollar government surplus.

"We have to make sure that the values we have developed in Canada [and] the safety net which has given so much security to everyone is not destroyed in the process for some very--what I would call--right wing reasons," Chrétien hypocritically stated. He called a proposal by Day to give more power to the provinces a "proposition to destroy Canada," and said the Alliance is in ideological league with the "dark forces" of European fascism. Immigration minister Elinor Caplan said Alliance supporters are "Holocaust deniers, prominent bigots, and racists."

A Canadian Alliance candidate was forced to resign after referring to immigration from Asian countries as an "Asian invasion.

"Stockwell Day's fundamentalist religious views, and his belief in Creationism as opposed to the theory of evolution have come under attack, as well has his refusal to work on Sunday.

An editorial in the November 18 Toronto Star opined that "one of the dirtiest election campaigns in recent memory has hit a new low. Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day is publicly accusing Liberal leader Jean Chrétien of criminal behavior."

Day and Progressive Conservative Party leader Joseph Clark earlier had asked the police and the federal ethics counselor to investigate Chrétien after it was revealed that he had called the head of a federal loan agency in the mid-1990s to help a crony obtain a $615,000 loan for a hotel in Chrétien's riding of Shawinigan in Quebec. Chrétien claimed he was only doing his job as a member of parliament for his constituents.  
 
Resistance of workers and farmers
The ruling capitalist class in Canada has been faced with a series of strikes and actions by working people. One week prior to the call for the election, 80,000 women rallied across Canada in defense of women's rights and for an increase in the minimum wage. Several actions have been organized in the context of the elections.

In Brandon, Manitoba, Native people from the Sioux Valley First Nations confronted Stockwell Day with signs charging him with "inciting hatred" and calling him a "racist and bigot." The Alliance has proposed a drastic overhaul of the relationship between aboriginals and the federal government, including the selling of reserve lands to individual aboriginals and an end to the tax-free status of Natives on reserves.

In Manitoba, farmers organized a one-kilometer convoy of tractors, grain trucks, and pickups along part of the trans-Canada highway to draw attention to the growing crisis of Prairie farmers.

"We've got this federal election coming up and we've never heard much on [agriculture] policies," said organizer Murray Dowining.

"It's getting ridiculous," farmer Don Darker, told the media. "It was tough when I started, but you worked a little harder. The harder you worked, the more you could make and feed yourself. But now it doesn't matter how hard you work. You just can't feed yourself!"

In Ontario owner-operator truckers who are members of the National Trucking Association have been fighting for a reduction in fuel prices. They will be holding a meeting the day before the election to decide whether or not to use convoys to block traffic on election day itself.

Truckers in Quebec, who were on strike fighting for a union despite a back-to-work law imposed on them by the Parti-Quebecois government, demonstrated outside the Montreal election rally for the Bloc Quebecois, addressed by Premier Bouchard.

Traditionally backing the NDP, many union officials are instead giving backhanded support to the Liberals in order to block any advance of the Canadian Alliance. For example, UFCW Local 175 and 633 president Wayne Hanley, writing in the November issue of the locals newsletter, does not mention the NDP. Instead the article is devoted to reporting on the corporate support for the Canadian Alliance.

Under Canada's undemocratic federal election laws, only parties that field at least 50 candidates can register as national parties with their names on the ballot. Other parties with this status are the Canadian Action Party, Natural Law Party, Green Party, Marijuana Party, Communist Party of Canada, and the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). The Communist League, which is running three candidates in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal (see statement on this page) can only appear on the ballot as individuals without a political designation.

John Steele is a meat packer and member of the United Food and Commercial Workers union.
 
 
Related article:
Working-class voice in Canadian elections
 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home