Vol. 72/No. 40      October 13, 2008

The Communist League candidates are presenting the working-class alternative to the capitalist class in these elections. Dugré, a garment worker and member of UNITE HERE is running in Rosemont/La Petite Patrie. Young, a meat packer and a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, is running in St. Léonard/St. Michel.

The deepening world economic crisis and its impact in Canada have increasingly become the issues at the center of the federal elections called by Prime Minister Steven Harper for October 14. The Conservative party leader had passed a law scheduling the elections for October 2009, but under the impact of a worsening economy decided to call them earlier.

The Conservatives formed a minority government after the elections in January 2006. Heading into this election, the Conservatives hold 127 seats, while the Liberals have 95. The Bloc Québécois, a party that supports sovereignty for Quebec—an oppressed nation in Canada—holds 48 seats. The New Democratic Party, a social-democratic labor party with a capitalist program, has 30 seats, and the Green Party has one.

Harper has accused other party leaders of “scare mongering” about the threat of a recession in Canada. However, Canada’s gross domestic product has declined since the beginning of the year and some 40,000 jobs were cut over the summer.

To combat mounting prices and joblessness, the Communist League candidates call for regular cost-of-living increases in wages and benefits, as well as federal legislation to shorten the workweek, with no reduction in pay, to spread available work to all. The campaign demands an increase in the minimum wage across Canada, and that Ottawa put hundreds of thousands to work at union-scale wages through a massive public works program to build homes, schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, and public transportation.

After initially putting the environment at the center of his campaign, opposition Liberal leader Stéphane Dion made a sharp shift this week in response to the U.S. bank crisis that sent shock waves through the world financial system. Dion is now pointing with pride to the record of the Liberal governments under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin from 1993 to 2006 as governments that show they can manage the economy. These Liberal regimes eliminated the federal deficits in large part by slashing spending on social programs needed by working people.

New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Jack Layton campaigns for stopping “the export of Canadian jobs overseas through new, manufacturing-friendly trade policies while adopting a Made-in-Canada procurement policy for the federal government and its agencies.” The NDP’s Canadian nationalist framework pits workers in Canada against workers in other countries.

Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe is posing a vote for the Bloc as the only way to stop the Conservatives from forming a majority government in Ottawa. The Bloc lost three seats to the Conservatives in 2006 and is fighting to hold onto its seats in rural Quebec. The Bloc’s main slogan in the elections is “Present for Quebec.”  
 
 
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