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I was waiting for NUPGE to pronounce, and am glad to see they have. The quote below is from president James Clancy:
Stephen Harper puts partisanship above public interest
Emphasis added.
This movement is snowballing. Thank you, Mr. Harper!
I hope that the signatories to this release can organize calls for public demonstrations of support for a coalition.
This is a really exciting, creative and appropriate opportunity for Canada. It will be great to see NDP in action.
Most importantly, it will show that Canadians really don't want the US style divisive politics that Harper and his ReformCons represent. It is a real made in Canada response!
This declaration represents an historic betrayal by people who claim to be leaders of the labour movement.
They call for the Canadian labour movement and the Canadian left to put aside our differences with the Liberal Party unconditionally and get behind an effort to install a Liberal-led government in Ottawa. And why? Simply for the sake of putting Liberals in charge instead of Conservatives.
Buzz Hargrove was rightly excoriated at great length by babblers for endorsing "strategic" voting for Liberal candidates. Now it seems the rest of the labour bureaucracy is falling in line with him and babblers are drinking the Liberal Party kool-aid along with them.
The most shocking thing is that this comes at a time when the capitalist class has made it clear that they intend to fight the current economic crisis by appropriating trillions of dollars of our money to bail themselves out, while proposing to cut back on spending to help the vast majority of workers who are the real victims of the impending recession/depression. And meanwhile real action to fight climate change is being ruled out because of the hardship it will create for the capitalist class.
This unconditional call for a Liberal-led government is devoid of any context of maintaining the independent struggle of the workers to defend their hard-won gains and protect themselves against the economic blows still to come, and even makes it harder for them to do so.
This is a call for the Obamafication of Canada.
Instead of a real left alternative, independent of the capitalist class and rooted in the workers organizations, Canadian workers are to be presented with the Liberal Party as the only "practical" alternative to the Conservatives, just as Obama was packaged as the only "practical" alternative to McCain. When Canadian politics becomes a U.S. style duopoly, we can look back on this moment as the time when the tide turned decisively against independent working class politics.
Don't those groups sign joint letters all the time? I could swear I've seen them all endorse (eg) arms embargoes to human rights violators in the past.
Granted, this is more immediately politically significant. (And awfully good to see, of course.)
I think Iggy going along with the no vote shows ya all where the coalition lies, Bob Rae turn-coat oportunist. Bet he never forsaw how Canadians would react to being lied to over the extention of the war. We are a tolerant country but we are not brain dead. This is a no go for the government period and we do not need to form a coalition with a snake who would go along with that Empire agenda that way Iggy did.
RR
Thanks, Rocky, for reviving this thread.
That statement by the so-called "progressive leaders" seems even more fatuous today than it did at the time.
On the contrary, the coalition notion is more vital than ever. What we did not fully know at the time (Nov. 30, 2008) was the terror it would instil in the hearts of the Michael Ignatieffs and Bob Raes of this world. Building a "real left alternative", as per M. Spector, is necessary, but it does not exclude taking other concrete measures to enable workers and other marginalized sections to feel their power. Ignatieff's pro-Harper betrayal of December 2008 - and since - reinforces that truth.
I think Iggy has said something to the effect that if things don't go his way by next election, a coalition of some sort might be in the skunkworks. Today's Liberal Party elite have perfected the art of talking out of both sides of their mouth at the same time. I have no idea what he meant by whatever it was he said. Perhaps he meant that the current Liberal-Tory alliance would be ongoing. No idea. Jack has said that his door is always open to any official party leader who feels that he should begin opposing the Harpers and their pro-US and big biz agenda at some point.
I'm really astonished at how extremely neocon right wing the Liberals have become under Iggy and Rae. What are they good for, really?
According to the leaked Lisa Raitt tape of last year, the Banks are dictating a big business agenda from Bay Street. Iggy and Harper are merely cosmetic leaders. I think it's to create an illusion for us ordinary slobs that we feel as if we have a say in things on election day.
I don't think they've changed that much, Boom Boom. They blow with various winds and are subject to many pressures. No one could have imagined that Chrétien, for example, who eagerly joined the U.S. "mission" in Afghanistan in October 2001, would have resisted joining the "coalition of the willing" in March 2003. I don't think many predicted that Paul Martin would have nixed Canadian participation in the Strategic Defence Initiative, or heeded Chrétien's call to support same-sex marriage, or been pushed into a national child care program and the Kelowna Accord and such. A couple years before or after, any of these could have gone differently.
So what are they good for? Adding numbers to a coalition to slow down and halt the Harper juggernaut, which knows no vacillation of the Liberal variety. Giving the people a sense of power that they can achieve something politically, even when none of the parties (including NDP and BQ) are consistently on their side. Of course there is the danger that someone will acquire illusions that the Liberals are "on our side" if we play the coalition game. But they may acquire the same illusions about the NDP or BQ.
No one is "on our side". It's just us. We've been losing so long, we need some victories. And as my experience in the union and peace movements have taught me, victories can make some strange bedfellows.
I remember this period. Right before the coup.
Good point, actually.
He and Manley had done their part stooging for the US years prior in 1994 with signing the most US-friendly trade deal in American history. I think the CIA and Hollywood must have suggested that Chretien step down and let a new stooge takeover for appearance sake. And many Canadians were fooled apparently.
Canada's Covert War in Iraq Richard Saunders