Speculation about a spring election had been in the air for the better part of a year, ever since Jean Chrétien announced that he would be stepping down as leader of the Liberal Party and as prime minister. Over this period, anti-capitalist groups throughout the country had been having numerous internal discussions about how they should participate in these elections or whether they should participate at all.

In the end, most neither viewed elections as the be-all and end-all of democracy, nor did they dismiss elections as irrelevant. Elections are one form of struggle in which people must engage to advance their own interests, but our experience was that electoral politics in the absence of a vigorous extra-parliamentary movement is a dead end road.

However, in discussing how we might participate in these particular elections, each of us kept running into the same problem — there is no national electoral vehicle to champion an anti-capitalist political agenda. Given that reality, how do we participate in these elections in a meaningful way? Who can we even suggest that people vote for? On these questions, no real consensus within any of the groups was reached.

Some individuals suggested that, lacking an electoral vehicle of our own, we should call on people to vote for the NDP as an interim step. Others opposed this position on the basis that the NDP has never opposed capitalism and that every provincial NDP government (and every social democratic party in the world) during the past couple of decades has embraced neo-liberalism in practice.

In the course of our discussions, the Winnipeg-based Structured Movement Against Capitalism (SMAC), took the initiative in proposing that anti-capitalist groups come together and produce a pamphlet to articulate a different perspective on the upcoming election. The pamphlet, A Different Canada is Possible, reflects the thinking of the Canadian Dimension Collective, the Socialist Project in Ontario, the Union des Forces Progressistes (UFP) in Quebec and the Structured Movement Against Capitalism (SMAC) in Winnipeg.

In the absence of a national anti-capitalist vehicle there is very little the anti-capitalist movement can accomplish during the current election campaign. However, this pamphlet, representing the political collaboration of four anti-capitalist groupings in Canada and Quebec, is an important step towards the creation of a national, united anti-capitalist electoral project. We sincerely hope that other anti-capitalist groups will also see the value of such a project and join in the discussion of how, together, we can make it a reality.

To get a copy of the pamphlet, call 1-800-737-7051 to order. On-line PDF versions are available at Canadian Dimension.