In opposing the Conservatives' unconstitutional and anti-democratic attempt to retain power, working people must give no political support to the proposed Liberal-NDP coalition government.
The Liberals are the Canadian bourgeoisie's traditional party of government. They have repeatedly used their opponents on the right as electoral foils, then in office imposed the policy prescriptions of the right, be it Trudeau's three-year wage controls in the 1970s or the massive public spending and tax cuts imposed by the Chrétien-Martin Liberal government of 1993-2006.
Canada's social-democratic party, the NDP, is a no less dependable prop of capitalist rule. When it has formed provincial governments, most notably in Ontario during the recession of the early 1990s, the NDP has come into headlong conflict with the working class, including slashing social spending, promoting "workfare," and breaking strikes and otherwise attacking workers' rights.
The BQ's sister party is the Parti Québécois. When the PQ last held office as Quebec's provincial government (1994-2003), it carried out a program of social spending and tax cuts strikingly similar to that of its federalist Liberal rivals in Ottawa—a program designed to redistribute wealth from working people to the most privileged sections of society.
None of the three opposition parties have questioned, let alone opposed, the Harper government's commitment, without any public discussion, of tens of billions of dollars to prop up Canada's big banks.
Few details of the coalition agreement have been made public. But it is known that the Liberal-NDP government will not "revisit" the Afghanistan issue, i.e., that the Canadian Armed Forces will continue to play a leading role in the Afghan counterinsurgency war through 2011. Also, the Liberal-NDP government will implement the Conservatives' five-year, $50 billion-plus program of corporate tax cuts.
As for the promised massive economic stimulus package, it will be welcomed, no doubt, by the big manufacturers and politically promoted as a program to "save jobs." But Ontario's Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty has let it be known that any federal-provincial assistance to the automakers will be used as a means to extort sweeping new contract concessions from autoworkers. The Canadian Auto Workers union, a strong ally of McGuinty and an early advocate of a federal NDP-Liberal coalition, has already announced its willingness to make further changes in workrules, that is, to impose speed-up and job cuts.
To repeat, the working class must oppose the Conservatives' power-grab. The attempt of one of the major parties of the Canadian ruling elite, with considerable and quite likely preponderant big business support, to overturn long-established parliamentary and constitutional forms is a frontal attack on democratic rights.
But in opposing the Conservative's illegal attempt to block the opposition from forming a government, working people should extend no political support to the opposition parties or their alternate government. Rather the struggle to defend democratic rights and workers' jobs and living standards and against imperialist war is entirely dependent on the development of an independent political movement of the working class in opposition to the entire bourgeois order.
In this respect, there are important parallels with the political and constitutional crisis that erupted in the United States over the outcome of the 2000 president elections. It was incumbent upon socialists to vigorously oppose the attempt of the Republican right, supported by the most powerful and rapacious sections of the US plutocracy, to steal the election on behalf of George W. Bush; but this opposition in no way implied any political support to the Democrat Al Gore.
Ultimately Gore and the Democrats capitulated to the right, allowing Bush to assume the presidency unopposed after the right-wing majority on the US Supreme Court, in flagrant violation of the law and the democratic will of the American people, declared him president.
The Socialist Equality Party will be intervening broadly in the working class in the coming days—including in the Canadian Labour Congress-sponsored "Make Parliament Work! Coalition Yes!" rallies—to mobilize opposition to the Conservatives' anti-democratic power grab and politically prepare the struggle against the alternate big business government being organized by the Liberals, NDP, and BQ with the support of the trade union bureaucracy.
With permission from www.wsws.org
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