Coalitions, Rewriting Constitutional History, NDP Spike or Surge and more -- The Left Chapter Canadian Election Round-up Week Six

This is the sixth and last of our weekly election round-ups of developments -- as well as the inane, bizarre, humorous and unusually facile -- in the great show that is mainstream bourgeois politics during the election of 2019.


The fifth was: NDP Spikes, Bloc Surges, May and Scheer Stall -- The Left Chapter Canadian Election Round-up Week Five

See also our The Left Chapter election editorial from this week with endorsements: Voting Communist, Tactical Voting and Conscientious Abstention -- Leftist Strategy in the 2019 Election

To coalition or not to coalition? 

The NDP, its leadership and its partisans, love to tell us over and again that there really is no difference between the Liberals and the Conservatives. Except, that is, when it comes to minority parliaments and coalition time, because then they seem to know full well that there is a difference.

With the polls indicating that a minority parliament is very likely, and with Jagmeet Singh and the NDP in a position to possibly hold the balance of power, both Singh and Justin Trudeau have been musing in various ways about hitching their parliamentary futures together to provide sunshine, lollipops and "progressive" government.

Needless to say, Andrew Scheer is unimpressed.

Looking to rally the troops Scheer has been warning that an NDP-Liberal coalition would be far more interesting and radical than I can assure you it actually would be. He has also been trying to rewrite parliamentary history and tradition to claim that the party with the most seats gets to try to form a government when this is not the case as anyone who ever took a public school civics course knows. The former Prime Minister of the previous House gets the first attempt to govern.

But even this absurdity does not go far enough for Scheer in trying to de-legitimize how the Canadian parliament works. The Conservatives are also suggesting in fundraising emails that if the NDP and Liberals governed together despite Scheer winning more seats it would amount to a de facto coup.

Seriously.

Of course, this is total idiocy. A minority parliament is the "democratic will of Canadians" in the parliamentary/electoral sense. Presumably Scheer is looking for something to get the base all angry about when the Governor General turns to Trudeau first in the event no one gets a majority.

Could it be that Scheer wants a distraction? 

It seems Andrew Scheer is doing his best to make the argument for strategic voting Trudeau wants. Another part of the reason the Conservatives want to cast doubt on the legitimacy of any NDP - Liberal collaboration is that they really have no natural partners to work with in a minority situation. They will either have to hope to govern bill by bill or come to rest on the backing of the Bloc Quebecois in many cases should the Bloc do as well Monday as it seems it might.

Is there an NDP "surge"?

There is no doubt that a combination of the Trudeau brownface scandal, a mediocre Liberal campaign and poor Green campaign, and a better outing by Singh than many anticipated led to a spike in support for the NDP in the wake of the debates. The party went from as low as 12 - 13% going in to around 18 - 19% now. This has likely staved off what looked like a possible annihilation election for them.

Keen to boost the "surging Singh" narrative various reactionaries like the Toronto Sun's reprehensible Tarek Fatah, the vile Brian Lilley and Lorrie Goldstein, and the conservative "pollster" Nick Kouvalis  penned articles suddenly pushing the NDP for rather obvious strategic reasons. Rather shamefully a number of NDP partisans online shared these.

But is the surge real? Insofar as it lifted the party back to being a player in the election again, yes. But it does seem to have stalled now and neither the Liberals nor the Bloc are collapsing as in 2011 so it would not appear any kind of Orange Crush is coming.

Election night will show to what extent their campaign turned the tide.

Jordan Boswell should be dumped by the NDP

Love me I'm a Liberal 

Other notable articles:

Disgraceful dog-whistling: Conservative Candidate Warns Voters Trudeau Might Name Jagmeet Singh His ‘Foreign’ Affairs Minister

Four Green nominees in Quebec made Islamophobic comments, party says

The biggest winner in Canada's election is the military

Dude, where’s my bus? How the election failed public transit

Group looks to help anti-abortion advocates get jobs working for new MPs

NDP targets Greens with misleading claims

10 Questions for Andrew Taylor – Communist

Federal Election 2019: Toronto-Danforth candidate Ivan Byard, Communist Party, answers our questions

Voting Communist, Tactical Voting and Conscientious Abstention -- Leftist Strategy in the 2019 Election

With less than a week to go until election day in Canada, anti-capitalist leftists are in the challenging position yet again that no anti-capitalist candidate -- either an independent or affiliated to a political party -- is going to get elected next Monday.

While there are partisans, and perhaps even a candidate or two, of the NDP who claim it is anti-capitalist this cannot be taken at all seriously given the party's program and history both in office provincially and opposition federally.

Keeping these limitations in mind we need to take a look at what strategy and tactics left socialists and communists can and should adopt, in our opinion, depending on factors such as where they live and what they are trying to accomplish by their involvement in the electoral process.

Vote Communist in 31 ridings and other individual endorsements

In the 31 ridings in this election that do have a Communist Party of Canada candidate they deserve our vote and support. The Communists and their leader Elizabeth Rowley have run an excellent, principled campaign on a comprehensive, irrefutably anti-capitalist platform. We have looked at this before in the posts "People & Nature Before Profit!" -- Communist Party releases its federal election platform leaflet and "The problem is capitalism. The solution is socialism." -- Communist Party campaign launches in Toronto.

Voting Communist sends a clear, direct message to the mainstream "progressive" parties rejecting their bankrupt platforms that do not go nearly far enough in tackling fundamental issues facing us such as grotesque levels of inequality and the threat posed by the climate emergency.

If you are in a riding with an independent or non-Communist party candidate who is also running on an explicitly anti-capitalist platform we would advocate a vote for them as well.

There are also a handful of individual candidates for the mainstream parties with a compelling enough narrative to deserve consideration.

Mumilaaq Qaqqaq (NDP) running in Nunavut would add an exciting and necessary voice to parliament. Sending Rudy Turtle (NDP), Chief of the Ontario Grassy Narrows First Nation, to Ottawa from Kenora would be a call for politicians to move beyond the hollow rhetoric of reconciliation and towards actually doing something to deal with the ongoing, brutal consequences of government colonialism, racism and indifference towards Indigenous peoples. Early on in this campaign the bullies at B'nai Brith tried to get the NDP to dump Miranda Gallo, who is running in Saint-Laurent, due to her activism on behalf of Palestinians. Electing her would be a rejection of the new McCarthyism that some have sought to impose around Israeli Apartheid.

Strategic and tactical voting versus conscientious abstention

What to do in ridings where there is no Communist or anti-capitalist candidate?

While the Liberals certainly always try to scare you into it, there is no serious leftist case to be made for strategic voting for Trudeau to stop the Conservatives. The Liberal party is a profoundly cynical, ugly, imperialist Bay St party that, while better than the Conservatives in many important and significant ways, is totally undeserving of support. The Trudeau government has reflected this cynicism while in power. There can be no greater symbol of why Trudeau and his government must be rejected entirely than the odious twin pillars of it, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland and Minister of Finance Bill Morneau. In no riding in the country should the Liberal get a left vote.

Tactical voting for the Greens or New Democrats in ridings where they have a chance of defeating the Conservative candidate specifically (as opposed to each other or the Liberal) is something to consider.

However, outside of practical riding by riding concerns about stopping Scheer neither of these parties deserves actual support from a leftist perspective and voting for them is an implicit indication of some type of support.

 The Greens and the NDP are not that different from each other in any real sense, their platforms are deeply and profoundly flawed and hypocritical to such an extent that you can count on their partisans to distort them to make them appear better, and neither party is opposed to either capitalism or the global western imperialist order in any meaningful way at all. In an age of desperate inequality, unrestrained western interventionism and an existential environmental threat posed by global capitalism, this is not a minor point.

Those on the left who still insist that somehow we must support the NDP due to its "historic" ties to labour or the working-class are engaging in a fiction that may once have had some meaning but is more and more silly and out-of-touch with objective circumstances now with each passing year.

In fact it is both depressing and informative that so many on the left have found one excuse or another to feign enthusiasm for Jagmeet Singh and his lackluster campaign that has benefited only by comparison with the tired Trudeau and the even more lackluster campaign this time out by Elizabeth May.

Any objective look would show that advocating for the NDP or pretending its platform is somehow "leftist" is simply getting on board with another dead end like those in 2015, 2011, 2008, 2006, 2004 and on and on and on.

The party has tried, rather unconvincingly, to slightly mimic the tone of Bernie Sanders (himself a deeply flawed candidate) and the NDP has proven record of never doing what it says it is going to when or if it wins anything. It is worth remembering how the party shifted dramatically rightward under Jack Layton -- an allegedly "leftist" leader -- especially after "winning" opposition.

Ironically, despite the supposed NDP partisan contempt of the Liberals and insistence that they are no different from the Conservatives, the main goal of the NDP now seems to be to win enough seats to make a deal with Trudeau!

In a riding where the Greens or the NDP have no chance of winning or where the Conservatives pose no threat why reward their liberalism, inherent imperialism and fundamental embrace of capitalism? What will this achieve in advancing the cause of working people and socialism? Nothing.

In fact, leftists continuing to waste their energies on the NDP (or now the Greens) despite decades of evidence in and out of power that this is a totally bankrupt dead end can only be seen as tremendously futile and counter-productive. A kind of crutch and excuse to which many return that prevents the emergence of a serious mass anti-capitalist alternative.

And just because the Liberals are genuinely awful and the Greens are only aspiring to be as milquetoast as the NDP has been does not make Andrea Horwath disciple Singh anymore interesting or "leftist".

In a riding where there is no Communist or anti-capitalist candidate, where the Greens or NDP have no chance, where it is a Liberal - Conservative race or where the Conservatives pose no threat we would suggest considering a conscientious, principled abstention and rejection of the sham of mainstream politics by either staying home or by spoiling your ballot.

"The problem is capitalism. The solution is socialism." -- Communist Party campaign launches in Toronto

The Communist Party of Canada launched its Toronto area federal election campaign on the Danforth Saturday night with a lively event at which leader Liz Rowley and several candidates spoke.

All the candidates touched on important themes for both the country and the communities they are running in.

Ivan Byard (Toronto Danforth) talked about housing issues while noting that the party's ultimate aim was "working class political power". Bronwyn Cragg, who is up against Finance Minister Bill Morneau in Toronto Centre, framed himself as the millennial taking on the billionaire. He noted that wealthy Morneau's riding had the fourth highest child poverty rate of any in the country clearly indicating that the Trudeau government's priorities are the wrong ones.

Ontario party leader Drew Garvie, running against Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland in University Rosedale focused on her terrible foreign policy record in Venezuela, Ukraine and generally. He stated that alone of all the parties, the Communists are confronting western imperialist narratives head on.

Parkdale-High Park candidate Alykhan Pabani spoke powerfully of how landlords in his community are engaging in the "violence of displacement" by driving out tenants using nefarious and frequently illegal methods. To the Liberal plan to tackle the housing crisis by making it easier to buy $800,000 houses he responded "are you serious" and likened it to someone taking the backpack off of a person dangling from the edge of a cliff so as to "lighten their load".

Harinderpal Hundal for Brampton West and Juanita Burnett for Guelph were also in attendance and spoke to how they are organizing in their constituencies to get the Communist message out to people.

Hitting on issues related to all of the three major pillars of the party's campaign -- the economy, climate change and foreign policy -- leader Elizabeth Rowley, who is running in Davenport, spoke at length as to why if Communists got elected "parliament would be an entirely different place."

On the economy she noted that a poll showed half of those who responded were $200 away from disaster at the end of every month. "Working people are living on the edge" due to decades of cutbacks, privatization and neo-liberalism. Communists would counter this in part with programs like genuine, universal pharmacare, free childcare and free education including post-secondary education. She stated that the only thing that should matter when it comes to getting into a university is marks.

Noting that a $15 an hour minimum wage no longer cuts it in many communities, the Communists are calling for $20 an hour. She said the party favours lowering the retirement age to 60 as well as shortening the work week with no loss in pay. Both measures, in addition to making the lives of people better, would help boost employment.

She also called out Canada's trade deals as little more than "economic constitutions" for corporations that need to be repealed. The Communists would prevent the danger of corporations moving factories to other countries via plant closure legislation.

Ultimately, Rowley said, "The problem is capitalism. The solution is socialism."

With regard to climate change, Rowley began by framing carbon taxes as an empty "solution" that does nothing more than turn emissions into a commodity. It is capping and reversing the emissions themselves that are the only way to confront the critical emergency facing Canada, with the Communist goal being to end them by 2050.

Key to the Communist climate strategy is to seize the ownership of natural resources out of the hands of multinationals and place them under public and democratic control. This would allow the government to take important steps like guaranteeing the jobs of tar sands workers during the transition to a green economy. 

Rowley rousingly went further to demand that the banks, insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations also be democratized and nationalized.

The Communist Party is the only party campaigning for "peace and disarmament" and Rowley stated the importance of this in today's international context where the danger of nuclear war remains very real. She also asserted the party's unequivocal opposition to interference in the affairs of sovereign countries and the ongoing attempts at imperialist regime change in Venezuela and elsewhere.

She ended with an analysis of how the danger from the far right in Canada is rising and how the Conservatives have direct and clear ties to it. Maxime Bernier and his People's Party, after all, only came in the wake of him losing the Conservative leadership to Scheer by a tiny margin. A progressive bloc is needed to stop this and Communists are essential to ensuring that this bloc pursues a people's agenda.

To those who worry that a vote for the Communists is a wasted vote, Rowley countered that it sends a message to the ruling classes and bourgeois parties as they know that for everyone who voted communist "100 were thinking about it and 1,000 were wondering." It is a ballot cast for "someone that is worth voting for".

The Communist Party is running 31 candidates across Canada. A list can be found here. Their full platform can be found here.